Valerie Taylor:
Aussie icons Valerie and Ron Taylor are famous for their love of the ocean and those scenes in Jaws. Here, Valerie opens up to Samantha Trenoweth about her late husband, surviving three shark attacks and cheating death in a whirlpool.
I survived three shark attacks
There have been two great loves in Valerie Taylor’s life. The first was her husband and fellow filmmaker, Ron. The second was the ocean. Perched on her balcony, looking out across mauve-topped jacarandas to Sydney Harbour, Valerie conjures vivid memories of both.
“He was beautiful,” she says of Ron, her husband of 49 years, “and I wasn’t blind. He was also a good bloke and, I think, a genius. I miss him every day.”
Ron’s death in 2012, from myeloid leukaemia, left Valerie with an immense gap in her life and her heart. “It’s been very hard,” she says. “I still get annoyed with him for leaving. Sometimes I’m angry with him and sometimes I’m desperately unhappy. He shouldn’t have died – it’s unfair – and the hurt doesn’t go away.”
Ron and Valerie Taylor met in their 20s at a spearfishing club in southern Sydney. They fell in love and instantly became all but inseparable, like one of those Hollywood couples whose names merge into one: Ronand Valerie Taylor. In Australia, their names also became synonymous with the sea.
Shocked by the carnage at an international spearfishing competition, the pair swapped their spears for cameras. Ron developed waterproof casings for their equipment and they began to film their underwater expeditions – the more dangerous, the better.
“The Movietone News was particularly interested in film of me swimming with sharks,” Valerie recalls. “They paid 24 pounds for an item and I think the basic wage was around nine or 10 pounds a week. So we spent every weekend in the water looking for sharks. That set us off on our career.”
The Taylors’ professional partnership produced thousands of hours of underwater footage, including all the live shark scenes from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the underwater footage for Hollywood blockbusters including The Blue Lagoon and Orca, and their own documentaries. Valerie’s still photography was published by the most important nature journals of the day, including National Geographic and books by Time Life. Valerie and Ron pioneered ocean cinematography, photography and marine conservation in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, revealing the rich biodiversity and breathtaking beauty of the sea. They also lobbied for legislation to protect particular wilderness areas and species, and were very often successful. Their influence was immense and Ron was honoured with the Order of Australia and Valerie with the Centenary Medal.
Most famously, in Australia at least, the Taylors were known for their fearless dives with sharks. They shot some of the earliest underwater footage of the great white shark and they were the first cinematographers to capture the great white without the protection of a diving cage. This, says Valerie, “was actually because our cage was torn from the boat and lost during a storm at sea.”
Valerie says that she was “never afraid of sharks” and admits that there’s not much that she is afraid of (except occasionally heights).
“Sharks are just fish and like all fish – like all animals – they’re curious. Dogs are curious, cats are curious, we’re curious. Why shouldn’t sharks be curious? They want to know what things are and they don’t have hands. They can’t reach out and touch things with their hands, so they feel with their teeth. If they gently feel you and you pull away, you will pull your flesh over their teeth. That’s why, when I’ve been bitten, I’ve tried not to move.”
Valerie has sustained three shark bites, one of which required plastic surgery and some 300 stitches, but she has never baulked at getting back in the water. Nor do storms at sea bother her. “If it gets incredibly rough,” she says, laughing, “I put on my wetsuit, make sure my flippers and face mask are handy and get back into bed.”
Her most treacherous experience was being dragged to the ocean floor by a whirlpool, but even then, she says, there was no time to be afraid. “There were huge currents and we were trying to dive between them – during those periods when there was about an hour of calm,” she recalls. “I was in a crack photographing the Nudibranch [a type of mollusc]. Ron and the other divers felt the current starting to change and got out, but I was pulled down. I was grabbing corals, I was grabbing Gorgonians [also known as Alcyonacea or sea fans] and they were just breaking off. We were all going down together. I was going down in this ball of broken corals and fish and air bubbles, and I couldn’t stop myself. When your air bubbles are going down as fast as or faster than you, you know you’re in deep trouble. I thought, ‘Oh, this is it.’
“We got to the bottom –
180 feet [55 metres] – and we stopped. Then, suddenly, I was being dragged up at an incredible rate. The pace started to slow when I was about three metres from the surface. I could feel the current turning and beginning to pull me back down. Then I looked up and I saw a hand break the surface of the water. I swam faster than I’ve ever swum and I grabbed the hand. It was Ron. I didn’t have time to be scared. I was fighting every inch of the way. Give me a shark any time. Currents scare me more than sharks ever have.”
In the early 1970s, an American author, Peter Benchley, saw a documentary, Blue Water, White Death, which featured the Taylors both in front of and behind
the camera, and he was inspired to write the novel Jaws. A couple of Hollywood producers wrote to Ron, asking whether he thought the book would translate into a film, and he responded positively.
“They bought the rights and they love us to this day,” Valerie says, laughing.
The world’s sharks were perhaps not so grateful. The combination of the Taylors’ real-life shark footage and life-like mechanical sharks made the 1975 film a box office sensation and struck fear in the hearts of beachgoers everywhere. Ultimately, the film’s producers recruited Valerie and Ron to travel the US “doing talk shows and telling Americans not to be afraid of sharks”.
It was in the years leading up to Jaws, while they were shooting back-to-back documentaries, that Valerie and Ron decided to forgo parenthood. Valerie has never regretted it.
“It was a conscious decision,” she admits. “I could either stay at home and look after children or I could work with my husband. If I’d tried to do both … well, I even found it hard to leave my cats when we went away. Imagine if I’d had to leave a child! And I’d been on enough film sets to know how the husbands behaved when they were away from their wives. So I stayed with my husband.”
At 80, Valerie is still a striking woman – petite, blonde and bright-eyed, with a lively mind that darts like reef fish. She dives as often as she can. As a result of chronic arthritis and perhaps the lingering effects of childhood polio, she finds it more difficult nowadays to wriggle into a wetsuit, so she prefers to dive in the warmer waters off the north Australian and South-East Asian coasts. On the day she speaks with The Weekly, Valerie is freshly returned from a fortnight in Bali, where she attended the funeral of a good friend and also took some time out to swim and dive.
“Mostly, nowadays, I dive in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, where it’s very warm,” she says. “I love it. Even on days when I can hardly walk with arthritis, I get in the water and I fly – I’m weightless.”
Yet, as the years have passed, Valerie has noticed that the sea life has diminished around those northern reefs. With Ron gone, Valerie fears that her second love, the ocean, is now also threatened and, even at 80, she is putting up a fight for its life.
“When we started out, the cinematography was a way to make money, to pay off the house,” she says. “Then I got to know the marine animals and ecosystems, and it became much more than that. “In 1965, we did a six-month dive trip for the Belgian Scientific Expedition to the Great Barrier Reef. The footage we shot is in the University of Liège.
It’s become part of history because the places we filmed no longer exist. They’re changed. We went back to the reef in 1970 on another six-month job and already we could see an incredible change. Crystalclear water had become murky. Fertiliser run-off from the cane fields had increased. Great algal blooms would come, settle on the coral and kill it.
“When we first went into the ocean, there were so many fish and they were so tame that we never thought we could get them all. It seemed impossible. But over the years, from pollution and overfishing, we have made a huge dent. Suddenly, they’re not there anymore.” Diving in the Coral Sea, Valerie has seen illegal fishing first-hand. “One time, out on Marion Reef,” she recalls, “we were rammed by a Japanese boat that was fishing illegally.
There was no law out there. They were putting nets across the passes and catching everything. Not just fish – turtles, everything!”
Valerie has advocated strongly for marine parks in Australia and internationally. “They’re not the only solution,” she says, “but they can save a lot of rare marine creatures from extinction. We don’t have enough of them and we don’t protect them properly.”
She simply doesn’t feel confident that we’re doing enough. “I am not really an optimist where the oceans are concerned,” Valerie says. “I wish I was, but I fear they’re going to die. The human race is destroying the planet.”