For the residents of this small Australian town, a string of shark attacks prompted an almost existential crisis. What does it mean to love the ocean when it's a place of so much grief?
Karen Milligan and her husband, Gary Johnson, shared a passion for the ocean and diving.
"We both loved it. We just loved diving with each other," Karen says.
Their favourite pastime saw them move from Perth to Esperance, a small town on Western Australia's south coast.
Yet, despite their mutual love of diving, Karen and Gary weren't naive to the dangers.
"We were conscious that there was a likelihood that we would have a shark encounter at some stage," Karen says.
Around midday on January 5, 2020, the couple anchored their boat near one of the islands that sit a few kilometres off the coast of Esperance.
Gary went in first. Karen followed.
They hadn't been in the water long when Karen spotted something.
"For a split second, I thought, 'This is my David Attenborough moment', and I was going to turn on my camera," she recalls.
"I thought it was a whale at first, the tail was that big.
"[Things] changed in that split second to … something really quite stressful, when I realised that it was a shark, not a whale."
Karen and Gary were 17 metres below the surface of the water when they encountered the shark.
"I saw the attack," she says.
Moments later, Karen would find Gary under the water and attempt to swim him back to the boat. However, her husband had suffered fatal injuries.
"I held Gary on the surface after the shark attack … he was not alive."
In the days following the attack, divers managed to locate some of Gary's diving gear.
Despite the widescale search, they never found his body.
"Gary was 57 when he died," Karen says.
"He was a very beautiful man … He was very kind.
"We were together for 15 years. Probably the best 15 years of my life."
A way of life
Esperance is a remote Western Australian coastal community, about 700 kilometres south-east of Perth.
People are drawn to the area for both its farming and its stunning coastline.
Whether it's surfing, diving or swimming, locals and tourists have always enjoyed Esperance's coastal lifestyle.
But three fatal shark encounters and a series of near-misses off the Esperance coast in recent years have left the community reeling.
In 2017, 17-year-old Laeticia Brouwer died after being bitten by a shark while surfing with her dad at a popular Esperance surf break known as Kelp Beds, while on a family holiday.
Then in 2020, just 10 months after Gary Johnson's death, Esperance father Andrew Sharpe was killed while surfing at Kelp Beds.
"Everyone knows someone affected," local ABC Breakfast presenter Emily Smith says.
"We know the names of everyone who's been attacked, we know their families.
"We know the people who responded to those horrific accidents and the people who searched for them.
"It's a bit hard to get your head around."
Thinking twice
These attacks have forced many locals to re-evaluate their relationship with the ocean and the apex predator that swims within it.
"Whenever I used to go in the ocean, I would think shark attacks are something that don't happen," Emily says.
"It's like something that happens in the movies. But once you know people affected, that changes."
"There was almost this existential crisis in a way," surfer James McCarthy-Price says.
"It was almost a sense of malice … there was just this energy that was in the ocean for about three or four months after. No one went out and that was all we were talking about."
Jayme is a member of the Icebreakers ocean swim club that meets each Sunday morning at Twilight Beach, west of Esperance.
Like other locals, she has become more concerned about sharks.
"I've got four kids," Jayme says. "So I'm not just thinking about what frightens me.
"I'm thinking about whether I come out of the water and what the consequences might be for the family."
She takes more precautions when her kids jump in the water.
If she visits an unpatrolled beach, she joins other families in keeping a lookout for sharks.
“There's someone with a drone that goes out and one of the guys actually has a stand-up paddleboard and he will paddle out behind the kids who are surfing,” Jayme says.
A town divided
Sharks have become a big focus in Esperance.
"Sharks are probably the number one issue in this town," the ABC's Emily Smith says.
But she says there's a range of opinions on what should be done to mitigate the risk of future shark attacks.
"Some people want to be able to have sharks killed if they attack a person," Emily says.
"Some people want a marine park created off the Esperance coast and … there are some people who want sharks culled."
Surfer James McCarthy-Price has his own theory on why this issue is so polarising.
"You've got the people who feel like the ocean holds more value than humans in a way," he says.
"And then you've got the other school of thought, which is, 'I have the right to go into the ocean without being hunted or attacked'."
The debate on how to co-exist with sharks goes back years.
In 1999, the great white shark was declared a protected species after scientists noted a long-term decline in its population.
Ever since then, it has been illegal to fish the great white shark, leading many in Esperance to believe the population has increased.
The great white shark population in the Western half of Australia is currently estimated at just 1,500 adult animals.
While many in Esperance believe there has been an increase in shark activity in recent years, local Nyungar man Doc Reynolds disagrees.
"I have not seen in my time an increase of sightings of sharks," he says.
"What I have seen … is an increase of water users and people in the water."
Peter Godfrey heads up WA's shark hazard mitigation program and he agrees, describing a rapid increase in the white shark population as "almost biologically impossible".
Peter explains that great white sharks are sexually mature at 17 years of age, they only reproduce every three years and shark pups are highly predated.
"So it's very difficult … for the population of white sharks to increase dramatically," he says.
What's being done?
After Laeticia Brouwer's death in 2017, the WA government installed shark monitoring receivers at three Esperance beaches and subsidised the purchase of personal shark deterrent devices that can be worn while in the water.
More recently, a shark-proof barrier was installed at a popular swimming beach.
But many locals don't believe these measures go far enough.
Marc Payne is a professional abalone diver and spokesperson for the Ocean Safety Group, an Esperance community collective.
"People are dying and I think there's a fair bit of liability here from government departments to do something," he says.
The Ocean Safety Group would like to see a shark caught, tagged and removed from the area straight after an attack.
"We see them as an immediate threat," Marc says.
"We also see that if there is a shark hanging around, it can really impact the rescue mission as well."
But Peter, from the shark hazard mitigation program, says the first priority after an attack is to get people out of the water.
"Our primary objective is to ensure public safety: [to] really ensure that everybody is out of the water in the area and that they're safe from any further interactions with the shark," he says.
Peter's program is often involved in search and rescue or recovery operations following a shark incident.
He says that capturing the shark following an attack is almost impossible.
"White sharks are highly mobile and our experience is that by the time we're able to get people on the water to an incident, we quite often find that there's no sharks in the area or the shark has moved on," he says.
Some in the community believe authorities need to consider a cull.
"People and families are more important than a fish," says Graham Donovan, a member of the Esperance Goldfields Surf Life Saving Club.
"I don't want them all dead. But if they are coming into our areas that are densely populated, they need to be taken care of. Like a tiger snake coming into your backyard, you chop it up with an axe."
But not everyone in Esperance agrees.
"Culling anything needlessly is not an option," Doc says. "I agonise over these thoughts that people have of just doing a mass destruction."
Doc sees the push for lethal controls on sharks as heavy-handed and fear-driven, likening it to the violent actions of white settlers during colonisation.
"It's just akin to Aboriginal people many years ago," Doc says.
"If an Aboriginal person did something wrong at the start of colonisation, a lot of Aboriginal people were massacred, you know."
'Trauma's like a backpack'
Since her husband's death, Karen Milligan has been vocally opposed to suggestions of shark culls.
Instead, she believes the trauma experienced by the town needs to be addressed.
"The response [following an attack] is to send the minister for fisheries down rather than the minister for community services, who could perhaps do some trauma counselling … that would be more useful," Karen says.
"Trauma's like a backpack. You put one stone in, it's not too heavy. Put two [in and it's] getting heavier.
"Trauma builds up and I would say that this town had a build-up within a number of attacks," she says.
In 2021, Karen established the Gary Johnson Foundation, which aims to promote the health of marine life in the Southern Ocean.
"No one can be responsible for a shark attack," she says. "Even if you started culling, you still wouldn't cull all the sharks.
"So they are always going to be there. And we really want them to be there. It's very important for the environment of the ocean to have the top predator there."
Returning to the water
After a 12-month hiatus following Gary's death, Karen continues to regularly dive off the coast of Esperance. She describes diving as her "happy place".
"Every dive's a good dive," she says.
Karen and her friends take precautions against shark encounters, but when she's underwater, she doesn't give the risk much thought.
"Always when you're diving, you'll look out," she says.
"Sharks are very beautiful when they're not particularly interested.
"If you see one, you'd feel blessed, I think."
ABC Radio National's Shifting Cultures series is a co-production with the BBC World Service. Listen for free on your mobile device on the ABC listen app, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or your favourite podcast app. It will also be broadcast on ABC Radio National.
Credits:
- Reporting, photography and video: Fiona Pepper for Shifting Cultures
- Drone footage: Mark Bennett
- Additional photography and video: James Carmody, Mark Bennett, Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development
- Editor: Alexandra Spring
- Digital producer: Fiona Pepper
- Video production: Sophie Kesteven
- Series supervising producer: Claudia Taranto
