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This past Saturday at Walkers Rock Beach on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula, Simon Baccanello, while surfing, was attacked by a shark. The 46-year-old was reportedly surfing in the line-up with approximately 12 people before being attacked and dragged by the shark further out to sea.

The State Emergency Service have stated that they believe Baccanello was killed in the attack and are still in the process of searching for the body. It’s been reported that the remains of his surfboard and his wetsuit have been found.

The South Oz town of Elliston is in deep mourning. Tributes have flowed in for Baccanello, who was a highly respected high school teacher.

There hasn’t been a shark attack in this area for over 20 years.

Below is a feature from Tracks Issue no.363 (Dec, 2000), where Tracks writer DC Green travelled to South Oz to see how the community was coping in the aftermath of a shark attack.

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FEAR AND LOATHING AT PORT SINCLAIR

Greg the publican smiled grimly. “If the locals want to talk, they’ll find you soon enough.” “Thanks.” I’d just been reminded how much I didn’t want this assignment – part because of my shark phobia, part the vampiric nature of tracking down the grieving, but mostly because of the location of the first attack. The Cactus locals are renowned as the most paranoid and protective in the land. They have scared off marauding surf media trips to the point where most surf journalists I know won’t even visit relatives in Adelaide. Now here I was with a room out the back of the Penong Hotel that couldn’t be easier for a lynch mob to locate – just get pissed and turn left at the beer garden. Still, I was hoping and half-assuming the locals would be pleased at all the tourist-deterring publicity; but as happens with assumptions, I wasn’t even warm. I checked the surf – right where Cameron Bayes was taken. Despite the brisk onshore, there were waves. Bleak, empty waves. I staggered through the saltbush. The camp was mostly deserted, but for a few scattered feral tents and two German women on a horror pilgrimage in a sparkling campervan with an annex. I fronted three Lorne locals drinking beers. Because of my rented Commodore, they thought I was an undercover cop. “Yeah, we’ve been surfing this morning,” said one. “Sharks don’t worry us. They can’t learn tricks or remember things like dogs. They’re just dumb fish!” “I’m lucky because I haven’t got much imagination,” said his mate. The Lorne guys didn’t want to have their photos taken (no-one in Cactus did). “The locals have left us alone,” explained one, “other than warning us not to take any photos of the surf, and the odd weird stare. So we wouldn’t want to rile them.” Back at the pub I had a few beers and a countery, fearing confrontation at any moment. Yet I met only non-surfing locals of all hues. The sole bloke with all his front teeth intact was staying overnight, en route on a solo ultralight flight from Geraldton to his home town, Kingston. He was 70. “I used to surf,” admitted the publican, Greg Warrington. In 1975, one of Greg’s grommet mates, Wade Shippard, swam out to meet a fishing boat at Port Sinclair. A great white bit off the boy’s leg and he bled to death on the way to Ceduna Hospital. Greg, and a few other locals, haven’t surfed since.

“Kill every fucking shark!” snorted a truckie. At dawn, the Commodore skimmed across salt plains. The surf was doing? Back in Penong, I fronted a local surfer/businessman who empty still, the sweep of beach devoid of all humanity. What was agreed to speak to me, provided I didn’t use his name, or take his photo. “I’m one of the accepted spokesmen for the hierarchy,” he explained. Zed’ was rational with his theories, but still clearly spooked. Like most “It’s still bloody out there, big as a station wagon!” locals, he planned on staying out of the surf for a month. I read every report of the attack (the whole town had clippings). The store I lucked into meeting a veteran local (“just call me Harry”) who’d gruesome details slowly coagulated, often contradicted. At the general seen the whole attack. “The shark was so close to the beach, it looked artificial,” Harry reckoned. “How big?” I asked. The man’s voice shook. “Big as a caravan…” New Zealanders Cameron and Tina Bayes were seven months into a working honeymoon holiday. Fireman Cameron planned to surf a bit at Cactus before heading across the Nullarbor to find seasonal shearing work in WA. On Sunday morning, September 24, the 25-year-old rose early to avoid the crowd. He’d already racked up about half a dozen good lefts by the time other surfers began to pull out their wetsuits, including a carload of school children. At 7.30 am the great white launched completely out of the water at the Cactus end section seemingly the shallowest, least likely place in the entire bay for such an encounter. Clearly hurt after the first strike, Cameron crawled back onto his board. He paddled five metres towards shore when the shark seized him again. It dragged board and rider some 50 metres further out and began thrashing in a circular formation with such ferocity, a whirlpool formed. Cameron was tossed completely out of the water. Harry: “There were fins, tails, blood everywhere. I… don’t want to talk about it too much.” After four minutes, the water calmed.

The shark and Cameron, gone. Some 200 metres further out, the back half of Cameron’s surfboard popped up, as if spat out. A 10-year-old boy ran through the carpark, shouting warning. Panic ensued. Who was the surfer? Grown men in wetsuits lurched in circles. Finally, campers and locals tweaked. There was a lady screaming, inconsolable. The wife. The widow. So disrupted with shock was Tina Bayes, her legs became paralysed and she couldn’t walk. An ambulance drove her to Ceduna Hospital, and from there she flew back to New Zealand. TV cameras and newspapermen flooded into Cactus. A local nightmare! “I had all the channels chasing me,” Harry tried to laugh. “SBS, ABC, all sticking their cameras in my face. But I didn’t really want to say anything, so I didn’t.” He snorted. “A lot of people who spoke to the media weren’t even there. Ego comes into it.” I heard the Bayes family were devastated when a South Australian newspaper ran a photo of the giant bite through Cameron’s board, blank foam stained pink. I chose not to be a stranger shooting questions down the line to New Zealand, or to track down the local schoolchildren witnesses. I figured they’d been through enough already (a counsellor had been to the school). And I was scared now too. Theories abounded. The shark was a rogue, injured, curious, territorial, gone to Elliston, a killer that must pay, still out there! Spring was dangerous: two previous attacks at Cactus had occurred in the same month, different years (one earning the nickname ‘Sharkie’). Cliff-top tourists at the Head of the Bight reported great whites devouring southern right whale afterbirth and attacking any sick or poorly guarded calves. Big sharks also move inshore for seal calving. And when salmon pass! Autumn had the warmest water ever. Ditto September. Big sharks get hungrier in warmer water! The oceans are changing fast, being fished out, poisoned and slowly boiled. What do sharks think! When fishermen dump fish-guts overboard, when humans in cages burley the water, when tuna are transported in massive mobile farms from the Bight to Port Lincoln, stopping every few days to feed the fish? Are the dumb sharks making connections? Harry: “The worst is when there’s no body left, no piece of wetsuit or even a fucking fingernail. You walk up and down the beach expecting to find something, but you never do.” Then came the news from Elliston. Harry shook his head. “When we heard about the second attack, it was as though it was a mistake, the sequence was… unbelievable really.”

ELLISTON

An insect exploded on the Commodore windscreen. I had just caused a random, violent death to a creature about which I felt only annoyance that its death- splat occurred right in the middle of my view of the road, meaning I would have to use a wiper at the next roadhouse. I thought a lot about death on the 270 km drive to Elliston. There are many creatures that can kill humans in our wide brown land. from redbacks to death-rolling crocodiles. But you can kill the former with a single thong blow and at least climb a tree to escape the latter. Surfers generally accept that every creature has a place in the scheme of things; indeed, we are often at the front line of environ mental rumbles. Yet who among us does not fear being eaten alive? My fear of the locals paled before this fear. Jevan Wright was a regular visitor to Elliston. At 12.50 pm on September 25, Jevan rode his final wave to the end of Black’s reef after a session with some mates and the father of his girlfriend. He was in the lagoon, only 30 metres from reaching the jagged shore when the great white hit. Two sudden, violent strikes, then… nothing. A friend stood stunned on the reef. He could smell the fear, the blood, but there were no screams, no sign of Jevan. Just a shark. 18-to-20 feet long. Then it too was gone. Jevan’s mate paddled out and retrieved the drifting front third of Jevan’s surfboard. Freaking I turned into the dusty carpark on a brilliant, mocking afternoon. The waves were… good.

I needed a surf desperately, so I leapt out of the car and clambered into my wetsuit. I stretched a bit, while hoping some other surfers might turn up, and trying not to be transfixed by the small memorial that overlooked the line-up: a cairn of rocks, shells and a few West End cans topped with a simple wooden cross. A car with two surfers turned up. “Looks alright,” I tried to enthuse. “Maybe.” They drove off quickly. I had believed that experiencing a little fear would help in my understanding of this story, but I never expected such intensity… the cliff climb ahead, the long lonely paddle, images of Jevan and Cameron, and that crucifix… My will snapped. I peeled off my wetsuit and stuffed it back into the board bag, where it would remain for the rest of my trip, and drove to Elliston to find a room. The town was… stunned. Grieving, angry, scared, confused, still searching. Shark sightings were the hottest news. “There’s one at Streaky, there’s two big ones in Coffin Bay,” said a spotter plane, and a monster at Sheringa! Tales abounded, of nets torn up and hooks straightened out, of researchers tagging more pointers in a single month than they normally would in a year. “Cactus guys saw a mako breach and a school of bronzies!” It was the same killer shark! One positive to emerge was how Elliston closed ranks after the attack. Within an hour there were 10 boats out searching for Jevan, plus the SES from Streaky and Lincoln, plus offers from other boats, even aeroplanes, all over the peninsula. “Everyone pulled together,” beamed the lone local cop, Sergeant Allen Argent. Burly abalone diver Jeff Grocke was in a meeting at Lincoln when the news broke. He charged up the coast to join the search, which ran for four days. Nothing was found. I spent an afternoon with Jeff watching too many shark documentaries and listening to too many shark stories. “Great whites are extremely cunning and curious fish,” said Jeff, whose 18-year-old son Jethro surfs. “They’ll hide under the boat and generally not spend a lot of time on the surface where they can be seen.” Jeff believes there is now an overabundance of predators to prey; hence the predators are seeking new prey. The abalone industry is pushing for a cull, and Grocke is the man for the job. “Scientists behind their desks,” Jeff spat. “They don’t believe what we say, they don’t get out in the field. We’ve all been buzzed. Noone in the abalone industry is working.” Jeff is also annoyed that if a fisherman accidentally kills a great white, he has to contact the Fisheries Department: “It’s like a murder inquest and you’re supposed to feel guilty.” Scientists take the sharks away for testing, and the fishermen receive no compensation, which hardly encourages cooperation. “A dog bites someone, it gets shot. But a shark eats a kid, and the fishery blokes come out to check we haven’t hurt any sharks! But you can guarantee 100 per cent the shark that took Jevan will be back.” After days of talk ing about and thinking only about sharks… my fear was a tumour out of control and I was a human shark feeding on death, struggling to understand the fundamentally unknowable, to wring desperate meaning from a creature as far removed from notions of human morality as the world- SA. Instead, I drove south toward Port Lincoln, a big town on Eyre’s devouring Galactus. I yearned to charge north to Ceduna Airport, to flee extremity made fat by the wealth of the ocean that surrounds; south, toward a meeting with Jevan Wright’s family….

PENINSULA’S END

I phoned Jeff Wright only because I’d heard he wanted to devote the rest of his life to ensuring that attacks such as the one on his son never happened again. Jeff met me at the door, wife Katrina puffy- eyed in the background, Jevan’s younger brother at school, I would soon learn much about the Wright’s remarkable son. Jevan was taken a week before his 18th birthday and his coxun ticket exams that would have earnt him first adult wage. “So he didn’t get to buy his first beer over the bar,” said Jeff, who’d only recently bought a minimal so he could get back into surfing with his two sons. Through the kitchen window, the sun broke through. I chuckled at a classic shot of Jevan in the local paper, with dreads and tank-top, shaking hands with a bloke from the council, wearing suit and tie. It seemed after two years of Jevan’s lobbying, Port Lincoln Council had at last agreed to build a skate park for the local kids. No wonder Jevan’s boss, Skipper John McKenzie, declared: “Jevan was a mighty man, I tell you, a man in his own right!” Welsh for “Warrior”, Jevan had a steady girl, worked hard and lived to surf and skate. No wonder over 400 people and a rock band turned up for his tribute service At the end of a smaller service at Black’s, thunder rent the air. Said Jeff: “As if Jevan was trying to say something.” From the kitchen, in a tiny voice, Jevan’s mum provided an answer: “I don’t want to go.” My eyes welled up. No-one spoke for awhile. Jeff Wright knows the truth lies somewhere between Vic Hislop and a shrieking media, who stir up fear and vengeance, and the scientific community, who seem sometimes more concerned with convincing us that sharks are basically just… misunderstood. There seems to be little liaison between the scientists and bureaucracy and the divers and fishermen,” said Jeff. “The old guys at sea can know a lot more than some young guy in an ivory tower who’s never experienced the ocean.” Jeff wants to help make shark repelling technology affordable for every surfer, to erect signs at beaches, shake up the world, do whatever it takes to make of Jevan’s death something tangibly affirming. “I’ll push my barrow for as long as it takes,” he said quietly, and I believed him. The Wright family were only weeks into a grieving process that would never end, coping in their own ways, but still fragile. I compared my own petty emotions to what this open, inspiring couple endured every day to outlive a child! and felt ashamed. The Wrights let me into their lives for half a day, and in the process, changed mine. I hope they don’t regret the experience.. Apart from driving too fast in a rented Commodore, we don’t confront death much in modern life. We muse on our own deaths even less. Few moderns kill their own meat or have any concept of food chains, let alone of being a part of that chain. Death thoughts create fear. Yet if confronted, riding on adrenaline, fear can lead to ecstasy. Flirting with death is the unmentioned basis of surf stoke. This is why big waves are more exhilarating than small ones, why solo night sessions are such a buzz, why every session in South Australia is accompanied with an intense awareness of nature and water movement all around that can border on enlightenment or paranoia; uncomfortable or intolerable. Surfers know, when surfing the Southern Ocean especially, that we are not the alpha animal, that death rides with the territory. Yet not an ignoble death in bed, but death in the saddle, becoming one with the sea, white death. Death after being truly alive. Rest in peace, Cameron and Jevan, and all the other “statistics”.

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