Eighth fatal shark attack in Australia this year marks deadliest since 1929

On a November morning at Cable Beach in Western Australia, a 55-year-old man became the eighth person to die from a shark attack in Australia in 2020 — a toll not seen since 1929, when nine fatalities marked a year that shaped the country's relationship with its coastline for generations. The death arrives not as an isolated tragedy but as a signal that something in the long-standing compact between human recreation and the ocean may be shifting. For nearly a century, the interventions born from that earlier reckoning held; now, with weeks still left in the year, Australia finds itself asking