Suzanne Harrington: A shark! We're gonna need a bigger bottle of sunscreen

Australians love nothing more than to swim in seas not just teeming with lethal blue octopi, but churning with giant waves, ferocious currents and deadly riptides. Seas that are full of sharks.

The blue-ringed octopus is very pretty and only about the size of your hand, but carries enough venom to kill 26 humans simultaneously, if 26 humans were to simultaneously annoy it enough.

It’s not aggressive though, explains my daughter: “Only if you get on its nerves.”

On the beach, about to climb into a tide pool because the actual sea seems too dangerous to swim in, a man is mildly telling his kids that someone’s just seen a blue-ringed octopus a few feet away in this very tide pool... the way Irish kids might see a crab in a rockpool.

“Hey kids”, he says cheerfully, “keep away from the rocks on the left, yeah?”

I try to imagine what would happen if a small sea creature with the capacity to kill 26 humans turned up on an Irish beach. There’d be media helicopters overhead, snipers on the roof, the military on stand-by. It’d be on the evening news.

Not here. Not in Australia.

Instead, Australians love nothing more than to swim in seas not just teeming with lethal blue octopi, but churning with giant waves, ferocious currents and deadly riptides. Seas that are full of sharks.

Next to the tide pool containing the blue-ringed octopus, the happily splashing kids and the unconcerned dad, I notice a white cylinder attached to a lamp post. It’s a Shark Bite Kit.

The Calm As Shark Bite First Aid Slam Pack. Picture: australiawidefirstaid.com.au 

It contains a tourniquet, bandages, dressings, a thermal blanket, gloves, a whistle and step-by-step instructions on how to treat a shark bite. You have to admire their optimism.

My daughter, who has lived here for two years, seems to have absorbed some of this native sang-froid. (Not that your sang would be froid after a shark attack; no, your sang would be all over the sand).

“The thing is,” she says earnestly, “they’re not aggressive either. It’s just that they use their mouths to investigate.”

Which of course makes perfect sense. The poor things don’t have hands — they can’t reach out and touch a surfboard or a swimmer’s leg with their shark fingers. Which is why they reach out and bite with their shark teeth instead.

They mean no harm. They’re just being curious. They’re just having a nibble.

I nod sagely at her explanation, which she finishes with Australia’s favourite statistic: you’re far more likely to die in a car crash. Which is true of course. You are.

I decide to give the tide pool with the blue-ringed octopus a miss, and head between the lifeguards’ flags on the beach, to the narrow stretch of water designated safe to swim. 

The waves are huge. As the surf crashes around my plump tasty meaty thighs, the air fills suddenly with a high-pitched siren like the sound of a cartoon police car, wailing across the vast expanse of beach.

It’s a shark alarm. I leapfrog over the waves back onto the beach, my heart banging. We are only a headland away from where a local surfer confounded car-crash statistics in September by being eaten by a huge shark, but when I look around, nobody seems that bothered.

The shark alarm stops, and everyone carries on frolicking in the waves.

I lie flat on the safe dry sand, wondering if I might be having a heart attack. My daughter hands me a tube of Factor 50 and gives me a lecture about the dangers of the Australian sun.

“It can kill you, Mum”, she says sternly. “You need to take it seriously.”