New Zealand shark hunter landed monsters from Sydney beaches

NZ Herald

30 Jul, 2018 05:24 AM3 mins to read

The monster tiger shark caught at Coogee by Sydney shark hunter Aubrey Sara, a Kiwi, featured in the Auckland Weekly News in 1918. Photo / Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Library

He was a champion Kiwi wrestler and a dubious Australian medic, but Aubrey Sara was best known as a fearless Sydney shark hunter.

He would run back and forth at Bondi beach hauling in monsters of the not-so-deep - very big fish that were in fact frighteningly close to shore.

Aubrey Sara, from New Zealand, was a celebrated Sydney shark hunter.

In 1918 he featured in the Auckland Weekly News with a large tiger shark he had landed at Coogee, a beach about 4km south of Bondi in Sydney, a city that was fascinated by his shark-killing.

Years later he said in a Sydney paper the biggest shark he had caught was a 4.9m-long tiger weighing 762kg

In March 1922, when Sydney was in shock after the city's third fatal shark mauling that year - a series of attacks on a swimmer less than 10m from the shore at Coogee - Sara and another fisherman began "active operations" to catch the killer.

Sara learned his shark-fishing in New Zealand. In Sydney he fished mostly from the shore and usually in the evening and at night. The city's Sunday Times hailed him as Bondi's "cleverest" shark angler and he described his sport in detail to the paper.

"A fellow has to do a lot of quick moving, and even racing along the beach when an active black whaler bolts with nearly 300 yards [274m] of line at his first run.

"Sometimes when I have hooked a big chap in the afternoon I have a hard job to keep it from running among the surfers. Not that I think the swimmers are in much danger, but a scare among them often causes somebody to get into difficulties and the life-savers have an anxious time."

Sharks, he said, preferred the channels at the beach, "the 'gutters', where the undertows lurk for the inexpert swimmer and [they] don't like the sand-bars and spits.

"Usually we get the bait out about 40 or 50 yards [27.4-36.6m], but sometimes the big fellows are within 20 yards [18.3m] of the beach at night."

Born in New Zealand, Sara rose to prominence as a champion lightweight wrestler. He had worked as a chemist in Auckland and Napier before shifting to Sydney in about 1912.

In 1930 he had a brush with a law over the death of a woman, in the first of several abortion cases.

A murder charge against the well known "shark fisherman at Bondi", also described as a masseur, was discharged, one paper noted, but he was remanded on another of having "unlawfully used an instrument", a reference to procuring an illegal abortion.

In 1939, Sara was convicted, with three others, of conspiracy to perform illegal abortions. He was sentenced to three years' jail.

In the months before the 1930 court case, Sara had travelled with his wife and children to New Zealand, where his arrival and planned Northland game-fishing trip made it into the social pages of the papers.