Australia Day

Australia’s Sydney Harbour is far from the simple boatyard its name might suggest. A winding waterway of 240 kilometres, it’s renowned as ‘an aquatic playground for Sydneysiders’. Dotted along its shoreline are exclusive houses for affluent locals, often complete with private jetties, picturesque gardens, and swimming pools, which fill up with the warm waters of the Harbour. At other sections, nature reserves, parks and public beaches hug the coast, drawing crowds looking to cool down from the often oppressive heat and to enjoy water sports and leisure. The water in the Harbour is a mix of freshwater and seawater, except for on rare rainy days. In January 1963, with the tail end of a heatwave lingering around the city, Australia Day celebrations offered Sydney’s residents a chance to head for the Harbourside, and enjoy a long weekend of relief and relaxation. The holiday came with warnings, however. The chance of accidents, on the roads or in the water, would always rise with the rush and excitement of such occasions. In the gentle bobbing waves, those sea bathing were encouraged to be aware. In the lead up to the national holiday, Sydney Beach Patrol aircraft had spotted a total of sixty six sharks off Sydney beaches and eight shark alarms had been sounded, sending beachgoers dashing for shore. The Sydney Morning Herald that weekend ran with the headline ‘Australia Day Holiday Surfers Warned of Sharks’. These warnings were not without merit.  

 Between the British colonisation of New South Wales and The Second World War, there were 57 recorded shark attacks in Sydney, 34 of which were fatal. Most of these occurred in the first half of the 20th century. Before then, a combination of concern over pollution and public decency, and racist notions that sea bathing was for so-called ‘inferior peoples’, meant that few Sydneysiders would spend much time at all in the water. In fact, up until 1903, many districts of the city prohibited entering the sea for recreation, between the hours of 7am and 8pm. In the following decades though, the rise of the now famous Australian beach culture brought humans and sharks into closer contact all along Sydney Harbour. In 1960, thirteen year old Ken Murray was killed by a bull shark, at the popular Roseville Bridge swimming site. In 1955, two others had also lost their lives in the estuary known as Middle Harbour. Another thirteen year old boy, John Willis, died spearfishing at Balmoral Beach, when he was bitten by a shark, just moments after catching a lobster. Three weeks later, a German immigrant, Bruno Rautenberg, was fatally wounded as he took a pre-lunch dip off the back of a harbourside property where he’d been lodging. However, for most people on Australia Day weekend in 1963, such morbid considerations were the last things on their minds as they embarked on a weekend of festivities.

 On the last day of the holiday weekend, Monday the 28th of January, Marcia Hathaway, left her apartment in Milson’s Point- right across the bridge from the iconic Sydney Opera House. She was looking forward to a day trip, deep into the Harbour. The 32 year old was in fact something of a local celebrity, having made a name for herself in theatre, TV and radio. A trained actress, she had studied Shakespearean drama, French and was an accomplished singer and pianist. With porcelain skin and stylishly cropped auburn hair, the young Sydneysider was a picture of contemporary elegance. In spite of her appearances in the local gazettes and magazines of the day, Marcia Hathaway was preoccupied by far less material concerns. In 1959, she had become an evangelical Christian, inspired by the visiting tour of charismatic American preacher, Billy Graham. This conversion led her to her only major film role, playing a kindly Christian mission nurse, in the 1960 western, ‘Shadow of the Boomerang’. Her good deeds extended beyond the screen however, and she was deeply involved in community and charitable work as a committee member on The Actor’s Benevolent Fund. Yet in spite of a busy schedule, she had managed to find the time to fall in love. Frederick Knight was a London-born journalist working in Australia with ABC, and it was Fred who Marcia was excited to spend the day with, cruising the channels of Sydney Harbour on that sweltering Monday. On a friend’s cabin cruiser, the 8 metre Valeeta, the couple and five mutual friends set off from north of The Spit, sailing up through Middle Harbour. 

Shortly after one o’clock, the Valeeta pulled into a scenic spot in Sugarloaf Bay, perfect for a lunchtime stop-off. With dense mangrove forest lining its sheltered shoreline and not a single house in sight, it offered a sense of seclusion that could be particularly hard to find on Australia Day in Sydney. For many Aussies of the time, and still today, the coast provided casual opportunities to catch lunch, and the party hoped to find some oysters as the finishing touch to their picnic plans. Anchoring the boat in the inlet’s waters, a little offshore, the group split up. Three of the friends, David Mason, Peter Cowden and Alan Simpson, stayed reclining on board, soaking up the warm rays. James Delmege and Sandra Hayden, swam ashore, where they began foraging amongst the rocks. Fred and Marcia, wishing to spend a little time alone together in the water, waded out into the bay. It was shallow and murky, with low visibility due to the silt disturbed by recent rainfall. Although far from cool, it felt refreshing and pleasant on Fred and Marcia’s bare legs as it rippled by, just above their knees, reflecting the brilliant sunshine. Just a short distance from shore, they started digging their heels into the sand, pushing a mound back, before reaching down, hoping to pluck an exposed shell from the bottom. The couple eventually drifted a little apart, each focused on their foraging efforts, as a few minutes passed by.

Fred’s focus was suddenly broken by a cry from Marcia’s direction. Whipping around he saw her face, startled. ‘There’s an octopus on my leg!’, she cried, staggering slightly. But the swirling of water and a twisting tail fin quickly dispelled that notion. The shark’s first bite, to her calf, had sent Marcia stumbling and she started being dragged forcibly, out into deeper water. Instinctively, Fred lunged towards the shark, as it attempted to pull Marcia further from shore. As he came, the shark let go, but only momentarily as it whipped back in and grabbed Marcia from behind, this time with a wider bite around the back of her thigh. Beating his fists against the hard grey body protruding above the surface, Fred tried to loosen its vice grip, but the animal was relentless, continuing to drag Marcia out as she began to weaken. In a desperate tug-of-war, in water now out of their depth, Fred pulled himself onto the shark, battling with all he had to rescue the woman he loved. Straddling its muscular body with both legs, such was the thickness of the creature that his feet hanging either still touched its flanks. His foot even slipped into its open spongy mouth for one awful moment, before coming free once again. Punching and kicking, Fred fought desperately, beginning to fear that Marcia would never be released.

Back on land, James Delmege and Sandra Hayden, had been engaged in their own oyster hunt on a small rocky strip. Hearing Marcia’s voice, they thought it was a playful squeal- simply the couple joking around. On hearing a second louder cry ring out, they jumped to their feet and turned towards the bay. The muddy waters were foaming and bloodstained, amid a terrible struggle. James shouted to his friends as he came running across the sand and dashed into the shallows. Reaching Fred, he joined him in his fight and together they finally managed to wrestle Marcia free. The shark had retreated, as suddenly as it had appeared. Carrying her ashore they laid her gently down on the sand. The severity of Marcia’s wounds was plain to see and they desperately needed to get her some help. Leaning down to reassure his wounded lover, Fred told her not to worry, that the shark had ‘only brushed her’- though deep down they both knew it was bad. David Mason, Peter  Cowden and Alan Simpson, back on the deck of the Valeeta, had also been alerted by Marcia’s screams. Tearing up bedsheets from the boat’s bunks to use as tourniquets, they jumped into a rubber dinghy and made straight for the rest of their party. Marcia was gradually slipping out of consciousness as the group lifted her into the dinghy, with the idea of transporting her to a boatshed a few hundred metres away, where they hoped to find First Aid supplies. Meanwhile, Fred, in a moment of considerable bravery, dived back into the murky waters of the bay and swam swiftly across to a nearby house, where he called for an ambulance.

Once they were all in the boatshed at Castlecrag, the severely wounded Marcia was placed on a makeshift table and treated as best they could, while they waited for the ambulance. It arrived soon after, racing down to the jetty. The patient was quickly tended to by paramedics in hurried efforts to save her life, being given a supply of oxygen and lifted onto a stretcher. By now a small crowd of locals had gathered alongside the ambulance, drawn by news of a shark attack in their bay. Some felt it had been coming. Michael Vaux, who owned the Castlecrag boatshed, had seen two large sharks in the same area that very morning, and only the week before a number of pet dogs in the neighbourhood had disappeared while splashing about in the shallows. And only a stone’s throw from Vaux’s boatshed was the garden where Bruno Rautenberg had perished 8 years earlier. A later inquest would claim Sugarloaf Bay was known for ‘shark infestation’ and that most residents usually avoided swimming in it. Fenced off swimming pools, such as the ‘shark-proof wonder pool’ at Manly Harbour which could hold up to 5,000 bathers at a time, had even been built to allow Sydneysiders to enjoy the Harbour’s water but with the added security of thick wooden fencing.

Once paramedics had arrived, in order to cover Marcia’s gruesome wounds, a white sheet was draped over her from the neck down, as she was lifted to the back of the ambulance. Fred carried the front of the stretcher. Barefoot and dressed in a leisurely fashion, with shorts and a pinstripe polo shirt, he was superficially the image of carefree holiday bliss, yet the brutal reality was the very opposite. Next to his arm lay Marcia’s head, thrown back, mouth open, as if frozen in shock at what had occurred. The doors slammed shut and the ambulance started off. Then misfortunate struck for a second time that day. On the way up the steep hill, the clutch of the old ambulance burned out and it rolled back down, ever further from the hospital. A crowd of twenty bystanders got behind the vehicle and heaved, attempting to push it to the top of the hill. Despite their best efforts they were forced to let it roll back to the bottom again and call for a second ambulance. Dejectedly, they lifted Marcia back out and waited in a summer home for what felt like hours for the replacement to arrive. Once it had come and brought Marcia to The Mater hospital, doctors, hoping for a miracle, attempted to revive her. In fact, she had already lost consciousness on the earlier dinghy journey and by the time they had ferried her to the boatshed, her pulse had all but faded away. From the doctor’s notes and the autopsy, it becomes clear that in spite of valiant attempts to save her, she had never had much of a chance. Marcia Hathaway had suffered numerous large bites, one almost severing her right leg, another leaving a gaping wound to her buttocks. Severe lacerations lined her right calf and the inside of her left thigh. A combination of blood loss and shock ended her life. The marks of her ferocious struggle for survival were written in the defensive wounds etched into Marcia’s hands. Fred, James and Sandra Hayden were treated for shock in nearby rooms, along with Marcia’s mother, who collapsed on hearing news of her daughter’s passing.

The untimely death of the pretty young actress stunned Australia. Though it was not without precedent, the fact that she had been killed in water just above her knees particularly disturbed the public. There was a widely held belief that such attacks could only happen in deeper water. Fred had in fact cautioned Marcia not to wade out any further, in the minutes before the terrible incident. That illusory sense of control over one’s own fate in the water was shattered by what had happened in Sugarloaf Bay. Various news reports gave the depth of the water as only ‘30 inches’ or ‘less than three feet of water’. The Sydney Morning Herald printed the dramatic headline ‘Killer in the Shallows’, emphasising that particular aspect of the tragedy. More tragedy was to follow in the aftermath, as the public sense of fear and anxiety led to a large shark hunt. Over the Australia Day weekend, fifteen Australians had lost their lives in car crashes but those devastating accidents couldn’t come close to matching the reaction Marcia Hathaway’s death provoked. A Sydney beach shark net contractor of the time said that according to their data, 95% of all attacks in and around the city happened in the three summer months of December, January and February. Leading shark experts of the time agreed, such as Sir Victor Coppleson, who claimed sharks ‘go crazy’ in the harbour in January. Peddling the contentious ‘rogue shark’ theory, he called for concentrated fishing to catch Marcia’s killer, as if a criminal, insisting ‘such a shark must be hunted until it is destroyed’. This resulted in many deaths of all kinds of large shark species in Sydney Harbour, in the crusade to restore peace of mind.

The Sydney Morning Herald informed its readers that 90% of attacks could be attributed to the bronze whaler shark, also known as a copper shark. Modern research shows that species’ involvement in attacks on humans to be extremely rare, with no more than fifteen attacks recorded by the International Shark Attack File since 1962- and even many of those remain questionable. Nevertheless, within days Middle Harbour fishermen, Tom McCulla and Mike Campbell, used baited lines to snare a three metre long whaler they proclaimed as ‘the killer one’. Snared 100 metres from the scene where Marcia and Fred had been, it struggled desperately off the back of the boat for an hour before finally expiring. Once landed, its numerous broken teeth only added to peoples’ suspicions. Ultimately, the results of dental comparison tests would eventually show that that shark had, like Marcia, simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

To most modern shark experts, all signs point towards a bull shark. The comfort in mixed fresh and salt water, the size and shape of the bite wounds and the aggressive persistence of the attack, all line up with that species. Smaller than the tiger or great white at two to three metres, what they lack in length they make up for in muscle and aggression. Prominent bull shark expert, the late Dr. Erich Ritter, put forward the theory that nearly all bull shark attacks on humans are accidental or a warning, and that in clear water the danger is minimal. Ritter became known as ‘the shark whisperer’ from videos of him floating freely and unharmed amongst adult bull sharks. Unfortunately, Ritter’s years of pioneering experiments were undermined in 2002. While recording footage for Discovery Channel, he was badly injured when a bull shark bit his calf and required life-saving surgery, making clear the limits to our current understanding of these creatures.

In 1942, two incidents similar to Marcia Hathaway’s occurred in Sydney Harbour. Both are believed to have involved bull sharks at Bantry Bay, only a bend in the Harbour up from Sugarloaf Bay. On January 4th, Zeta Steadman, a 28 year old secretary in Sydney was enjoying a picnic with friends. In waist-high water, she was bitten and dragged out by a shark, as a friend attempted to beat it away with an oar. Finally, after being rammed by a rowing boat, the shark released Zeta, but she was deceased, having been torn almost in half at the hip. On Stephen’s Day at the end of that year, 15 year old Denise Burch suffered a similar fate. She had been evacuated from Hong Kong to Australia due to the ongoing Second World War, and her father and brother were still detained in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Cooling off in knee high shallows, Denise was grabbed from behind by a shark as she faced the shore. Again, the attack was tenacious, pulling her below the surface and out into deeper water as bystanders ran to her assistance. Pelting the creature with stones and branches, the teenager was finally released but died before she could be brought ashore. The apparent randomness of the incident was emphasised by the fact the shark had passed right by two boys swimming further out, before coming inshore and surprising Denise Burch. Both of the attacks of 1942 are recorded in The Australian Shark Attack File as involving bull sharks and though bites on humans are generally unintentional, in some instances bulls can show extreme persistence once they go into a frenzy. While great white sharks are found along the beaches off Sydney’s coast, and tiger sharks around the Harbour’s entrance, bulls are the only of the so called ‘Big Three’ that tend to frequent the brackish waters deeper into the Harbour. Improved understanding of shark habits and review of historical incidents in Middle Harbour strongly suggest the involvement of a bull shark, and absolve the often scapegoated bronze whaler shark, in Marcia Hathaway’s fatal encounter.                   

Likely these findings would have brought little relief to Frederick Knight. Having rescued her from the bloodstained bay, then having lifted her into the ambulance, as a pallbearer he carried Marcia to her final resting place. Her funeral service drew over five hundred mourners. In attendance were many from the film, radio and TV industries, who wished to say goodbye to their talented peer. Max Rowley remembered his friend who had graduated from the same drama school and how, working in radio on that Monday evening in 1963, he had first found out about Marcia’s death as he read the news story live on air. Fred returned to his family in England to grieve following the coronial inquest into Marcia’s death. Heartbreakingly, he revealed that the couple had planned to formally announce their engagement on Marcia’s birthday, the 8th of February, but had never got that chance. The coroner consoled Fred, noting that he had done everything he could and more, remarking that ‘his heroism had stood out like a beacon light’. For his bravery he would also go on to receive the Royal Human Society’s highest award, The Stanhope Medal. Bereft in Sydney, Fred left Australia and by 1964 he was working as a Reuter’s correspondent in Lagos, Nigeria, spending the following years in similar overseas roles. Eventually, he managed to find love again in New York. However, after many years away, Fred made the decision with his fiancée to return to Sydney, where they married and settled down. His wedding day was bittersweet as he told reporters that a long time had passed and he was moving on, though adding ‘you never forget a thing like that’.

In the years since what has been called ‘Australia’s Most Horrifying Shark Attack’, the state of New South Wales has developed an expensive, but effective, shark tracking program. Although nets had been used since 1937 at many Sydney beaches, the fact these often trap and kill sharks and other marine life such as dolphins, has come under greater scrutiny and faced much criticism in recent years. The record of netted city beaches only having one fatality in the subsequent 75 years, often ignores the heavy toll of the 15,000 sharks caught in those nets. The modern shark tracking initiative, which the government of New South Wales claims to be the largest in the world, offers an alternative, allowing the monitoring of large sharks in the region. Fitting bull sharks with acoustic trackers, and tiger and white sharks with satellite tags, sharks are monitored in Sydney Harbour and along well over 1,000 kilometres of New South Wales coastline. Following alerts on a Shark Smart App, members of the public can keep up to date on shark locations. In 2009 when Navy diver Paul de Gelder narrowly survived a bull shark attack while on duty in Sydney Harbour, the state decided to commission a long overdue scientific study on the movements of the marine predator. 21 listening stations have been set up around the state capital and when a bull shark swims within 500 metres of one, its information is logged and then studied. Results of these studies have shown further evidence of the regular proximity of sharks to humans in the Harbour, and highlight just how unusual negative interactions between the two actually are. It is hoped better understanding of shark behaviour and their migratory patterns can further improve peaceful coexistence between sharks and water users in Sydney.

Though she met her unfortunate end on that Australia Day Monday in 1963, Marcia Hathaway’s final words perhaps brought some solace to her loved ones, telling Fred ‘I’m not in pain. Don’t worry about me, dear. God will look after me’. Floodlights were donated to St. Stephen’s Church in her name, keeping a little of her light in the world. Fifty eight years on, Marcia Hathaway remains the last person to be killed by a shark in Sydney Harbour.