In the summer of 2024, on a weekend visit to Sydney, I walked the popular Bondi-to-Coogee route, which meanders cliffside through Sydney’s northern beach towns. I made it to Randwick Cemetery in the mid-afternoon. The cemetery is uniquely positioned; it sits on the edge of the cliff, not far from Coogee beach. It’s a million-dollar view — the envy of the living. Charles Catley, who is referred to posthumously as the “Father of Coogee”, is buried there. Within a year of arriving in Sydney and settling on the lands of the Gadigal and Muru-Ora-Dial people, Charles purchased twin parcels of land on which he planned to grow vegetables. The story goes that he brought with him just three sovereign coins, one of which he tossed into the ocean, crying, “I am going to be a very rich man!” His crop of cauliflower, grown from seeds he brought over from England, was particularly fecund. He named his estate, which accommodated a six-bedroom sandstone Georgian monolith, Cauliflower Hall.

Now, Coogee is known for being a beachside suburb popular with surfers and beach-goers. At first, however, its plot of ocean was deemed too unsafe for swimming. At some point, this consensus was abandoned, and from the beginning of the twentieth century, the area became a hub for swimming, surfing and suntanning. Around the same time, Coogee experienced a small number of shark deaths, a period in the early 1930s dubbed “shark era”. Eyewitness accounts of the attacks (such as this one from the Cairns Post: “… the horrified crowd next saw for some minutes a shark and the swimmer thrashing around in a welter of blood-stained water and scarlet flecked foam”) describe the shark’s brute, blind hatred, and the bravery and heroism of its victims. One of these was a twenty-one-year-old ex-military officer who chose to turn and fight, rather than swim for his life, and lost both of his hands. He told his aunt from his hospital bed, “Maybe I won’t have any [arms], but I’m not going to die”. He later died from gangrene.

Sydney’s shark era provided Australians with new opportunities for heroism, filling a void left by the end of the first world war. One lifeguard and rescuer, Frank Beaurepaire, was awarded a medal for his “undying heroism” and was paid generously for his attempt to save a young surfer from a shark attack (though he later died from blood loss). Frank was knighted and made Mayor of Melbourne. He used the reward money to start Beaurepaires, an iconic Australian tyre retailer that, just recently, closed down most of its stores.

For both Frank Beaurepaire and Charles Catley, wealth and heroism were seemingly a happy accident. Their legacies have a sheen of nationalistic nostalgia about them, especially in the case of Charles Catley, whose Cauliflower Hall could be thought of as Australia’s version of Drax Hall — a plantation in Barbados owned by Tory MP Richard Drax that has recently been at the centre of reparations discussions. It protects those whose riches have been made at the expense of human and non-human lives.

During the shark era, shark hunting was taken up by Coogee residents and visiting sailors from New Caledonia, who were after the prize money on offer for anyone who could find and kill the sharks responsible for the attacks. Sharks were routinely caught, dragged to the shore of Coogee Beach and gutted, though, in the end, none were identified as the offending ones. Large mesh gill nets were soon erected along Coogee’s line of coast on the recommendation of the NSW Shark Menace Committee (an absurd yet apt name for a group whose ideas for preventing shark attacks included policing the bay with aeroplanes and an “electrical device for stunning sharks”), who claimed the nets were a “cheap and effective way of minimising the shark peril”.

A photograph taken in 1932 of workers repairing the nets is captioned “working on the shark-proof fence”. A closer look at the image suggests the workers paddled out on a rowboat. Secured to the top rope by what looks like a carabiner, their job was to attach a sheet of netting to it — making their way down the line by walking the bottom rope like trapeze artists  This is what the original structure looked like:

The project reminds us, too, of WA’s “rabbit-proof fence” which, by 1930, was over one thousand kilometres in length (in twenty more years it would double its reach) and did a poor job of managing the state’s rabbit problem with its miles of sun-glinting wrought iron cables.

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There are currently around fifty-one shark nets, each spanning a length of 120–180 metres, anchored in waters off the NSW coast. The program costs the NSW taxpayer about $21m per year. A recent study concluded that in the summer of 2023/24, almost 90 per cent of the animals caught in the nets were not sharks, but other, sometimes endangered, marine life. In fact, none of the shark nets in the Eastern Suburb beaches area (Bondi, Bronte, Maroubra and Coogee) caught any “target” sharks. Instead, the catch data from NSW’s Shark Meshing Program, FOI’d by Humane Society International, revealed that among the 149 dead animals caught in the nets, four were critically endangered grey nurse sharks. It has also proven that shark nets are ineffective at keeping sharks out of recreational waters, though the state of NSW continues to erect them every year, and did so again just recently, at the beginning of spring, 2025.

Last week, a shark-bite death in Dee Why, NSW — one of only two across Sydney’s beaches in sixty years — reignited debate about shark nets. In news coverage, the victim has been characterised as “a good bloke”. A friend and witness who saw him trying to warn other swimmers moments before his death described him as “heroic”, adding: “People get focused on the shark, and terror, I’d like to refocus on what this guy did, and the love that he had at the most critical time …”. A day after the incident, NSW Premier Chris Minns announced that plans to trial the removal of shark nets on three Sydney beaches would be paused indefinitely, while The Age — referencing a 2016 study of 50 years of data by Deakin University’s School of Life and Environmental Sciences — stated that “there is statistically no difference in shark fatalities between netted and un-netteted beaches”.

The NSW state government’s knee-jerk response to the tragedy, despite overwhelming evidence that shark nets do more harm than good, points to a hasty attempt to assuage public hysteria — one that plays into a long-held prejudice deeply-rooted in the same hero/villain dichotomy that gave Beaurepaire his fortune. Shark nets aren’t a sure-fire way of preventing shark-related deaths (on the contrary, biologists have argued that the false sense of safety they engender may make deaths more likely) but they are guaranteed to threaten the lives of marine life and to the continued existence of endangered ocean species.

The annual raising of the nets along Sydney’s beaches is by now ritualistic. It’s a destructive act that buys into Quixotic illusions of heroism — the myth of an “Australian” way of life on which the settler sense of belonging relies operates within a program of sinister heroics. As Indigenous Distinguished Professor Aileen Moreton Robinson argues:

It is a sense of belonging derived from ownership as understood within the logic of capital; and it mobilizes the legend of the pioneer, “the battler” in its self-legitimization.

The battler is often depicted as a working-class settler male attempting to make an honest living through farming or otherwise ravaging Aboriginal land. The myth of the Australian bush as harsh, difficult to farm and unyielding sets up the battler as a conqueror of sorts. The implication is that colonial settlers’ industrial agricultural and land management practices tame an otherwise hostile, inhospitable landscape. Such myth-making relies on the fallacy of terra nullius, and on the denial of Indigenous Australians as caretakers of the land and the animals that inhabit it. Australian myth-making compulsively tells these stories over and over again — a process that erodes collective memory and undermines truth-telling.

Charles Gatley was a pioneer of the kind Robinson speaks about, and a battler in the sense that he was celebrated for conquering the land he built his estate on. The legend of Gatley as a farmer and founder of Coogee conceals the fact that opportunistic settler-colonial farming practices such as his, which brought from England non-native crops and reproduced them en masse by “clearing and burning the trees, cropping the soil and then repeating the process on new land”, justified the illegal dispossession of Aboriginal land and contributed to a widespread decline in soil fertility, the pollution of wetlands in Coogee and nearby Maroubra, as well as the spread of disease.

Australia’s attachment to fences, nets and borders of all kinds reveals a paranoia common to all settler colonies, which view the land, sea and Indigenous populations as hostile, even predatory, to the state. The figure of the battler is so compelling because he overcomes, or at the very least faces head-on — even at the cost of his life — his supposed adversaries. Made real by legends like Beaurepaire and Gatley, the battler’s ideological baggage justifies all number of things from reactive, neo-liberal government policy to poor agricultural and ecological management, and even genocide.

Historian Bill Gammage’s warning (in The Biggest Estate on Earth) that “fences on the ground make fences in the mind” rings in the ears as shark nets are erected along Australia’s coastlines each year. The legacy of Sydney’s 1930s shark era is all too evident heading into spring 2025, as Chris Minns and the NSW Government make a snap decision that once again fails to heed the advice of the scientific community and pressure from environmentalists.

Image: Coogee Beach in 2015 (Gnagarra, Wikimedia Commons)
 

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