Esperance grapples with shark safety after three deaths in three years

Karen Milligan strapped on her dive gear and descended into the same waters where her husband died, determined to mark the anniversary of his death with an act of defiance. On January 5, 2020, Gary Johnson, president of the Esperance Dive Club and a man she described as a gentle, passionate protector of the ocean, was killed by a white shark estimated at six metres long. Fifteen years they had spent exploring these waters together without incident. Then, in a moment she would replay countless times, she saw what she thought was a whale tail. It was not. She swam toward the shark, striking at its tail and nose, trying to save her husband. The shark disappeared. Johnson did not. A year later, on the anniversary, Milligan placed a memorial dive tank filled with messages from family and friends on the ocean floor—a gesture that spoke to something deeper than grief: a refusal to surrender the ocean that had shaped her life.

But Milligan's return to the water was extraordinary precisely because so many others had turned away. Between 2017 and 2020, three people were killed by sharks off the Esperance coast. Laeticia Brouwer, a teenage surfer, died in 2017 at Kelp Beds, a popular surf break near town. Andrew Sharpe was attacked at the same location on October 9, 2020. Three deaths in three years sent shockwaves through a community whose identity was inseparable from the ocean. Pete McMahon, a fifty-year-old surfer who had spent three decades at Kelp Beds, watched Sharpe's attack from the beach. He has not paddled out from an Esperance beach since. Others like him—lifelong ocean users—simply stopped. The fear was not abstract. It was personal, immediate, and it was changing the town.

Mitch Capelli, an Esperance-born surfer who has spent close to twenty years in the water, noticed something else: he was seeing more sharks than ever before, particularly in the past five years. In response to Brouwer's death, he had founded the Esperance Ocean Safety and Support Group, an organization dedicated to practical solutions—distributing trauma kits with tourniquets, developing safety protocols, finding ways to keep people in the water rather than driving them away. "Not when it's everything you know, everything that your life revolves around," he said of the suggestion that people simply stay out of the ocean. "The ocean is bigger than that to us. It's our life." But the three deaths had fractured the community's confidence. Some surfers returned to the water in the year after Sharpe's death. Many did not. Capelli watched hard-core surfers he thought would never leave the water abandon Esperance entirely. He worried about their mental health, about the tourism industry that depended on the ocean's draw, about the town's future.

The question of how to respond became a political minefield. When the former Liberal government authorized the killing of large tiger, bull, and white sharks in 2014, protests erupted across the country. When Mark McGowan became Premier in 2017, he shifted toward non-lethal approaches: rebates on shark deterrent devices, trials of non-lethal drumlines, warning systems, and an ambitious tagging program. Esperance had become one of the best places in Western Australia for tagging white sharks, with forty-one tagged off its coast in four years—more than half the state total. The region's annual seal pupping season attracted sharks and made them easier to catch and tag, according to Peter Godfrey, the statewide operations manager for WA Fisheries. But Capelli and his group believed these measures amounted to band-aids. They wanted non-lethal drumlines deployed near popular beaches to catch, tag, and relocate sharks before attacks happened. They pointed to precedent: Fisheries had relocated a 5.3-metre shark spotted near Cottesloe Beach in Perth. But Godfrey said the department lacked resources for that as an attack-prevention strategy.

Capelli's group also proposed that after an attack, if a shark matching the description was caught, it should be humanely euthanized according to Fisheries protocol. He was careful to distinguish this from a cull—a balanced, solution-based approach, he called it. The shark involved in an attack should be removed, he argued, to protect people, reduce danger to first responders and recovery divers, help recover evidence for coronial inquiries, and enable scientific research. But the word "lethal" remained toxic in Western Australian politics, and the proposal divided the community along lines that had nothing to do with the science and everything to do with philosophy: how much risk was acceptable? Who got to decide? What did the ocean owe its users, and what did its users owe it?

David Swan, a local veterinarian and spokesperson for the Ocean Safety and Support Group, acknowledged that social media had amplified awareness of shark sightings, but he believed—based on conversations with abalone divers, commercial divers, and lifelong ocean users—that more sharks were genuinely present in the region. Researchers, he noted, said they had no evidence of that. But the community knew what it had seen. In 2019, the group launched its own research project to study sharks in the area. Acoustic receivers placed in Esperance Bay would record when tagged white sharks swam past, building a database of movement and behavior. The long-term answer, many believed, lay in understanding sharks better, not in reacting to attacks after they happened.

On the anniversary of Johnson's death, after her dive and a gathering with friends and family, Milligan launched the Gary Johnson Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving his legacy and his dream of establishing a marine park in the Recherche Archipelago off Esperance. The foundation's discussion paper warned against short-term, unscientific strategies. "Any lethal approach to shark mitigation would be completely unacceptable. It's known not to work," Milligan said. Her daughter Hannah echoed the call for evidence-based policy—trialling new strategies while avoiding dated approaches that had failed. Both acknowledged the trauma and fear that had gripped the community, but they believed perspective mattered. "We can't guarantee 100 per cent safety," Milligan said, "and I think people have to understand that too." The ocean, she suggested, was valuable precisely because it was not entirely safe, because it remained wild and unpredictable. The community wanted the same thing, she believed—safe interaction with the water. The disagreement was only about how to get there.