Shark Attack!

                                        Shark Attack!

 

We lived in rural New South Wales Australia, moved there when I was a tender five years of age.  We moved from Sydney into a property a good distance from the dirt road with mostly empty fields.
The one saving grace of this property was that it backed onto the Richmond river, the river paddock had pretty much been left to nature and offered much shade and tranquility. Now don’t get me wrong it wasn’t some hippy nature love fest, the trees were only allowed to grow along the riverbank to avoid losing land to erosion. The river usually flooded once a year leaving us isolated, and when there wasn’t torrential rain there was often devastating drought with temperatures in the high 40s.

 I remember one time we all went swimming in the river, I had a inflated tire tube and was forbidden to remove it, it was put on a rope as the current was too strong for my young legs to fight against, and I was quickly pushed down stream.

But other than that, the river was mine to explore, my next oldest brother, Stephany, five years older than me, would sometimes fish of the old wharf. Sometimes I would go and sit with him as I had nothing better to do, I remember I liked watching the crabs playing in the mud. The river was tidal, revealing muddy shallows at low tide.


                             

So I can’t quite remember what year this occurred, I was young, being picked up and carried around, I was a small kid. I think I may have been about 7 or 8 but could not swear on it.
It was at low tide that Stephany decided to play the bully, he was often mean and would go out of his way to get me into trouble with our father. This time we were standing on the wharf and he pushes me, and then goes to grab me as he says “Tell mum I saved you!”
Now what was supposed to happen is that he pushed me, I flinched, lurched off the wharf and he would have grabbed me, preventing me from falling in, and thus “saving me”.
What actually happened was that he pushes me and fails to catch me, so I go flying over the edge into the mud, I am only light but I still sink into the mud a few inches. My legs are facing the water, and half in the water, my feet are completely in the river.
So Stephany apologises and asks me not to “dob on him”, and says i "wasn't supposed to fall off", I say something stupid, like “You didn’t save me”, as i am sinking into the mud looking up at him on the wharf. 

So we both start laughing and I start trying to stand, I’m kicking in the water, and my feet can’t get a grip, I’m just sliding in the mud, I’m making the water muddy. The wharf was about a meter high above the mud so i had no chance of using it for leverage, even if i had been standing.
Stephany says something, along the lines of “move closer to the wharf and ill pull you up”, I don’t remember exactly.
What I do remember, vividly to this very day, is that my attention was drawn to a grey white shape approaching in the now muddying water. It took a while for my young mind to register what it was. I just moved both my feet up out of the water, somehow managing to stand in a kind of ninja jump move, as the shark lunged left and right at my feet. I screamed for Stephany to help me up as I sunk deeper into the mud. I know he looked back at where it was, it splashed as it turned,, I looked back myself and saw its swimming back out to deeper waters.

                                                                Bull Shark

I do not know if he was afraid of getting into trouble or if he hadn’t actually seen it, but he never admitted that there was a shark, he claimed it must have just been a big catfish.
Now we did have both dogfish and catfish in the river, but it wasn’t one of those, I had seen my brothers fishing; I knew what those fish looked like.
In fact no one believed me, I was repeatedly told that sharks don’t live in rivers, they live in the sea. However I knew what I saw, I never went into the river again, but often enjoyed exploring the riverbank.

                                              

Fast-forward a few years and I heard that sometimes sharks do travel up the river in floods and to “clean out their gills”. Though I was still told that sharks would not go this far up the river.
Today it is common knowledge that bull sharks, actually live happily in salt or fresh water, though when I say happily I mean hungrily, as they are responsible for most attacks in shallow water.


This is a fact and they are often caught in the Richmond River where I had my near miss. While at the time I thought it was a baby great white shark (it looked to be about two foot long) on reflection I would assume that it was in fact a Bull Shark, i don't even think i knew there were different kinds of sharks at that age..  

Writing this I was curious to know what my brother Stephany now says about the shark I saw, so i asked him, and his reply was typical;
“That was probably just a big catfish.”