I’ve lived my life enjoying the sea breeze and watching the horizon change with the light, but I still don’t go into the water unless it’s absolutely necessary. The ocean is the shark’s world — not mine — and every year, reminders come that we humans are just visitors in their domain.
The Aussie coastline stretches for almost 30k kilometres. According to Google, it’s the sixth-longest national coastline in the world. Only a tiny fraction is actively used by swimmers or surfers. These are high-traffic areas, and most carry warning signs. There are times when sharks are most active.
Despite this, the attacks don’t stop. The simple truth: the ocean’s depths are not ours, and the places we enter it are often transitional zones where sharks hunt, feed, and travel. We’re temporary food sources standing on their highway.
In recent months, that truth has featured across our news many times. Over the 2025–26 summer, especially since December 25 last year, Australia has seen a string of shark incidents that have reignited debate about marine safety. In New South Wales alone, four shark attacks occurred within a 48-hour period, prompting closures of large sections of Sydney’s Northern Beaches and an unprecedented ramp-up of drone and surveillance patrols. In one of those incidents, a 12-year-old boy was fatally bitten by a shark in Sydney Harbour, just kilometres from the city centre — a stark reminder that proximity to urban life doesn’t equal safety.
Prior to that, in late November, a woman was killed, and her partner seriously injured off Crowdy Bay in New South Wales — another devastating encounter that underscored how suddenly and violently these encounters can unfold.
These incidents don’t happen in isolation. They overlay a long-term pattern: across Australia, researchers track about 20 shark bite incidents each year, with around three fatalities on average nationally. Some years see more, some see fewer, but the numbers make clear that fatal attacks are rare — yet still real.
And yet, even as statistics show that coastal drownings and other water-related hazards far exceed deaths from sharks annually, the public clings to the shark narrative with almost mythic intensity. I often find myself thinking: don’t go into the water — but logic isn’t the preferred option in the face of surf culture, thrill-seeking, holiday bravado, and drunken stupidity. While people continue to swim, surf, dive, or paddle in the ocean, there will always be attacks to remind us that what we do is dangerous, and that those who choose to enter are living on borrowed time, even if the statistical odds are low.
For me, that understanding is deeply personal. When I lived aboard the yacht Last Laugh, I spent countless hours on the water — but I always applied a cautious strategy. If I needed to clean the yacht’s underside, I would find a place to anchor and plan the dive meticulously: mid-day, clear water, slow-running tide. I avoided murky conditions and low-light periods—dawn and dusk—when feeding activity is most active. I entered the water with my fins on my feet, kicked slowly, and scrubbed the hull while allowing the copper-based antifoul and residual foul to drift over me. I hoped the chemical barrier would deter anything approaching from behind. It was a strategy I shared with many sailors, and many adopted it because they, too, understood the nature of risk at sea.
Now, living on land but right on the coast, I still don’t go into the water. I watch surfers wax their boards, kids splash at the shallows, and swimmers bob in the swell — and I know that I’m opting out not out of fear, but out of respect. The water is the shark’s world; we’re merely guests, and sometimes unwelcome ones.
It disappoints me when the public cries out to stop the shark attacks. All I want to do is shout back: don’t go into the water. You can clamour for mitigation programs, nets, drones, deterrents, and research — and all of those have value — but nothing can ever remove the fundamental truth: the ocean is not our habitat. There will always be risk — and there will always be reminders that sharks are apex predators in their own domain.
So I step back, stay on the sand, and watch the horizon. I listen to the sound of waves instead of chasing them. And each time I see a news bulletin about another attack, I’m reminded that the odds of being attacked are not zero, and that choosing not to swim is neither cowardice nor denial — it’s acceptance of respectful reality.
–Michael (Dark fiction. Author of SEETHINGS (the first book), free for a limited time)
SEETHINGS II follows the return of the Storm Killer as a body on a secluded beach in Moreton Bay, igniting fear and denial. While police dismiss the link, the media doesn’t. Mitchell Felding forms a dangerous bond with a man who understands his darkest impulses. When Natasha enters his life, carrying love letters from her murdered mother, intimacy deepens, and truth closes in. Some futures are inherited. Some have escaped.
Discover more from Michael Forman – Author of Dark Fiction & Drama
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