Frenzied shark attack in Sydney's Little Bay a reminder that the Hunter Coast is home to a Great White Shark nursery

I was a deckhand on prawn trawlers working between the Gulf of Carpentaria and northern Western Australia.

As we watched over the edge, a pod of dolphins, and a smaller but more threatening pack of sharks, worked together like aquatic sheepdogs herding a school of fish into each other's mouths.

I would never again sit in the surf thinking: "I'm OK, because there's a bunch of dolphins over there, and sharks and dolphins don't mix."

It may have been on the WA side, because the Gulf can get a bit murky, and this water was so crystal clear we could see all the way to the sandy bottom many metres below, where the Men In Grey Suits and the Friends of Flipper were making common cause.

The other astounding aspect of that morning was seeing the reaction when a bolshie shark got too close to one of the dolphins, and one of the mammalian team came screaming in from sideways and rammed the shark amidships with its nose. In that instance there was no question which side was in charge.

Some time before that, we'd winched the nets up one morning to find an enormous shark in the nets.

Or an enormous shark's head, anyway, with a telltale curved cross-section of flesh that was best explained by something else coming up behind this shark, and swallowing most of it whole.

This was still the era of Jaws. Stephen Spielberg's shark-schlock shocker had only hit the cinemas in 1975, and if that big grey head was the remains of a one-bite meal, the body was residing in an even bigger stomach.

I'd been thinking of these days since hearing of the horrific fatal attack in Little Bay, two headlands south of Maroubra and the last bit of sand before Botany Bay.

The victim has been named as Simon Nellist, a 35-year-old from Wolli Creek near Tempe.

I'm not sure if anyone knows how far out in the water he was, but he was reportedly training for tomorrow's annual Malabar Magic Ocean Swim, which has since been cancelled. Beaches have reopened.

A diving instructor and keen ocean swimmer, his Facebook page had a picture of him, underwater in his dive gear.

He reportedly moved to Australia from the UK a few years ago, and was set to marry "the love of his life".

The attack was described as frenzied.

He might have been the first person fatally attacked by a shark in Sydney waters for 60 years, but his death will no doubt reignite a debate over the levels to which we should protect ourselves from sharks. Nellist had made his views clear, with a Facebook post last year featuring these words: "Shark net and drum lines protect no-one and kill all kinds of marine life each year."

Plenty of people would dispute that belief, even if the zeitgeist is to recognise that the ocean is their domain, not ours, and that the wildlife toll from our traditional protection of offshore drop nets is too great to justify their continued use.

Last week, with autumn in the air, I'd found myself thinking we had made it through another summer without a serious shark attack in our part of the world.

I checked, and we had one fatal at Tuncurry in May last year and another at Emerald Beach near Coffs Harbour in September.

I'd been thinking of those worrying summers we had a few years back, when it seemed that Newcastle's beaches were closed every second day, and arguments over the numbers of sharks, and what to do with them, were high-profile topics.

Online lists show Nellist is the tenth person to be fatally attacked in NSW waters since 2000.

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Queensland has had the same number, and none since 2020 when three people died, the most recent a surfer at Greenmount two Septembers ago.

South Australia has had seven this century, and Tassie one. Newcastle-born WA Premier Mark McGowan might be keeping COVID at bay, but the hermit state is Australia's shark attack headquarters, with 19 deaths since 2000.

It's a subjective measure I know, but I think there's fewer surfers out for a dawn "early" in Newcastle than there used to be.

Early morning before the summer onshore breezes get up is the best time for a surf, but it's also apparently breakfast time for the Noahs.

We've known for years that the waters from Stockton Bight up through the Myall Coast and Broughton Island are Great White breeding grounds.

As the historic photo above shows, there were so many around Port Stephens that Pindimar, near Tea Gardens, had a shark processing factory from 1927 that processed the catch from big gill nets strung outside the heads, and winched aboard a pair of nine-metre boats, Devil and Demon.

They caught plenty of big sharks as well as wobbegong and rays.

My Tea Gardens history book tells me that by 1933 the weekly catch had fell to about 50 sharks and the factory was no longer viable, and closed.

More recently, with game fishing moving to tag and release and much of our coast given over to marine parks, there has to be more sharks than there, doesn't there?

And there's no such thing as a "dumb animal".

They used to avoid us.

Now, I'm not so sure.