Rewind 1960

Sun Herald

Sunday January 30, 2005

Interview Katrina O'Brien

The award-winning underwater photographer, shark-lover and dedicated marine conservationist recalls a time when hunting rather than protecting drove her.

I was 25 when this photo was taken. I was a spearer back then and used to go around killing things. My parents had a waterfront house in Burraneer Bay [in Sydney's Cronulla] and my younger brother, Greg, and I used to spearfish around the bay. It was the nicest way to get dinner on the table.

In the late 1950s, a guy called Brian McKenna saw me fishing. "You're a very good fisherman," he said. "Would you like to be in our club? We don't have many women." So I joined the St George Spearfishing Club. It was male-dominated but I thought I was pretty good and I was always treated very nicely.

Spearfishing takes a certain amount of skill and it was a thrill.

I was very competitive - it's just in my nature. We speared against other clubs, then we had the NSW championship and I was the Australian ladies' spearfishing champion twice in the early '60s.

[My husband] Ron belonged to the same club and I met him when he was 29. We went to the meetings together but didn't go out for quite a long time - most of the time we were just friends. He was the best Australia's ever had - Australian champion four times from 1962 to 1965 and the World Spearfishing Champion in 1965. We were club champions at the same time and we liked the same things - the ocean, bushwalking, adventure and each other.

We married in 1963 and in the late 1960s, I went to compete off Maroochydore, Queensland. There was an island out there and we hit it hard for three days. We took every large fish off it. Afterwards, all these beautiful tropical fish were lined along the beach. I felt sad for what we had done and thought it was such a waste. You're supposed to eat the fish you spear but, of course, we hardly ate any. Ron and I decided to stop spearfishing soon afterwards.

We concentrated on filming marine life rather than killing it - Ron's the filmmaker and I'm the photographer. I was a commercial artist back then and in 1969 I started taking pictures. It was back in the days when they had newsreels in picture theatres. The companies would only buy footage of big things such as sharks and stingrays so that is how we got into sharks.

Sharks are the most beautiful creatures. I've been bitten twice and nipped once but it's all part of the business. I don't get frightened when they come close - I get very excited. "Come here, my darling, come on," I call, willing them over to be photographed.

I was pretty dumb when this photo was taken. It was before I had travelled and I was very inexperienced. I'm a little wiser now and I have learned so much - I take every opportunity for a new experience as the chance may never come again. But I don't feel guilty about what I used to do. That was just how it was.

Fast forward

Saving sharks is as important as having kangaroos in Australia. Killing those beautiful wild animals for their fins for soup is insidious and it's past crisis point. In Asia, they'll pay more than $US100 [$132] a kilo and everyone can do it. It's a huge problem that I'm still trying to help overcome. Ron and I have worked on underwater sequences for Jaws, The Blue Lagoon, Honeymoon In Vegas and lots of marine documentaries and we're still working. I'm 69 and I don't have one spare moment. I make jewellery, I paint, we go bushwalking and I garden. I also spend a lot of time working on my images. I'm sorting through them and putting them on CD. I've got thousands of shark pictures.

© 2005 Sun Herald

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