Since all the posts this week have been about shark battles I thought I had better include a relevant song, but which one? Are there any songs about being eaten by sharks? Not really a situation that lends itself to romantic lyrics is is? If you have any suggestions please share!
Well, the first song with a hint of someone being eaten that popped into my mind was this one, Poke Salad Annie by Tony Joe White*.
Yes, I know it isn’t a song about shark attacks but how could I not include it; Poke salad Annie/Gators got ya Granny/chomp, chomp chomp….. ?!
* Or Polk Salad Annie.
The first time I saw this clip I was amazed that such a bluesy voice came out of someone who looked like one of the Beatles. And was white. Who’da guessed?
Clearly this week has become the week of shark battles.
Monday was shark vs poodle, no surprise that the poodle lost really. Tuesday was another dog vs shark post but this time the shark was ambushed by a happy dog and hauled to shore. One all.
Today we have what can only be described as a shark with more enthusiasm than brains.
In 1950 three people, Fred, Edna and Doug, were out in the waters off Altona in a 16ft dinghy. It was probably lucky their boat wasn’t any smaller though, as an 8 and a half-foot Grey Nurse shark unexpectedly leapt out of the water and into their boat. Eeeek.
The article describes their efforts to subdue the snapping, thrashing, beast as a ‘desperate struggle’.
Hmmmm… Had a shark arrived in my boat in such a fashion that struggle would have also been accompanied by the kind of language that would turn the air blue.
I wonder what the immediate reaction was of all those in the boat, the shark included. I can imagine it being a moment of quiet looking around, not one of them being sure as to what is really going on. The people thinking “Is that a shark? IN MY BOAT? What the!!” and the shark thinking “Shit. This isn’t going as well as I’d hoped… “
Of course this excursion only went well for the humans. After what I can imagine was an unpleasant end the 400lb shark was sold to a fishmonger. Imagine if they had just heaved it back over the side and into the briny deep, what do you think it would have told its friends when it got home?
Here we are at round two of the dog vs shark wars. Once I saw this picture of a happy pooch I hoped it ended in favour of the dog rather than the unfortunate Fluffy poodle of yesterday’s post.
In that post, and thanks to the ongoing amusement in the comments, we imagined a wife’s pampered poodle with an annoyingly tinkly bell on its collar being taken for a late night walk by a long-suffering husband.
We couldn’t really imagine too many ways that bell from a small dog’s collar made its way to the insides of the shark that those work-dodging police fishermen caught in 1911.
Even more unlikely was that a bell, heavily corroded from the digestive juices that had already consumed the poodle and the collar, would be ringing from the insides of a shark but we were willing to overlook that in support of an amusing story.
The Border Collie in this report was clearly made of sterner stuff than our imaginary Fluffy poodle.
In July 1938 he leapt from the pier at Queenscliff, grabbing a four-foot whip tailed shark in its mouth and swimming back to the landing. The shark was killed by fishermen but I really think that the dog was probably capable of doing it on its own, don’t you?
I hope that this dog didn’t ever overestimate its own abilities, imagine if it took on something bigger or a shark with a bigger friend lurking under the pier? Eeek!
In 1911 two off-duty* coppers from Prahran went fishing off St Kilda pier and caught a small, but very active shark. As it lay on the pier each of its death flops wiggles was accompanied by a strange tinkling sound.
The men decided to investigate and, opening the shark, found a small bell such as those which were popularly attached to the collar of small poodles.
It was surmised that the bell was the only part of a missing Fluffy which had resisted the sharks digestive juices.
The foremost question I had about this article was this; when do you think the paths of the shark and a tinkly-bell wearing dog collided? There are lots of things that are found inside sharks, not all of them make sense. Wouldn’t you love to know where sharks find some of those things!! (Some other posts I have done have bombs, cats, goats and kangaroos and more cats inside sharks.)
I wonder if the annoying tinkling of Fluffy’s bell caused a husband to finally crack, the pooch meeting its end when it was taken on a late night stroll by the pier…..
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And, using a thread so thin as to be almost invisible to connect this deathmatch to another equally unlikely deathmatch, here is a clip that makes me laugh, Celebrity Deathmatch: Men in Black vs The X Files.
Unnecessary use of dismembered play dough body parts warning….
*I say off-duty, but it was a Thursday afternoon. If it was a sunny Autumn day the chances are they were just fishing instead of working detaining the shark to help with their enquiries….
Regular readers might remember that I am not a fan of sharks. Selachophobia is my one completely irrational fear.
It is irrational for a few reasons. I know sharks have better things to do with their time that lurk in the shallows waiting for humans, so going to the beach isn’t really risky at all.
The main reason this fear is irrational is because we live more than an hour from the beach. Boats aren’t my thing either so unless one gets on the bus and turns up on my doorstep there is very little chance a shark and I will ever be trying to occupy the same space.
JG didn’t do me any favours the other day with her New Jersey shark post though. I remember seeing the movies about these events some years ago and thinking that the scene where the shark is spotted swimming under the bridge towards the unwitting ‘dinners’ splashing about upstream was a little too convenient and probably written in to the script to make the story more exciting. According to JG’s account of the events that’s how it really happened. Eeek.
For those of you who didn’t see that post (go and have a look), a quick summary is that up until 1916 people in New Jersey still lived safe in the knowledge that sharks only ate things like dolphins and seals. Humans were obviously not on the menu even though we are of a similar size and probably taste just as delicious*. In the early weeks of July 1916, after a few attacks in front of shocked onlookers, people realized that this assumption was totally wrong (and probably that all those previously attacked by sharks just didn’t live to point the finger).
The shark in 1916 not only attacked people on a beach, it also swam up a river and took some even more unsuspecting victims there.
Those of you who live in Australia (and South Africa, I suspect) will know that shark attacks in the news are not something unusual. We don’t see them all the time but we aren’t shocked when we hear of them, just unhappy. Of course we are happy for all you potential tourists to think that your average surfer dodges a Great White between every set.
I had to rant post about sharks because I wanted to share this article. In 1935 a 14ft shark was placed in the Codgee Aquarium for the enjoyment of the masses.
The shark had been captured a week earlier and obviously had been having quite a few adventures recently.
In front of stunned onlookers it stopped swimming, thrashed about for a moment, and vomited up a human arm. The arm had a distinctive tattoo and a piece of rope tied around the wrist.
I bet the horrified crowd didn’t really care about the distinctive markings though and I am sure a few of them never went into the water again…..
The shark also disgorged other things, a bird, bones and parts of another smaller (6ft) shark who was the original eater of the arm (which is why it was intact enough after a week for fingerprints to be taken).
The arm turned out to be all that remained of James Smith, a petty criminal, and the story behind his death was one of the most convoluted stories in Australia’s legal history. Due to the lack of body, and the underworld creed of keeping your mouth shut, nobody was ever convicted of his murder (Dictionary of Sydney, wikipedia). Had the shark not eaten the smaller shark, then been captured by fishermen, Smith’s fate would have never been known.
Just because, and to show you that sharks really can pop up anywhere (so my fear is not entirely stupid) here is a clip from Brisbane, Queensland.
During flooding a few years ago half a dozen Bull Sharks were washed into the lake on a golf course and became a local attraction. Recently the course and lake were inundated again and those at the course were worried that their iconic sharks might have made their way back to the sea.
A later news article was happy to report that the sharks were still splashing about in the lake as usual, forgoing their chance at freedom. Maybe they have developed a taste for golf balls. After all, who is going in after a lost ball there! (I think the clip’s title ‘killer sharks’ is a bit of an over dramatization though….)
*I think that one day we might meet a killer whale with a taste for humans and our current assumption that they don’t eat us either will go the same way.
Yes, I know I said I wouldn’t be doing music posts all week but when I did my 80′s music post a few days ago I can’t believe I missed out on this band!
Eighties music in Australia was all about mullets and having fun and I think that one of the bands that embodies this the most had to have been the Uncanny X Men.
I admit, I was a big fan of them back in the day, maybe it was those extra fluffy mullets that did it…
Amazingly their lead singer Brian Mannix manages to get an occasional gig on the odd tv special and still seems to be having as much fun as ever.
If you wish to use any images or text from my blog be sure to ask permission and include a link back to Buried Words and Bushwa, and full credit to it.
Trove.
The newspaper articles here come from the National Library of Australia (trove.nla.gov.au). Get on there and do some text correcting! You never know what you might find...
