🦈 Amanda Keller On The Coogee Shark Attack From Her Perspective

As a Coogee local, Amanda Keller has shared her perspective on the shark attack.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Gold.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
Hello there, it's JONESI Demander driving you home.

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Our home is girt by sea, but that comes with
its own perils and we saw that on the weekend
with that shark attack.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Well, this shark attack was in the beachside suburb of
Kujie and I've lived there for thirty years. And anywhere
you know, Australia at the moment is seeing so many
shark tas there's lots of fish in the water, but
when it happens in your own community, it is horrifically chilling.
As you can imagine. It was a beautiful day. I
was down the beach earlier that day walking my dog

(00:30):
and the water was so clear, it was warm, it
was unseasonably warm. It was so beautiful, so many people swimming,
so many people walking along the beach. And at eleven
o'clock that morning, a thirty five year old woman was
attacked by shark and she's in a stable but I
guess compromise positions still at hospital. Her life was saved

(00:53):
by a twenty five year old young man called Charlie Verko.
He actually went to school with my son. He was incredible.
He was an off duty volunteer life saver and this
woman was doing laps. She was within the flags. She
was only twenty or thirty meters out where the first
break was, so she wasn't way out and the shark

(01:15):
grabbed her. He saw the commotion and he paddled towards this,
and he said the shark was the size of a cart.
It was a great white shark. He said he was
looking up at these fins. Actually hears how he described
what he saw.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
I could see the dorsal fin and the tail fin
and the body of it, and I felt like I
was looking up at the shark just because it was
so big, and that was where I really went. I
actually don't know what I can do here to help.
It's just too big for me to actually do anything,
and so I just looked at the beach, tried to
signal to the life guards as the big Codex to
get them to understand what was going on out there.

(01:50):
And yeah, then there was a lot of blood in
the water. She ended up getting taken underwater for a second,
and I couldn't see where she was because it was
all red. And luckily she popped up and the shark
had let her go, and I was able to get
close enough to bring her into.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Shaw, so casually to bring her into shore, it wasn't
all as simple as that. So he grabbed her and
he pretty much reached into the sharks, took her out
of the shark's jaws, almost put her on the tried
to get her onto the board, couldn't do it. She
was holding onto i think a water cage at the
front of his board, and he was paddling backwards.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
And then she slipped into unconsciousness and so he was
grabbing her and paddling backwards to share extraordinary. If he
hadn't been there when he was, she either may have
bled to death or the shark may have had another go.
This has saved her life, I'm sure of it. And
by the time he came closer to shore, there was
so many local heroes. There was one the man I

(02:49):
do want to say his name. His name was Ben Heenan.
He was the Couljie Surf Life Saving Club president. He
started paddling out towards them. Amazingly, there's a doctor, Ian
ferguson off duty emergency physician, walking along the beach with
his kids. So all these people were there on shore
when she was brought to the sand. Locals were holding

(03:09):
up towels to give them some privacy, some sense of
privacy because lots of people are taking photos. A friend
of mine was there and just shocked at what she
was seeing, and other people were taking photos and she's saying,
do you mind, And they're saying, I have every right
to film. This is what one woman said to her.
So you saw the best of humanity go on that day,
and apart from a few of those ghouls, quite an
extraordinary thing. And I was there the next morning walking

(03:32):
my dog again, and it was such a somber, incredible
mourning because so many people there are are swimmers who
swim all year around, and they're big groups. It's a
wonderful social thing. And everyone's just sitting there in a
state of shock. And I spoke to one of the
local council workers and he had never obviously, was still traumatized.
The man who runs the coffee shop on the beach,

(03:52):
horrified by what he'd seen that are as well. You
don't get a lot of shark attacks.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
It's not really a sharky area.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
Not and it was clear water. It was in the
middle of the day that it was not when anyone
would have thought such a thing could happen. Scary, It
is absolutely scary. And you know what in this somber
that's one side of the beach, one side of the street.
The other side of the street was the pub. And
the Brazilians were there in force to watch the opening
match of the World Cup, these orange, these yellow jerseys,

(04:23):
and they were screaming and yelling with joy. And I thought, both,
this is the world. Both those things exist at once,
and that is life. You take your joy where you can.
So this one small suburb had all those human emotions
at once. So the woman I don't know, I don't
think her name has been released yet. She is still

(04:44):
in hospital, and our thoughts and wishes are with her
and to all those incredibly brave people who helped out
on the day the socaos.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
Speaking of that, what about that?

Speaker 2 (04:56):
What about what about? Everyone wrote us off?

Speaker 1 (04:59):
And here we are, Ah, I like him say, here
we are