A shark killed one person and seriously injured another on Thursday at a beach in Australia’s eastern state of New South Wales, rescuers and police said.
The attack took place in the early morning and one of the victims, a woman, died at the scene.
The other suffered serious leg injuries and was airlifted from the remote beach in Crowdy Bay – around 250km north of Sydney – to hospital in a stable condition.
‘Going for a swim’
“They were known to each other, and they were going for a swim and the shark attacked,” New South Wales Police inspector Timothy Bayly told reporters.
State ambulance inspector Joshua Smyth credited a bystander with potentially saving the man’s life by wrapping a makeshift tourniquet around his leg.
“The courage from some bystanders is amazing in this situation – to put yourself out there is very heroic,” he added.
Steven Pearce, Surf Life Saving NSW chief executive, described it as “a really, really terrible incident”.
“This area is so remote, there’s no life guarding services up there at all,” Pearce told local radio 2GB.
The beach and surrounding areas have been closed and authorities are working to determine what species of shark attacked the two swimmers.
Attacks on the rise
There have been more than 1 280 shark incidents around Australia since 1791, of which more than 250 resulted in death, according to a database of the predators’ encounters with humans.
Oceangoers are most likely to be bitten by great whites, tiger and bull sharks, the data show.
Increasingly crowded waters and rising ocean temperatures that appear to be swaying sharks’ migratory patterns may be contributing to an escalation in attacks despite overfishing depleting some species, scientists say.
In September, a great white mauled a surfer to death at a popular Sydney beach.
The man, who left a wife and young daughter, lost “a number of limbs” and his surfboard was broken in two, police said.
Teeming with sharks
Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human.
Though still relatively rare, fatal attacks do appear to be on the rise with 56 reported deaths in the 25 years to 2025 compared to 27 deaths in the previous quarter-century.
Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers – with a 2024 survey showing nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year.
How best to protect people from sharks is a touchy topic in Australia.
Authorities have adopted a multi-layered approach – deploying drones, fixing acoustic trackers to sharks so they can be detected by listening buoys near popular beaches, alerting people in real time with a mobile app and stringing up old-fashioned nets.
Researchers say shark lives, too, need protecting.
Globally, about 37 percent of oceanic shark and ray species are now listed as either endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a database for threatened species.
By Garrin Lambley © Agence France-Presse
