It wasn’t until Jess Woolhouse was alone in the water, after pulling a bleeding shark attack victim to safety, that the fear finally took hold.
Until that moment, the father of three had been acting purely on instinct when he paddled towards a five-metre great white shark and helped rip Phil Mummert from danger at a surf break at Bunker Bay, 260km south of Perth.
More than 50m from shore and with the shark circling below, Woolhouse and fellow surfers Father Liam Ryan and Alex Oliver pulled 28-year-old Mummert on to a longboard and paddled hard for shore.
“Liam and Alex held on to him from the sides, and I was at the rear … finally a wave came and I pushed from the back of the board and so they made it in [to shore],” Woolhouse said.
“I looked up and everyone was in, the last couple of people were scrambling up the shore and I hadn’t caught a wave in, it was at the point that the dread sunk in.
“I genuinely was like ‘Oh great, I’m the last one out here and this thing is obviously hungry’, and it is the first time the reality of it all sunk in. It was crazy.”
The surfers’ heroic actions on that sunny winter’s day in July 2020 have earned them one of the nation’s top bravery awards.
Woolhouse, Ryan and Oliver are three of 15 people being recognised with Australian Bravery Decorations by the governor general, David Hurley, for acting selflessly and putting themselves in jeopardy to protect the lives or property of others.
“No one sets out to be brave. No one really knows how, when presented with a dangerous situation, they will act. The men and women that we are celebrating today acted bravely,” Hurley said on Tuesday.
“Each found themselves in a perilous situation. There was a threat. They or fellow citizens were in danger and, in that instant, they chose to help.”
Among the other recipients honoured on Tuesday were two navy officers who ran into a burning building to try to save an elderly man at Greenwell Point in New South Wales and a truck driver who, covered in fuel, rescued several people from a petrol tanker accident in Melbourne.
Russell Irwin tried to stop an armed home invasion in Cranbourne North and Gyles Deacon was honoured for rescuing a fisherman swept from rocks at Wombarra in NSW.
Mummert says he has no doubt he would be dead if the trio hadn’t paddled over to help him.
“The shark came from behind and to the side of me and got me from there, so I didn’t see it before it bit me,” he recalls.
He said he came face to face with the shark as he floated in the water with half a board strapped to his leg.
Mummert says he knew the shark had bitten his board in half, but he didn’t realise it had also taken a chunk from his buttocks to his knee.
In the fight of his life, injured Mummert says he slammed what was left of his board into the shark’s face and mouth and tried to kick it away as it circled and charged at him multiple times.
“I really remember quite vividly trying to push it away in the side and I just remember it felt like I was pushing a brick wall and its skin was really rough,” Mummert said.
“It was so solid, I remember as I pushed it, it didn’t move – it just moved me backward and I knew that what I was doing wasn’t working.”
This is not the first shark attack at Bunker Bay. In 2011, 21-year-old bodyboarder Kyle James Burden was bitten in half and killed instantly by a great white shark.
Mummert says when he saw the other surfers coming toward him, he thought “What are you doing? Go and save yourselves.”
“I was doing my best to fight it off on my own but there is only so long you can do that for, it would have got me eventually and as far as I’m concerned the only reason the shark disappeared in the end was because those three came over.”
After almost two years recovering from the attack, Mummert says he has finally turned a corner and can go surfing again, despite residual nerve pain in his leg.
Exactly a year after the attack, Ryan and Woolhouse say they went back to the Bunker Bay break, called The Farm, and surfed it again.
They plan to make the pilgrimage each year.
Ryan, Woolhouse and Oliver were strangers to Mummert before that fateful day, but despite living three hours from each other, they keep in touch.
Woolhouse says although the trio have also received a gold medallion for exceptional bravery by Surf Life Saving WA, he doesn’t feel like a hero.
“I would say I just feel lucky – lucky I was the right guy in the situation at the right time and I was able to get away scot-free,” Woolhouse says.
“These awards really mean a lot to me because without sounding like an absolute bogan, I really am a proud Australian.”
