Surviving a shark attack

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1:22Many of us, quite naturally, have a visceral fear of sharks, stoked in part by movies and by popular culture. With fear comes fascination. When people survive an attack, we want to hear about their experiences and then the effect it's had on their lives. Justine Barwick was attacked by a shark while sailing in the Whitsunday Islands. Brett Connellan encountered a great white shark while surfing in New South Wales, and that was where Dave Pearson himself was also attacked. Dave began by taking me back to 2011, when he went to surf on the coast after work. I had a new board, so I was pretty keen to get down into the water.

2:03Give my neighbour a call and said, come on, I'm heading out to the beach, want to lift? So I took him down and me, him and my dog turned up at the beach. There was one young guy already out there, a friend of ours called Noddy, and another guy, Sean, turned up while we were there. So the three of us paddled out together. I'd only been in the water probably not even 10 minutes. And this is where a lot of fortunate things happened for me. And number one is I was looking off to my left-hand side where the guys were and the shark came from just off to the right-hand side from the front of the board.

2:32And as it came up, its bottom jaw hit the surfboard. I guess its teeth become stuck into the board. And as the shark flipped out of the water, because I was paddling, my left arm had gone forward and as its top jaw came down it trapped my right arm between the surfboard and its top teeth and because it was flying out of the water it then took me down to the bottom with it and as its teeth ran across the top of my arm it took all my forearm muscle and damaged tendons in my wrist and and thumb but fortunately it actually hit me in the head on the way through so I was semi-conscious for most of it and the shark obviously had a bit of a sore nose from hitting him inside of my thick head.

3:13So we got to the bottom, wrestled around for a couple of seconds and then parted ways. And I swum back up the surface and climbed back on my board and proceeded to look at what had happened to my arm. And it was only then that I actually realized I'd been hit by a shark. And young Noddy, he was screaming, you know, Dave, was that a shark? Was that a shark? Because he'd actually heard a loud smacking noise and looked over and he thought he was watching a dolphin that had just jumped out of the water going back in. And then the next thing, my surfboard popped up followed by me. But yeah, I sat there, looked at the water going red around me.

3:47And I remember looking at the big flap of muscle hanging off my arm and I sort of tucked it all back together and tried to slow the bleeding down a bit. And I thought, wow, this is not good. And that obviously was a shark. And I remember thinking, the movies get it right because the water really does go red and below me was a three meter bull shark and when you're sitting on a surfboard looking at something like that under the water it was very impressive it was a big fish that wasn't my concern but I was just looking at how much blood was squirting out of my arm and I just went I've got to try and get to the beach and a few set waves come through bigger waves and I thought beauty I can get the first one and as I tried to paddle one arms onto this wave the wave picked me up and dumped me off.

4:28And I was back underwater again, rolling around. And by then, I was starting to lose some of the energy that I'd had. And the next wave hit me and then the one after that. And it was then that I realized I was just about to drown as well. And I thought, wow, not a good afternoon to die, but I've had a pretty good life. And I kind of accepted that I was just about to say goodbye to the world. And that was a surprise to me to be able to go, well, I'm okay with dying. I was peaceful. I guess due to the injuries, I was not really with it but I did remember while I was under there I was thinking about my kids and my partner and I went I can't die today and I just remember saying not today Dave and I just felt the sand under my feet and pushed as hard as I could and got back to the surface and as I climbed back on my board luckily my leg rope hadn't broken and started to tuck all the skin back together and lay on it again and paddle in and then I'd heard young Noddy behind me and he'd seen me get into trouble and he just said to Sean, we just can't leave Dave.

5:23He's going to die. And yeah, and I guess without them two doing that, I wouldn't be making this call with you guys tonight. Thank you, Dave. I'm just taking in everything that you said. Let's bring in Brett, March the 30th, 2016. Tell us about that day, please.

5:39Brett Connellan:I was working in a surf shop at the time, which had been broken into early that morning. So after dealing with police all day and cleaning up glass and doing all of that, I decided I just need to get in the water because surfing's the thing that I can do that'll turn a bad day around. And little did I know what was about to happen. I called one of my good friends, Nick, and another good friend of mine, Joel, and told them that I was on my way back home and I was probably just going to go to Bombo Beach to go for a surf. Nick said that he couldn't make it and Joel said that he'd try. I got down there and paddled out by myself.

6:11Brett Connellan:And I'd been surfing for maybe 20 minutes before Joel actually decided to make his way to the beach. With him was his partner, Aggie. Joel and I were surfing together for 30 minutes and I was telling him about my day and sharing waves and sitting out there waiting for the next one and thinking to myself as the sun was just kind of starting to set I was like you know what it's been a bad day but at least I've been able to come for a surf and you know spend some time with a mate and I do feel better and it was as I was having that thought out of nowhere and I get hit with this immense force from my right side and this force was so strong it threw me off my surfboard and I landed in the water and before I could even look around and figure out what had happened, I looked down and I see this shark biting into my left leg.

6:52Brett Connellan:And this, for me, is that distinct moment where time just stops. And I'm taking in all this vivid information of everything that's right in front of my eyes and noticing things like the feel of the shark's skin and the fact that there's no sound and the distinct black look in this shark's eye that was in front of me. And that, for me, was the moment where I realised what was happening. It was this hopelessness within the situation that, you know, you're facing your worst nightmares, but there's something about facing a shark like that where you can't talk with it, you can't reason with it, you can't tell it to stop.

7:26Brett Connellan:There's nothing like that that you can do. My instinct tried to kick in. I tried to punch the shark harder to do than what a lot of people will say. Punching through water is a very difficult task. And if you look at fight, flight or freeze as being the three options, I'd already frozen, I'd already tried to fight and flight was the only option I had left. So I tried to pull away from the shark. The result of that was as it was grabbing onto my leg, it tore this massive amount of muscle from my body, which is not what you want to experience. But the good news here is I have a small window of escape and I just have my eyes fixated on the shore.

8:02Brett Connellan:I'm trying to swim as hard as I can to get to the beach. And I only get about 20 or 30 meters in and I have this thought come over my mind, which I can only describe as just the thought filled with doom and the thought is, is this thing going to come back a second time? And it's lucky that I have the thought because I look over my shoulder and I see this enormous rush of water coming towards me and I'm able to put both my hands out to try and stop it. My right hand lands on its nose. My left hand takes a small detour through its mouth, scraping a few teeth on the way through, which takes another chunk of skin off my hand.

8:33Brett Connellan:But there's another moment of hopelessness where I've got this shark at arm's length as it's pushing me through the water with an immense amount of force. The power, I find it difficult to describe because there's nothing that I have felt anywhere near that. It just made me feel so small and insignificant as a human in comparison to this creature. I don't know what to do in this situation because I'm not going to fight it off from here. It's just pushing me through the water. I see a wave approaching and I think to myself, the only thing I can really do from here is when the wave hits me, try and push it to one side and hope that separates us underwater, which is exactly what I tried to do.

9:08Brett Connellan:And luckily the wave has enough power that I'm doing front flips underwater immediately, which is actually a good sign because it means it's pushing me towards the beach. And by the time I surface, I'm standing up and the water's only about waist deep. And luckily don't see the shark coming back another time. I actually see my friend Joel. He's paddling towards me as fast as he can. And he gets to me. The first thing he says is how bad is it? Because he knows exactly what has happened. He heard my screams and there's only a very short list of things that that could end up in. So he immediately puts me on the top of his board because I'd lost mine in the initial impact.

9:43Brett Connellan:The shark's teeth actually cut through my leg rope. So we try and make it in towards the beach. We get stuck in a rip for a little bit. And it's the same thing that Dave mentioned before, where the longer this goes on, the more you lose energy and the more it starts to feel like an out-of-body experience. And I guess this is just, maybe it's losing consciousness, maybe it's losing blood. But by the time we get to the beach, I'm completely out of energy. Joel has to drag me up the sand. And we talk about luck a lot when it comes to our stories. Anyone I've spoken to that's had a similar story will always try their best to balance out the bad luck with the good luck.

10:17Brett Connellan:And a lot of my good luck tends to happen on the beach. I mentioned Joel's partner, Aggie, who was there. Incredibly lucky that she was because she was an intensive care nurse and was able to coordinate some of the rescue efforts. There was another off-duty nurse by the name of John Neville, who was on the beach as well that helped tie tourniquets and stabilised me as well as a lot of other people on the beach until the helicopters came. I was conscious for the entire time right up until getting into the helicopter. And there's so many emotions that you go through when it comes to questioning if you're going to die and what your life feels like if these are the last moments.

10:52Brett Connellan:And the fact that my parents were able to make it onto the beach, it's a moment for me that is filled with so much because there is the emotion of family and there's the significance of nearly losing your life. And then there's the other side of it, which is the luck and the fact that somehow I survived that for me was one of the things that I thought about for the longest after the attack. But having this crystal clear recollection of the experience itself is definitely something that I think about and I talk about a lot and try and weigh up all of these things, as I'm sure all of us do. Thank you so much, Brett.

11:29I really do appreciate you going through that. Let's bring in Justine now. Can you take us to what happened to you in September 2018? I was on holidays at the end of a beautiful day. We were anchored in about five metres of water and I dived into the water right next to where one of my friends was swimming. The water was beautiful. It was clear and warm and it was just lovely. and as I surfaced from that dive, the shark just hit me with that force that I still, you know, all of these sort of seven or eight years later failed to have the words to explain how much force I was hit with and I knew immediately that it couldn't have been anything else but a shark and I turned and saw the shark coming back and I had to push it off my thigh and thankfully for me, I, you know, managed to convince it to move on and I turned and just swam back to the boat and I was confused getting up the swim ladder as to why my right leg wouldn't work properly because I knew I'd been bitten by the shark but it wasn't until I got into the cockpit of the boat with the help of my husband and one of my friends that I realised the extent of the bite.

12:46The shark had taken all of the inside of my right thigh to just above my knee. All of the back of my leg was gone. Most of the front of my leg was gone and I could see my thigh bone. And then I saw that my femoral artery was gone. I saw the spurts of blood and I knew then that I was in really big trouble. You do your first aid training and you know from that training that that is something really difficult to survive, especially in such a remote location. My husband grabbed a big beach towel and put it straight into my leg. He tells me that not even that big full-size beach towel filled the hole in my leg.

13:28And before I knew it, my friend Lynn was there with him and she had the first aid kit and just putting bandage after bandage after bandage. My other friend Michelle put the Mayday call out on the marine radio and other boats heard that call and asked us what we needed. And even though we were very prepared sailors, nobody's prepared for an injury of that magnitude. So Lynn and Craig called for more bandages and people came in their dinghies and just threw bandage after bandage after bandage. So I laid on the deck of the boat and I knew that I had to slow my heart rate because I knew I had to keep that heart rate down to stop myself from bleeding out too quickly.

14:11Craig and Lynne kept me alive on the deck of our boat for two hours until I was winched via rescue helicopter. The light was fading, the helicopter was running out of fuel. They hadn't actually even been originally tasked for the job, so they didn't have blood. By the time I was winched into that helicopter, it was nearly Ennsville for me. I did have a fear that I was going to die. And I had thought, you know, things like, well, my husband was only 51 at the time, he can find happiness again. And I've got grown up daughters and they were in their early 20s at the time. And they'd be sad, but you know, old enough to emotionally cope.

14:50And it's these things that you think about that are quite rational in those moments. I was taken to Mackay Base Hospital, and they gave me less than 20 % chance of survival. I just consider that it was very unlucky what happened to me, but I was so lucky with the retrieval, the first aid, the bystander support, just everything that happened afterwards. I couldn't have been more lucky, really lucky to be alive and certainly really lucky to have my leg. My leg's been reconstructed with muscle from my tummy. I've had a heap of nerve grafts. I've had to learn to walk on a leg that I can't feel. But life is good.

15:34Extraordinary stories there from Justine, Dave and Brett with more than a hint of Australian understatement. We'll hear more from them on what happened next and what makes life good in just a moment. I'm James Reynolds. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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17:09Shark attacks on humans, mercifully, are rare. But in Australia, where all of our guests are from, the number of incidents is slowly rising. It's unclear why. Warmer waters could be pushing sharks closer to beaches, Or it could simply be linked to population growth, putting more people in harm's way. Not surprisingly, people get traumatised after they've been bitten by sharks. It takes time to recover mentally as well as physically. So we continue now with Justine, Brett and Dave with what happened to them afterwards and how it led Dave to form a support group called The Bite Club. Perhaps do not want to have to join.

17:50There are currently over 500 members worldwide. Most of them have survived a shark attack or been attacked by another predator. I had a period where they were going to remove my left arm and when I'd come out of surgery, it was still there. I was pretty stoked about that. But 97 kilometres from where I lived to where I worked, and I just couldn't drive a manual car. So I had to set up an office at home. I was a 3D modeler, so I couldn't really work, but I did the best I could. Sitting there at home and I was reaching out for support. I was getting lots of information from media outlets asking me to do stories.

18:25And I went, you know what? If I'm going to do a story, I want to talk to whoever else you're going to talk to. Because I want to find out whether these silly dreams I'm having. And by then, I was waking up screaming and having weird nightmares. And I just went, is this going to go on? Or is this just going to be a short-term thing? And can I ask other people? There was no support group. So I just tried to talk to everyone. And then there was another shark attack a month after I was out of hospital. So I just rang up the hospital and said, hey, please pass on my number. I want to tell this guy that there's other people here that are looking to talk with other people to see if we can work this out together.

18:58One of my mates jokingly said one day, he said, you're like an ambulance chaser. Someone gets attacked and then you're at the hospital. And I said, yeah, that's what I'm doing. And it's been brilliant. I've met some wonderful people in their worst possible state and managed to form really nice relationships with them, like Brett for one. and every one of them connections I've made has been wonderful.

19:20Brett Connellan:Yeah, I think on that as well, the value that I saw definitely long-term is finding people with like-minded stories, but I think it's also, it's the antidote to how alone you can feel in the moment when you are coming to terms with a shark attack. It is something that is so uncommon that if you start looking at statistics and you start asking yourself, why me? It's so easy to feel like this single person that something terrible has happened to. And for me, just the ability to know that there are other people that understood was one of the more comforting things that got me to understand a lot more about my experience.

19:54Brett Connellan:And that's not to say that, you know, you have to go through a shark attack to understand things on the level that we do or to be able to speak the same language as us because I speak to so many other people with different stories. And adversity is adversity at the end of the day. We will all go through it. It doesn't have to be a shark attack. But what I learned through having this support is it's the structures and the things around you and the mindset that you have that helps you get through it. And if that can come from a place of experience, it sets you up for a much easier path to work your way through it.

20:27Brett Connellan:It definitely opened my eyes to coming to terms with my experience of adversity. And then from there, what you can do to use your own experience to help others, I think, was massive. And I think that's the credit to you, Dave, is it obviously started with you doing it yourself, chasing those ambulances. But it's not just you anymore. It's a lot of other people that have gotten their own purpose out of bringing this community together. I'm happy about that. I see all of your stuff that you're doing and you go, it's awesome that you're using it for good, not for evil. And, you know, you're making other people inspired by just hanging out with what you're doing.

21:00And that's, I guess, that's the best thing I've got out of this group of all these wonderful people that I get to hang out with and watch them succeed in life going forward. Not fail because of the shark attack, but actually excel in life. I wonder how long the process of recovery has taken for each of you. The concept of recovery is different for everybody. That day that you dive in the water or decide to go for that surf or however your incident ends up happening, your life has changed forever. And so really it is a process of physically healing. And, you know, a lot of us have bodies that will never be the same again.

21:38So that is a big adjustment, you know, adjusting to living your life in a body that doesn't work like it used to or living with a disability. I think that the concept of recovery, rehabilitation is going to always be different. It is a mind game and we need to be really kind to ourselves. and I think this is one of the things that Bike Club does really well. It not only connects those of us who were that individual who was on the sand or on the deck or, you know, wherever we were in that moment, it also connects those people who were with us and that's really important too because those people's lives, their scars aren't as visible as ours are and it's really a balance that Bike Club does strike really well.

22:23We've got members who are people who have been bitten, We've got members who are supporters and family members. We've got people that have lost loved ones to shark attacks. And the support really is quite incredible where it is more about an adaption and an acceptance. And I've been really lucky. I've always looked after myself from a mental health perspective, even before my attack. But I hold no anger about what happened. And I think that really has helped me. but the connection is also really quite key to recovery. I think as you said there, Justine, it's a lifetime thing. You're going to be working your life around your injuries to try and make it better.

23:04I met a guy who was attacked in 1955 and he was getting close to the end of his life and suffering from dementia and he was in a nursing home and he was having night terrors about his attack. And it just so happened that one of the ladies who worked there, her husband knows me and he said, Dave, if any chance you can come and visit. So I did that a number of times and he went through his story like it was yesterday. That moment is frozen there and you're mentally dealing with that forever. And he actually stopped the night terrors, which I was really happy with. That's a fantastic story, Dave.

23:37Yeah. Just as you know, Justine, if someone asks me to do anything, I've got my hand up and I'll go, yep, you want me? I'll turn up because I just know how good it is for me as well. I'm going to put him on a pedestal now because Fred is out there in lots of schools, spreading inspiration and knowledge. And everyone who follows what Brett does would be amazed at how much of a difference he's making in the world. I'll say it, Brett. You won't? I will say it. Thanks, Dave. One of the things that I don't actually mind about being visibly, physically impacted by my attack is that it does show a level of vulnerability.

24:13And people do actually then share their story. because as Brett said, you know, everybody's experienced adversity and I like to say, you know, everybody's had a shark. You know, everybody's had their version of a shark in their life and that does afford me some pretty privileged opportunities to help people. So I do try to flip those, you know, a negative to a positive. It's the only way to go.