Newspapers seemed to be full of lurid accounts of shark sightings, maulings, captures. The whole country was obsessed with sharks. It was as if the continent were besieged by armies of them, and of all those species stalking the depths beyond the surf-line none had the pitiless warrior reputation to match the so-called ‘white death’. We knew quite little about Carcharodon carcharias in the sixties, but some Australians began to go to a lot of trouble to encounter them and to capture images of them close up.
When the groundbreaking documentary Blue Water, White Death was released in 1971 I was desperate to see it, but the film passed me by. It boasted the first extended underwater footage of great white sharks ever taken. In the later years of video it seemed perennially unavailable, so the republication of Peter Matthiessen’s Blue Meridian comes as a consolation of sorts. First published in the same year Blue Water was released, it’s an account of the making of the documentary, and although written as natural history the passage of time has rendered its social observations as telling as its descriptions of life beneath the waterline.
Matthiessen is acknowledged as one of the world’s finest writers of natural history. Best known for The Snow Leopard and The Cloud Forest, he also has a respectable body of fiction, including my favourite, the arresting Far Tortuga. In 1969 the author joined an expedition led by American millionaire Peter Gimbel to find and film Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark. Gimbel had previously earnt fame as the man who took the first pictures of the Andrea Doria in 70 metres of water off Nantucket, and his project was financed by the cinema wing of TV giant, CBS. The plan was to find the fearsome predator and to get into the water with it and film it. The first objective was an enormous challenge, the second all but unthinkable at the time. It was the year people went to the moon, an era when discovery and adventure still had some cachet, but even then preparing to swim with great whites was quite an undertaking.
In March 1969 the team of seven Americans and two Australians charter a whale catcher from Durban and set out for the whaling grounds off the eastern coast of South Africa. The Australians are Ron and Valerie Taylor, who are underwater royalty in their home country. According to the expeditioners’ intelligence, very big sharks congregate off Durban, especially during the whale hunt. Matthiessen, along as spare hand and observer, is a novice diver and suitably apprehensive at the prospect of climbing into an aluminium cage in the midst of a pack of feeding sharks. His tone of calm curiosity gives his account a sympathy that is grave and illuminating. Witnessing the butchering of whales, he writes: ‘Nothing is wasted but the whale itself.’ On April 8 when they find their first big aggregation of sharks, Matthiessen describes his descent in the cage: ‘When water and body temperatures are so nearly the same, the skin seems to dissolve; I drifted in solution with the sea. In the sensory deprivation of the underwater world – no taste, no smell, no sound – the wild scene had the ring of hallucination. The spectral creatures came and went, cruising toward the cage and scraping past with lightless eyes.’
For hours the crew films the awesome sight of big oceanic whitetips coring the floating carcasses of whales at close proximity. The cages are buffeted, the water swirls with gore, and though the footage is remarkable, no great white appears.
On April 19, to the horror and fury of the Australian divers, Gimbel and fellow cameraman Stan Waterman leave their cage during a similar feeding frenzy. A small shark enters by the open door and the remaining diver is left with it trapped and blundering around with her until it can find the door again. That rattled diver is, of course, Valerie Taylor. The dismay at Gimbel’s sudden recklessness begins to open up divisions in the crew, especially between the Americans and the Australians. The author renders the shifts and silences of shipboard life with great tact and subtlety. He becomes fascinated by Ron and Valerie Taylor. Ron in particular interests him almost as much as the elusive white shark itself: ‘He is a well-made graceful man with long sideburns and a black monk’s cap of unparted hair, a flat gaze – his eyes do not open the way into his mind, but reflect one’s own – and a slightly retracted lower jaw; perhaps it is association, but in a strange way that eludes definition, Ron brings to mind a shy and handsome shark.’
Matthiessen learns something of the Taylors’ reputations. Spearfishing champions, filmmakers and popular lecturers, they are minor celebrities at home and gurus to those who dive. He the quiet, unassuming genius, she the beautiful, feisty on-camera sidekick – they are professionals in the company of mere adventurers. At the time, Ron is perhaps the best diver alive, capable of amazing feats of courage and endurance, moving in the water as though he were born with gills. Although Taylor seems to know no fear, he takes only calculated risks. He has lost several friends to sharks and every now and then he kills one when it seems to Matthiessen less than necessary.
While the ship steams about the Indian Ocean, all the way to Sri Lanka and back to Africa with no great white in sight and a growing litany of mishaps dogging the company on and off the sea, Matthiessen carefully builds his picture of a strange clash of minds and cultures. The Taylors are prim, conventional Australians of their time and there is real humour in the portrayal of them surrounded by big-talking and foulmouthed Yanks who are cosmopolitan, educated, wealthy and confident. The human drama of this is often more enthralling than the quest itself. Driven to push himself further and further, Gimbel takes more and bigger risks, not only swimming in the midst of slamming, buffeting sharks, but working his way right into the wound of a dead whale so that he is beside the gnashing jaws of the sharks, pressed against their gulping throats. ‘A wild fatalism overtook us,’ Gimbel tells the author. ‘We felt a growing sense of immunity.’
Matthiessen and the Taylors puzzle over this behaviour. Gimbel maintains that he’s simply curious: ‘he seeks out ways to test what he calls “the limits”,’ says Matthiessen, ‘and of course this search has no real end to it but death’. Gimbel seems driven to challenge the sharks, while to the author Ron Taylor may simply be one.
The expedition moves to South Australia’s Spencer Gulf, and another famous local joins the company. Rodney Fox still bears the scars of his 1963 encounter with a great white. It took 360 stitches and a great deal of surgical skill to save him that day but his fascination with sharks has only grown over the years and few have his working knowledge of whites. As they chum for the sharks that seem to perpetually elude them, he and the Taylors are convinced that the wait will soon be over.
When the first specimen finally shows itself the sight is awesome. After the mechanical grotesqueries of the Jaws franchise and the intervening years of cage-dive footage to which the contemporary viewer has become accustomed, it’s worth contemplating just how dramatic that first sighting must have been. Even Ron Taylor seems to have gotten excited. Immediately, the cages were lowered, wetsuits shrugged on. ‘Surging out of the sea to fasten on a horse shank hung from a davit, it stood upright beside the ship, head and gills clear of the water, tail vibrating, the glistening triangles of its teeth red-rimmed with blood. In the effort of shearing, the black eye went white as the eyeball was rolled inward; then the whole horse quarter disappeared in a scarlet billow.’
Underwater, Matthiessen watches the historic filming from his racked and buffeted cage, horrified at the sight of these great otherworldly creatures: ‘there was no sense of viciousness or savagery in what they did, but something worse, an implacable need’. As ever, the author is first a natural historian, as dispassionate as he can manage to be, but even he cannot resist the urge to touch – as if he’s not immune to the impulse that Gimbel acts upon so extravagantly – the urge to connect momentarily with a greater power. ‘Gills rippling, it would swerve enough to miss the cage, and once the smiling head had passed I could reach out and take hold of the rubber pectoral, or trail my fingers down the length of a cold dead flank, as if stroking a corpse: the skin felt as smooth as the skin of a swordfish or tuna.’
Later, the author quotes Peter Gimbel as saying:
‘I was filled with a terrible sadness that we had indeed determined precisely the limits we sought, that the mystery was at least partly gone because we knew that we could get away with anything, that the story – and such a story! – had an end.’
I suspect Matthiessen may not have shared this sadness. In this account Gimbel’s quest seems to have had more to do with the mysteries in himself than those of the shark he seeks. The author’s curiosity never seems to wane, his awe and respect for nature have not dulled with time. Certainly the Taylors have gone on to see sharks very differently, and although more has been learned about the great white since this remarkable jaunt in 1969, no one would dare say the creature is any less a mystery, any less a target of irrational hatred.
The day I began reading Blue Meridian an abalone diver known to friends of mine was taken by a great white near Hopetoun, Western Australia. It’s impossible to read of an expedition like this without mixed and strong emotions. Appalled, amused, amazed, I still envy Matthiessen his brief touch of the living shadow, an experience from a time when you couldn’t have filled a dinghy with those who could claim to have done the same.
* Peter Gimbel died of cancer in 1987. Ron Taylor continued to dive until his death in 2012. He too died of cancer. Peter Matthiessen died of leukaemia in 2014, aged eighty-six. At the age of eighty, Val Taylor was still diving with sharks and campaigning for marine sanctuaries.
II
Predator or Prey?
Australians have a peculiar attitude toward sharks. It’s pathological and it runs deep. Other cultures have their wolves and bears, their lions and tigers – the carnivorous demon lurking in the shadows. Here there’s no growling menace out in the dark. Our demon is silent and it swims.
‘Why did God make sharks?’ Whenever my kids asked me this I was always tempted to answer: ‘To sell newspapers.’ Because that’s how it feels sometimes. Flip through a Sunday paper this summer. Watch the telly. When it comes to sharks, fear equals money. The more lurid the pics and headlines, the better. Readers and viewers can’t help themselves. Advertisers love it almost as much as editors. A bona-fide bad guy. I guess it’s what you’re left with when you’re no longer allowed to burn witches. The shark is our secular substitute for the Devil.
Like most Australians, I grew up with an irrational fear and disgust for the shark. Not that I ever actually saw one. Not alive, not in the wild. Our waters were supposedly teeming with these hideous creatures, but for the millions of hours I spent surfing, spearfishing and boating, I saw none at all.
As a kid I saw a few dead specimens. Divers often killed sharks for sport. When anglers like the legendary Alf Dean ‘fought’ tiger sharks and great whites they did it for pleasure, for some sense of mastery, then they dragged them ashore and hung them from gantries. I remember enormous, distended carcasses suspended from meat hooks and steel cables on jetties on the south coast. The dead sharks often had their lengths and weights painted on their flanks as if they were machines. Their entrails spilled at our feet through their gaping jaws. And I think of it now: the hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilos of protein, the decades of living and travelling and breeding and ecological job-sharing that are bound up in the body of a single mature shark. All of this reduced to a trophy that lasted a few hours before the creature’s body was carted off to the tip. These displays were like public executions, the criminal species strung up for the crowds, as if the only good shark were a dead shark and we needed to see this butchery acted out again and again for our own wellbeing.
No wonder I wasn’t seeing live sharks as a kid. Humans had declared war on them. By the time I finally caught sight of a specimen in the wild, some time in my thirties, there were more sharks in our collective minds than there were left in the water.
Picture this. I’m thirteen, standing on a jetty looking down onto a flashing mass of bronze whalers and other sharks. Men are blasting holes in them, shooting them at close range from boats. This is Albany, 1973. The sharks are gathered around the gore-mired flensing deck of Australia’s last whaling station. It’s a local treat for tourists, having access to such a spectacle. There are half a dozen dead sperm whales floating a few metres away. The water is wild with blood, not just from the writhing sharks, but because someone just beneath me is grinding the head off a whale with a steam-powered saw. Believe me, it’s an untidy business to witness. A head the size of a shipping container unseated from the biggest body you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s hard to believe what I’m seeing. It seems a bit wasteful – disgusting, actually – to be butchering such immense creatures for little more than fertilizer and cosmetics. But blokes shooting sharks? That doesn’t bother me a bit. I am, after all, a boy of my time and place.
Of course I haven’t been that boy for a long while and the culture I grew up in has changed. In my own lifetime Australians have become very conscious of animal welfare and nature conservation. Most people hate to see creatures mistreated. Whether it’s a dog being beaten or a bear tortured for its bile, cruelty and thoughtless slaughter offend us. A kangaroo cull or footage from an overseas abattoir will cause outrage bordering on social derangement. But of all creatures subject to routine mistreatment and wanton destruction, the shark remains, for the most part, beyond the range of our tender feelings. We reserve special sympathy, of course, for endangered species. Most of us could not countenance the unnecessary killing of an elephant or a rhino, let alone those scarier creatures, the leopard or the cheetah. After all, these are rare, proud, noble beasts. But the endangered shark? By and large nobody cares.
Yet the shark was here before any of those other ‘iconic’ beasts. It embodies the deepest experience of prehistory and it still swims in the present. But in the popular mind it’s a terrorist, an insidious threat we must arm ourselves against. Bees kill many more Australians than do sharks every year, but there is no war on bees.
The Devil is supposed to get all the good lines, but the shark is mute. It is a creature routinely vilified, and the disgust it produces in us shuts down curiosity and empathy. As a result we tolerate or even participate in acts of cruelty against it that’d be unimaginable were they to involve any other species. In short, the removal of sharks from humane consideration gives humankind licence to do the unspeakable.
The evidence suggests that we’ll let ourselves do anything to the shark. This is why the barbaric trade in shark fin continues to prosper, why most of the big pelagic sharks have disappeared globally without an outcry, why boys who maim and torture sharks beneath jetties in coastal communities of Australia are unlikely to be reprimanded, let alone convicted of any offence, and it’s why right-thinking folks in Sydney and Melbourne are content to buy shark meat under the false and misleading market label of flake, even as the numbers decline. Of all the fishery resources close to worldwide collapse, the shark’s is the one least likely to stir our collective conscience. Because essentially, the shark doesn’t matter – that’s the stubborn and perennial subtext. The demonization of sharks has blinded us, not just to our own savagery, but also to our casual hypocrisy.
Sharks are not machines. They are not invincible. They are not cruel – certainly not as cruel as a fourteen-year-old with a Twitter account, or a backroom politician with a grudge. Unlike humans, sharks are not capable of moral evil. In short, they are not at all what we thought they were. For one thing, we need to remind ourselves: there is no monolithic shark. With almost four hundred species, there are as many ways to be a shark as there are to be a human.
You only need to meet a few individual sharks to understand that they’re complex and many-faceted, variable in behaviour and form. Some are sociable, even playful. At times they seem to like human interaction. I love dolphins as much as anybody else, but believe it or not I’ve had more fun with sharks: lemon sharks, tawny nurses, whale sharks, even the ADHD kids of the surf zone, the bronze whalers.
Happily, most of us who spend a lot of time in the water have moved on from the ignorant shark prejudices we grew
up with. In the rare instances when a diver or a surfer gets bumped, bitten or even killed, it’s now uncommon to hear the survivor or a bereaved relative speak in terms of vengeance or outrage. Anger and hatred are rare. The tone of these harrowed folks is philosophical. The ugliest utterances seem to come from those at a distance, citizens who rarely get their hair wet. They’re usually blokes, I’m sorry to say. Men, of course, are far more likely to die on the toilet than from a shark encounter, but when you hear what some politicians and shock jocks have to say on the matter you’re led to suspect that before their final straining moment they’d prefer to see every last shark dead.
The year 2011 was the worst for fatal shark attacks in Australia in living memory. Four people lost their lives. These were violent deaths, terrible events. With the help of news media a kind of fever gripped the public imagination, and as a result lots of Australians and foreign tourists were too terrified to swim in the sea. That same year we suffered the lowest road toll since the Second World War, with only 1292 Australians killed. Some of these people died slowly, many were disarticulated. Their blood stained the lawns and streets of many safe neighbourhoods. But there was no media-fanned panic, nobody stayed off the roads – on the contrary, our road usage went up. This most common form of violent death simply doesn’t frighten us anymore. The very real likelihood of being mangled in a car is something we’ve domesticated. That’s not simply a contradiction, it’s a marvel of human psychology.
The fact is, sharks have so much more to fear from us than we do from them. Worldwide, millions of people are in the water every day of every year – and even with the recent spate of incidents in Australia, most of them in my home waters, the number of attacks is but a handful. But how many sharks are killed annually? Almost a hundred million. That’s 270 000 sharks killed just today. Many of these have their fins amputated while they’re alive; they’re returned to the water where they drown slowly or die from shock. A third of all open-ocean shark species are threatened. Many of those are keystone species, so when they disappear, the rest of the ecosystem goes haywire. Habitats stripped of sharks begin to produce monocultures at best and plagues at worst. The current rate of shark slaughter is savage and is not just unsustainable, but potentially catastrophic for our oceans.