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05/03/2005: "Vintage: Marine-Photography ........ same Shovel Nose (cont.)"

A picture is worth many words......

This collectors print signed illustrates the early careers of those shown, Rodney Fox, Henri Bource, Ron and Valerie Taylor and fisherman Les Nash. Rodney Fox is a celebrated shark bite survivor who lives in Adelaide. Is there anyone who has not seen the horrific wounds pictures before and after doctors sewed his chest up?

Henri Bource was the Victorian survivor after a white pointer shark removed his lower left leg with a single snap.

He was fortunate there was still a knee-cap which helped him wear an artificial limb much faster than otherwise.

Henri used self-hypnosis. It helped him cope with phantom pains i.e. an itchy toe in a foot that wasn't there.

Ron Taylor looking down into his camera viewing screen, is carefully snapping a b&w still photo that will appear in magazines world-wide for decades.

The subjects: 'shark bite survivors inspect shovel nose rays'. Members of the shark family and therefore adding variation in feature magazine coverages of sharks. His camera is a wide angle Rolleiflex in a custom housing - Ron's main stills camera for many years.

Henri Bource was working on his Savage Shadows, a feature length documentary - his comeback to diving after the shark bite. Released on 35mm and later home video it failed miserably in the marketing.

What we divers didn't realise, Henri enjoyed a double life, one as a filmmaker and diver, the other as a musician who played sax in a leading Melbourne rock band, The Thunderbirds. His life story is quite amazing.

Leaning against my sturdy 14 foot aluminium boat (a deHavilland Tempest) is Valerie Taylor who is a most unique and celebrated Australian female diver. She's chatting with pro fisherman Les Nash a former at-sea whaler from the recently closed Tangalooma Whaling Station on nearby Moreton Island.

(Les was the first professional fisherman to not spit venom at spearmen. A gentleman in an era when pro fishermen treated freedivers like the plague. They thought we frightened fish away, not realising they were catching most of them!)

North Stradbroke was a good coastal region for shark activity and maybe still is, but not anywhere in the same numbers as back then. It was my favourite poor man's alternative to the Great Barrier Reef because of the clear ocean waters. Today real estate (on the hill in the photo background) is grossly over-priced.

Eventually a bridge may connect the island to the mainland and then it will become the northern Gold Coast and another Kings Cross. We are fortunate to have known these places as they once were.