Perth Shark Attack: Teenage Girl Dies in Swan River

Story here .

On Thursday Nathan from Bartlett’s dropped by to investigate and fix a problem with one of my thermostat and baseboard heater circuits. A bitterly cold day. I managed to swing the conversation around to blazingly hot days when I was harvesting wheat in Western Australia.

From there Nathan dragged me over to crawly poisonous things, so I segued into “Sharks and Black Bears”, which gives me an excuse for this tale.

I have spent a good part of my life in Australia, and read stories about black bears attacking tourists. Too I have spent a large part of my life in Canada and read a great many stories about sharks.

My theory is that on a quiet day in Australian news the Australian papers trot out a story about some tourist in British Columbia getting mauled by a bear. Often, I suspect, because they got too close to the bear for an instagram-fame photo. The same theory holds for idiots who try to touch the tail of a bison in Yellowstone Park.

Likewise on a quiet news day in the UK or Canada, the papers will front up with a story about a shark attack, in this case, one that turned fatal.

First off: How many people are killed by sharks each year in Australia? “less than one person per year.” According to today’s article.

The article has a lovely photo of Perth downtown code taken I suspect, from Kings Park.

The article states that the attack took place “in the Perth suburb of Fremantle, on Saturday”

Now just to put things into perspective, Fremantle is the port or Perth, about nine miles directly from Perth, about 15 or 20 miles depending whether you go by car or boat. That’s from Perth downtown to Fremantle harbour.

Likewise, from Perth downtown to West Midland is about nine miles directly from Perth, about 15 or 20 miles depending whether you go bat car or boat.

West Midland is where Governor Stirling Senior High School sits, where I attended high school from 1959 through 1963. Wooden jetties formed a swimming area right in The Swan River at that spot, and the ocean tidal flow brought jelly fish, creatures of the salty sea, right up to Governor Stirling Senior High School, where we swam on Wednesday afternoons “sports day”.

I lived in Swanleigh hostel a further four miles upstream, but the salt-water didn’t reach that far.

Now Fremantle is a shipping harbour, a small one true, but it entertains serious ships, so I would not dream of thinking to swim in that part of the river.

Some of the news reports carry phrases like “near the Fremantle Traffic Bridge in North Fremantle,”, in other words, just the other side of the bridge from Fremantle Harbour. I have tagged the bridge with bright yellow, bottom-left corner of the map.

I think sixteen years old is old enough to know about ocean creatures and tides; I was sixteen when I started fifth year.

Perhaps the teenager was from out-of-town, maybe the wheat belt or the goldfields, and was not raised in coastal culture. Maybe the teenager was from overseas – The Hebrides where, I suspect you don’t need to worry about swimming in the sea, let alone meeting a shark.

But heavens! Perth’s beaches have had shark patrols – aerial spotting – for at least sixty years that I know of, so how come no one warned the teenager that where there are salt-water dolphins there can be, and often will be, sharks?

It may be a coincidence that the image is taken from Perth looking directly away from Fremantle, as if stressing that “Poor Perth” downtown is deadly. The hills in the background are The Darling Escarpment, which starts almost where you find the second letter “D” in “Midland” at the right-hand side of the map. “Midland”, where oceanic jelly-fish swim.

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