Crossing the Tideline

This episode I'm joined by Carl Musker from Sydney's Northern Beaches, one of the most shark-active stretches of coastline in the world right now. A Long Reef Boardriders member for more than 30 years, Carl is part of an alliance of surfers and community members who are pushing for stronger government action on shark mitigation. Carl is also a close friend of the Psilakis family and was surfing at...

On Father's Day, September 5 2021, Tim Thompson was fatally attacked by a shark while surfing at Shelley Beach, Emerald Beach near Coffs Harbour. He was 31 years old. His partner Katie Thompson was at home, eight months pregnant with their daughter Elka. She found out through a link to an ABC news article her mum sent her. Katie talks about the morning Tim died, an ordinary Sunday they had spent a...

Dan Webber is a journalist, surfer and longtime observer of the shark debate in Australia. He was in the water for two shark attacks during the Ballina cluster of 2014 and 2015, a two year period that saw twelve incidents across a 70km stretch of coastline between Evans Head and Byron Bay. Out of that experience he built the Ballina Shark Reports page, a real time community sighting tool that was...

Senator Peter Whish-Wilson has spent 14 years in Australian politics fighting for ocean and environmental protection. He's also a surfer and diver who uses deterrence himself, has had his own unannounced Great White encounters off the Tasmanian coast, and made the trip out to the Neptune Islands to observe deterrent testing firsthand. He's stepping away from the Senate mid-2026, and this conversat...

Easkey Britton is an Irish surfer, marine social scientist, writer and ocean advocate who has spent her life studying the relationship between people and water. Born into a surfing family on the northwest coast of Ireland, she competed internationally from the age of twelve and has spent the decades since trying to understand what the ocean does to us, and for us, and what we owe it in return. Thi...

In 2023, Brett Burcher had a close encounter with a Great White Shark while surfing at his local beach in Forster, NSW. The entire incident was captured on drone, in clear blue water, from directly above. He was a new father with a three month old daughter at home. That moment became the catalyst for Crossing the Tideline, a podcast sitting right at the line where certainty gives way to unpredicta...

Charlie Huveneers is a researcher and lecturer at Flinders University in South Australia, and one of the leading names in shark bite mitigation science in this country. For close to 20 years his team has been doing the fieldwork that most people only read about, testing deterrents on live sharks, studying Great White behaviour and trying to answer the questions that coastal communities are actuall...

Brinkley Davies grew up surfing the Yorke Peninsula and the West Coast of South Australia, two coastlines that have had more than their share of shark encounters, fatalities included. She is also a marine biologist, conservationist and diver who has spent years working alongside Great Whites, including three years on the cage diving boats out of Port Lincoln. That combination makes for a rare kind...

Dave Rastovich has spent more time in the ocean than most people spend indoors. A lifetime of surfing remote coastlines, alone, in all conditions, has given him a way of reading the water that is intuitive and deliberate. He has had to reckon with his own fear, now watching his son find his feet at the same breaks where he found his. This conversation goes to places I didn't expect. We talk about...

For over 27 years, Dr Chris Lowe has been studying Great White Sharks on the beaches of California - one of the most densely populated coastlines in the world. As director of the Shark Lab at Cal State Long Beach, his team uses drones, acoustic tagging and underwater cameras to track juvenile white sharks that spend their days metres from swimmers, mostly unnoticed. What they've found might surpri...