The Crow Eaters Read online

  Peter Gimbel, the protagonist and driver behind the search for the great white in the film Blue Water, White Death, said of his obsession, ‘Why does anyone in his right mind go looking for the biggest, most well-armed and aggressive cold-blooded animal in the seas? Because man is by nature curious … it is like every adventure in which man voluntarily pits himself against a challenging aspect of his natural world.’

  Peter Lake, the cameraman on Blue Water, White Death, after an encounter with a great white shark in the Spencer Gulf of South Australia said, ‘When I saw those bars starting to go I felt like I had jumped at 1200 feet with my parachute eaten by rats’ of the helplessness of those early encounters in the shark’s territory when they were beginning to understand how out of their depth they were.

  The recent Australian history of the great white centres on one man – Rodney Fox from Adelaide. In the late 1950s Rodney was a fit and active young man with a keen hunter-gatherer instinct. He would shoot rabbits and spearfish for his parents on the beaches surrounding Adelaide with a hand spear, flippers, goggles and a woollen jumper he would wear under water for warmth. Rodney was a natural in the water and he pushed his limits further and further with a local group of spear fishers called ‘The Octopus Club’. They would go away for camping weekends, spearing fish on the beaches around South Australia and Victoria and living an idyllic life as 20-year-olds, capable of providing for themselves and taming the depths of the ocean. They would often see sharks while under water – two aggressive bronze whalers stole their fish once at Port Victoria and another unidentified shark rippled past Rodney to take his speared fish at Gleeson’s Landing, also on the Yorke Peninsula.

  Rodney started entering spearfishing competitions in the early 1960s. Even from the beginning there were numerous worrying shark attacks, resulting in the deaths of two of his fellow divers during competitions in 1961 and 1962. Despite this, Rodney had been lucky. But this was about to change. ‘So often the hunter, I was now the hunted,’ Rodney wrote in his book Sharks, the Sea and Me.

  There were about 40 competitors in the 1963 South Australian spearfishing championships on Aldinga Beach south of Adelaide. Rodney had been diving for hours, collecting an inventory of fish to put him in a good position to win. He headed out to the reef again and spotted a dusky morwong that looked to weigh about 8 kilos. He settled on the bottom, 20 metres below the surface, and glided towards the big, speckled fish. Rodney levelled his spear gun at his prey when he was suddenly hit from his left. ‘It was as though I’d been hit by a train,’ he later wrote as a muted roar rippled through the water. He had been attacked by a big great white. It was pushing him through the ocean, though he still recalls the slow and easy rhythm of its surge through the water. The shark had him in its mouth from under his arm and down to his hip. He frantically poked the shark’s black eyes as he fought and it released him momentarily, only to snap its jaws across his right arm. He instinctively wrapped the shark in a bear hug and frog kicked up to the surface for air before it could clamp down and sever his arm completely.

  Rodney’s starkest memory of the encounter came at that moment when he looked down and saw his body floating ‘in a sea of red’ and the snout of the great white barrelling up from the depths towards him. Then a miracle happened. The shark accidentally gulped down Rodney’s buoy where he stored his caught fish. It towed him down in a ‘surging, swirling, spinning nightmare’ and just as Rodney was about to expire, the line snapped and he drifted to the surface with his last scrap of energy. As it was a competition, the commotion had been noticed and two competitors in a boat rolled him aboard in a pool of blood and raced for the shore. It just so happened that the president of the association had his car on the beach that day and Rodney was loaded in with bits of his organs slipping out from the bite wound during the bumpy ride up the cliff. An ambulance was there to meet him and with a police escort, which allowed them to skip every traffic light and stop sign for the 50 kilometre journey, he arrived at the Royal Adelaide Hospital within an hour of his attack. Through it all, Rodney was still conscious, and many believe that if he had passed out or gone into shock he would have died from the massive blood loss, punctured shoulder blade, broken ribs and a collapsed lung. Rodney required 462 stitches and a sort of bold surgery to stitch his diaphragm, his main artery, spleen and lungs that was unheard of in South Australia at the time. He had been attacked by a 3-metre great white and lived to tell the tale.

  Incredibly, Rodney returned to the water only three months after his attack and he continued to spearfish; he later became an abalone diver and saw many more sharks as he picked the underwater gardens for lucrative shellfish payloads. Eventually Rodney’s fame meant that he was contracted to consult on a series of documentaries about sharks by renowned divers Ron and Valerie Taylor. This prompted Rodney and Ron to test out the world’s first shark cage in October 1965 on the Eyre Peninsula. In 1971 his help was enlisted on the large international production Blue Water, White Death, and the film climaxed with Rodney’s discovery of a great white in the wild water below Port Lincoln. Greater notoriety was to come in 1973, when Rodney received a call from Universal Studios. They were filming Jaws and they wanted some expert help for the shark cage scenes with the fictional 8.5 metre shark. To help with the scale (considering Port Lincoln’s sharks would be a maximum of 6 metres), Universal flew in a 1.4 metre tall stuntman with a wetsuit and a ‘mini’ cage was built to create the scale. Key scenes for Jaws were shot in South Australia, including those of the great white with bullet holes, which were drawn on a passing shark by Rodney with bright red lipstick.

  To aid me with my own quest to search out a great white, I have enlisted the help of Rodney’s son, Andrew, who has devoted his life to the study and conservation of the same shark species that nearly killed his father more than 50 years ago.

  Andrew now runs Rodney Fox Shark Expeditions, which takes the Princess II, a 23 metre, 160 tonne liveaboard boat, down to the Neptune Islands to explore the great white’s territory on trips which can last up to eight days.

  We leave the marina at Port Lincoln in the darkness of the early morning and after three hours we throw down the anchor adjacent to the enormous sandy cliffs of Thistle Island, a place author Peter Matthiessen once said looked like ‘an ocean on the moon’. We are here to swim with the resident population of sea lions once it is light. The water is murky and the current draws us around the rocks, where 20 or so sea lions dive and spiral in the water around us. They are curious and playful, often coming within centimetres of my goggles. I dive down with them, spinning down to the ocean floor 4 metres below. The sea lions dart in and out of the seaweed beds and disappear again in the caves on the edge of the cove. Despite this unique experience, my mind is elsewhere and I scan the water for a dorsal fin, even though Andrew told us that this isn’t a breeding ground and a shark hasn’t been spotted here for 30 years.

  As Peter Matthiessen wrote in Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark, ‘Shark legends occur around the world; the Jonah of the North Australian aborigines is Mutuk, who was swallowed entire,’ and some contend that the Biblical Jonah was in fact swallowed by a great white also. This is the end of the Australian mainland; it is the land of the Barngarla and Nauo people who once used the rich food resources of the lower Eyre Peninsula coast. Later Matthew Flinders surveyed this area in 1802 and named it Memory Cove after a cutter with his crew aboard sank while crossing Thorny Passage and eight of his sailors drowned. In Flinders’ journal he wrote about the catastrophe:

  Sunday Feb 21 1802. Mr Thistle was sent over with a cutter to the main land, in search of an anchoring place where water may be procured … at dusk in the evening the cutter was seen returning from the mainland; but not arriving in half an hour, and the sight of it having been lost, a light was shown and lieutenant Fowler was sent in a boat … returned soon afterward but alone.

  Flinders had previously written about the strong currents and the observation of sharks, and it was assumed th
at this is how they vanished. The nearby islands: Thistle, Taylor, Smith, Lewis, Grindal, Little, Hopkins and Williams are all named after the lost crew.

  As we travel between Thistle Island and the Neptunes, another three hours further south, Andrew tells me about his history with the sharks of South Australia. He was seven years old when he saw his first great white. ‘Dad heard that the Jaws film crew was coming over to Port Lincoln and he wanted to prepare. He took me out to Memory Cove one night in his abalone boat. Mum was really nervous – he had drums of whale oil dripping away all night,’ Andrew says as we roll along the ocean to the Neptune Islands, named by Flinders because of their isolation and otherworldliness. ‘At about 9.30 that night dad heard scrapes along the side of the boat – he got me out of bed and said, “Andrew, come and have a look at this!” He shone a torch over the side of the boat and there was a big 16 footer [nearly 5 metres] with its eyes above the water looking at us.’ So began his fascination with the great white. ‘I saw a white shark from a cage when I was 14. I was one of the first people in the world to shark cage dive.’

  Even though all of Rodney’s three children were exposed to the shark life when they were young, Andrew was the only one who developed a passion for it. ‘I’ve hardly missed a dive in 35 years,’ he says. He’s also introduced this strange life on and in the water to his own three children. He took them in the cage when they were young to expose them to this part of their father’s and grandfather’s lives that is so important. ‘I did the last rites, held their hands. But they just jumped in like it was a kiddie pool! Henry [his oldest son] wasn’t really that fussed and would have rather played video games.’

  I ask Andrew where this obsession came from, considering how the shark nearly prevented his entire existence. ‘Dad had a hunter-gatherer background – living off the land when he was younger. I was quite a huntergatherer in my teens as well, though when I noticed that I spent more of my time trying to get the fish off the hooks I realised that conservation was more for me. For me the instinct is still there, though the camera acts as a substitute. I’m still shooting like Dad did, though now I’ve got millions of photos of great white sharks. There’s an art to it and it gave me a new lease on life,’ he says as I notice the variety of dorsal fins, breaching sharks, great whites on the ocean floor and cage shots framed on the wall of the cabin. ‘I like that photography can inspire the conservation of the great white – without that I couldn’t be bothered with all this – just to go for a dive would get a bit thin,’ he says of the model of understanding, education and research which drives his expeditions and sets him apart from the other operators in the area. ‘I feel like the great white industry is getting a bit like birding. It’s just ticking off what you see from your “to do” list.’

  Andrew’s connection to the great white has always gone much deeper than this. He accompanied Rodney on as many shark trips as he could growing up and later studied Environmental Science, with a focus on sharks, at Flinders University. While his father, along with Ron and Valerie Taylor, pioneered the conservation of great whites, Andrew noticed where things could be improved because of his unique point of view. ‘There was a limit to Dad’s knowledge. He had lots of experience and he would share this with the scientists we had on board. I saw that there was a need to mix the experience with the credibility of the research. One of our missions now is to provide a platform for researchers, journalists and students who want to learn more.’

  The greatest part of coming on these trips still is that Andrew is able to fill that gap between what his father was and the theoretical experience of the researchers.

  ‘There’s still so much hearsay,’ he says. ‘At the moment there’s lots of media attention about cage diving making it more dangerous to encounter sharks and conditioning them to be aggressive. There’s lots of speculation linked to the cages, so for one of our projects we looked at how this plays out. There’s good qualitative data that suggests that the cages have the opposite effect.’

  I ask him what he means and he brings up some photos of juvenile great whites on his computer. ‘It’s the new sharks that are aggressive. We have groups of two, three, four and five sharks that revisit the Neptunes each year; we can identify them and those that come back year after year are much more placid.’

  As part of their identification process, they’ve discovered that with repeat visits there is actually a negative habituation. ‘There’s measurable data to show that they don’t become conditioned and aggressive with the cages.’

  He does admit that humans do have an impact on shark behaviour. ‘Of course they do. Even Matthew Flinders recalled sharks trailing their ship – just like they’ll follow a fishing boat.’

  Some people have accused the shark operations of luring the great whites to this isolated channel, though that too is short-sighted, says Andrew. ‘The Neptune Islands have the largest aggregation of Australian fur seals in the world. Of course the sharks are here.’

  What they do here aboard the Princess II though is to identify the great whites that visit here year after year to help give a dataset for conservation decisions. They’ve done close kin genetic tests to determine that the population west of Bass Strait is a distinctive genetic population and that there are up to 1200 adult great whites in the region. They do biopsies and insert tracking devices into some of the great whites to record their yearly migrations, though there are still many unanswered questions.

  ‘We don’t know how long they live,’ says Andrew. We also don’t know for sure how many pups each shark has, or where they give birth. ‘One thing I’m keen to discover is how many great whites we need,’ he says, referring to the environmental balance between all species in the ocean and the fact that there still is so much to learn. ‘I kind of like the mystery. It keeps the magic with the great white.’

  Andrew does believe that the numbers have recovered – to the point where there are approximately 12 000 great whites in Australian waters, though if this is seen as an excess, rather than the management of a vulnerable population, he believes that it’ll be open season for shark fishing and culling initiatives again. ‘I think there’ll be a big conflict between sharks and humans in the future unless there is empathy and better understanding. These are vulnerable creatures and our trips are also about overcoming the whole narrative of killing monsters, revenge and heroes,’ he says referring to the way sharks were demonised after his father’s attack. To demonstrate the hands-on experience he’s had, Andrew tells me that, ‘over 38 years of diving with them I’ve removed packaging straps from their gills, fishing lines and hooks. I’ve been at absolute point-blank range.’ One thing his dad told him about interacting with the sharks was never to show off or ‘grandstand’ – treat them with respect and others will do the same. ‘The days of the shark heroes like Dad are gone. I believe that shark diving, conservation and research are the best things for the preservation and better understanding of the sharks,’ he says.

  I ask him about this, the perceived danger and the lingering impact of Jaws that still affects people. ‘How dare a shark swim past a metropolitan beach!’ he says of the uproar that always plays out in the media when there is a shark attack in a populated area. ‘How many people who work with elephants or horses have had close calls?’ he says in defence of the risk associated with his relationship with the sharks, and that it’s not nearly as dangerous as you might think.

  ‘In 50 years of the trips – my dad and now me – we’ve never had an injury on board that required stitches,’ he says as if to prove a point.

  As the text on the Department of the Environment and Energy’s website says, ‘No shark is thought to target humans as prey’, and the vast majority of shark bite incidents, ‘can be attributed to the shark confusing us with its normal prey’. This is something that Andrew agrees with.

  The wind drops and we arrive in the channel that separates the two Neptune Islands, north and south. Seals frolic on the rust-coloured rocks and ospreys, seagulls an
d sooty oystercatchers ride the thermals in the air looking for fish below the surface.

  Despite all this build-up and expectation, there are no sharks. The water is still. The crew release the two cages, one to the sea floor 23 metres below and the other off the back of the boat. There is a plethora of life out here, though not what we’re all quietly hoping for. ‘It looks a bit sharky,’ Andrew says hopefully, though I think he’s just trying to reassure me. ‘It’s a feeling. Sometimes I just know there’ll be nothing. See the wind from the west, the dark water, the texture of it,’ he says referring to the ripples on the water in front of the boat. I can’t tell the difference between this water and that at Thistle Island, though Andrew stays silent, not building our expectations.

  I head out on deck, steadying my feet to the roll of the swell. The air is sweet and blood from the crew’s burley buckets slides across the back of the boat.

  ‘Back in the day burleying was like a witch’s potion. Tuna mince, horse blood, whale oil earlier than that. You could turn the sea red ladling this gloop in the water all through the night. Now we know that the sharks have their own patterns and itineraries and you can’t really change their behaviour dramatically with any sort of concoction,’ Andrew says.

  One of the deck hands, Vinnie, ties an enormous tuna tail to a rope and hoists it in, while Sienna, one of the crew members from England, throws in a bucket of tuna gills and offal – they only use fish-based products now to draw in the sharks and the fish that are attracted to the free feed.