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In the three decades passed, there’s been a radical shift in the waters off Tuncurry. White sharks today are reasonably common. They swim through surfing lineups and even cruise around Wallis Lake, hanging near the cleaning tables looking for a cheap feed of fish. Surfers and fishers see them often; mostly juvenile whites between six and eight feet. Teenagers. Everyone who spends time in or on the water around town has a story about some kind of close brush – most of them sharks casually cruising by, looking for a feed of ray, mullet, salmon. Not interested in surfers.

Some of those encounters however have more consequence.

My brother was surfing Tuncurry Beach a few years back on a Tuesday morning. It was sunny, the water clean, the waves were small and breaking only a few metres from shore. Surfers are taught to avoid dirty water, dawn and dusk. This was none of those.

The idyllic scene was broken abruptly when a surfer nearby was hit by a white shark. My brother and a group of the surfer’s friends held their ground and tried to pull him away from the shark but couldn’t get near him. By the time the shark let go and they got him to the beach, he was gone. In response, the state government sent in a shark team later that day, who set baited drumlines in the immediate area. They caught and released six whites. The fatality was followed by several close calls in the area, and Tuncurry soon had a reputation as a white shark hotspot.

The town was not alone.

Coastlines around the southern half of the Australian continent – the natural range of the great white shark – have all seen a change in the water. White shark numbers appear to have grown. Attacks on surfers – and subsequent fatalities – have certainly increased.

The change began in 1999.

In response to decades of population decline – due largely to fishing and a decline in its food sources – the Australian government protected the white shark under federal law. The white shark breeds slowly, and shark scientists believed the shark was vulnerable to extinction. They didn’t know how many white sharks there were – getting any kind of population estimate was incredibly difficult – but the markers were bad. They were disappearing. For scientists who’d studied them for decades, the white shark was still a creature of great mystery. Where it bred, where it fed, where it travelled and how it behaved were still largely unknown at the time. The protection would at least give scientists time to understand one of the oceans most iconic species before it was lost.

The recovery plan for the great white was just that; it didn’t reference a scenario where the recovery would go so well that surfers in the years ahead would become nervous when paddling out. It was a recovery, not a rewilding.

The first signs that something in the water had shifted occurred around Byron Bay in 2015. A cluster of great white attacks on surfers and swimmers – some of them fatal – signalled the start of the new era. Nobody knew why it was happening in that short stretch of coast. I was living in the area at the time, and it seemed every other week someone was being buzzed, or worse, and the general anxiety level in the water was high. Surfers weren’t used to sharing the lineups with white sharks.

The run of incidents around Byron prompted the NSW state government to create a trial program where sharks were caught on drumlines, then tagged and released. It was a public safety response first and foremost, although the real benefit would be delivered in time, with scientists now having hundreds of tagged white sharks they could study. It confirmed some long-held theories – two distinct east and west coast white shark populations, shark nurseries off Gippsland and the Stockton Bight – but much of the data posed new questions. It was fascinating territory, and the program super charged white shark science.

But equally fascinating was the change on land.

Those initial attacks around Byron and nearby Ballina saw reactions split broadly into two camps. You could characterise the ‘Byron response’ this way – the ocean is the shark’s domain; we should just leave them alone. They saw the white shark as a totemic, endangered species. It was very new age, very Byron. Down in Ballina meanwhile – just 20km down the road but an old fishing town – the general feeling was that people were dying here, and the situation required some fishing. The Jaws response.

If these attacks had happened a decade or two ago, the Jaws response might have prevailed, the public calling for more hardline measures like culls and more shark nets to deal with it. But the prevailing sentiment amongst the surf community was as while the attacks were harrowing, they were also still rare. This was nature doing its thing and the white shark should remain protected. ‘Coexistence’ became the new paradigm.

That uneasy balance between conservation and public safety has been tested in the years since.

In the decade since Byron, the white shark attacks have spread to other parts of the Australian coast – Tuncurry, Port Macquarie, Elliston, Esperance – tending to occur in clusters. Some towns have seen several attacks, some fatal, and they have ripped at the fabric of the place. Shark attacks by nature are awful and primal and scar not only the survivors, but the towns themselves. This needs to be acknowledged and respected.

Yet through all this, attitudes have broadly held, supporting a new way of dealing with the shark problem… and a new way of reasoning it. A modern response to a modern problem.

There are a number of drivers with social attitudes here. One is the science.

The response by governments around the country has largely been led by scientists. Millions of dollars have been spent on not only trying to keep people safe, but at the same time better understand the great white.

Tagged sharks showed clear patterns, but outliers were doing strange and scarcely believable things. The data confirmed the theory of two distinct shark populations – an east and a west, divided by Bass Strait – although recent genetic testing has now established those populations are not as clear cut as first thought.

And then there are sharks doing batshit crazy things that defy any theory, like tagged sharks swimming to Macquarie Island, swimming from Queensland to Kalbarri, and even one tagged female white shark that swam across the entire Indian Ocean, from South Africa to Western Australia. As the shark scientists will tell you, they’re only just starting to understand the white shark, but surfers realise any future safety measures against shark attack will come from the science being done now.

Another driver is pragmatism. Despite living lives engineered around catching waves, surfers tend to be realists. You have to be very, very unlucky to end up on the wrong end of a white shark. It’s an aquatic lightning strike. The risk of attack remains unfathomably low… just higher than it was two decades ago, and higher still if you’re surfing in areas known as white shark hotspots. Surfers know the only way to be perfectly safe is not to surf, and that’s never going to happen.

Maybe surfers are also seeing the big picture. The recovery of the white shark hasn’t happened in isolation. While around the globe many marine ecosystems and fisheries are in danger of collapse, those in Australia – with a few exceptions – are in rude health. And while the white shark recovery is emblematic of that, there’s a bigger one that dwarfs it.

Scientists estimate that over 40,000 humpback whales now swim along the Australian coast every year: south for the summer, north for the winter. It’s hard to imagine these creatures were almost lost forever, harpooned down to just a few hundred souls before being protected in 1963. As far as the recovery of an endangered species goes – let alone one of the biggest animals to ever roam god’s blue earth – “remarkable” doesn’t do it justice. With some of the apex players now protected, marine environments around Australia have been re-setting back to some kind of primal groove for a while now, and we’re getting a glimpse of what the ocean out there looked like for tens of thousands of years.

Maybe the real driver here though in our attitudes to white sharks is something primal reemerging in our hard wiring. Taking our place at the top of the food chain is a relatively recent phenomenon for human beings, just a couple of thousand years. Before that, we lived with danger every day. That’s largely been stripped from our lives. The prospect of a shark attack, while presenting an infinitesimally small chance of killing us, is also in some way making us feel more alive when we’re in the ocean.

We’re rewilding ourselves as much as we’re rewilding the ocean.

This story features in Roaring Journals, Edition Two.