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Shark attacks and seriously injures woman swimming in Sydney Harbor: “I heard a soft yell for help”
A shark mauled a woman in the first attack in Sydney Harbor in 15 years, officials said Tuesday, sending her to hospital with a serious leg injury.
The predator struck Monday evening as the woman swam off a wharf at Elizabeth Bay, about 1.2 miles from Sydney Opera House, police said.
The woman suffered a “serious injury to her right leg,” New South Wales police said in a statement.
It was the first shark attack in Sydney Harbor since February 2009, when an Australian navy diver fought off a bull shark that bit him in the arm and leg in Woolloomooloo Bay.
Neighbors rushed to help the Elizabeth Bay victim, identified by the Sydney Morning Herald as 29-year-old Lauren O’Neill.
“I got home from work and sat down on the couch. I heard a soft yell for help just outside the window,” nearby resident Michael Porter told reporters.
Outside, he saw the woman trying to climb a ladder out of the harbor’s waters.
“Behind her was her leg, which was limp and all completely open and full of dark red blood behind her,” Porter said.
“She had obviously been mauled extremely badly by whatever shark it was that got her,” he said.
“We have always worried and known about sharks in the harbor,” he added. “It’s only now that it feels very real.”
A veterinarian living nearby gave first aid.
The woman was in a stable condition in intensive care at St Vincent’s hospital, a hospital spokesperson said.
She was expected to undergo surgery during the day.
Witnessed posted video of the aftermath on social media and the woman could be seen being transported on a stretcher to an ambulance, local media reported.
Bull shark likely responsible
Analysis of the shark bite and of images provided by the authorities confirmed “a bull shark was likely responsible,” said shark scientist Amy Smoothey.
Sharks are “more actively feeding” in low light at dawn and dusk, she told national broadcaster ABC, making it “potentially a high-risk time to be swimming”.
Scientists have tagged 87 large bull sharks in Sydney Harbor since 2009, said Smoothey, who works for the New South Wales department of primary industries.
Tagging indicated that bull shark numbers in the harbor were at their highest in the Australian summer months of January and February, she said.
“Shark bites are really rare although they are very tragic when they do occur and my thoughts are with the victim,” Smoothey said.
“There are very few interactions that occur in our enclosed waterways but we know that bull sharks are one of the top three species involved in shark bites.”
In February 2022, 35-year-old British diving instructor Simon Nellist was killed off Sydney’s ocean beach Little Bay in the first fatal attack in the city since 1963.
The International Shark Attack Files, a University of Florida group that aims to compile all known shark attacks, classified the attack on Nellis as “provoked.” But that doesn’t mean Nellist was responsible for his death, according to Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
At the time of the attack on Nellist, several people were fishing from the shore cliffs, Naylor told the Times of London. He said in his blog post that fishing is “known to attract sharks” even if bait or chum aren’t used.
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Britain’s Conservative Party on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as its new leader as it tries to rebound from a crushing election defeat that ended 14 years in power.
The first Black woman to lead a major British political party, Badenoch (pronounced BADE-enock) defeated rival lawmaker Robert Jenrick in a vote of almost 100,000 members of the right-of-center Conservatives.
She got 53,806 votes in the online and postal ballot of party members, to Jenrick’s 41,388.
Badenoch replaces former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who in July led the Conservatives to their worst election result since 1832. The Conservatives lost more than 200 seats, taking their tally down to 121.
The new leader’s daunting task is to try to restore the party’s reputation after years of division, scandal and economic tumult, hammer Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s policies on key issues including the economy and immigration, and return the Conservatives to power at the next election, due by 2029.
Alberto Pezzali / AP
“The task that stands before us is tough but simple,” Badenoch said in a victory speech to a roomful of Conservative lawmakers, staff and journalists in London. She said the party’s job was to hold the Labour government to account, and to craft pledges and a plan for government.
Addressing the party’s election drubbing, she said “we have to be honest — honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip.”
“The time has come to tell the truth, to stand up for our principles, to plan for our future, to reset our politics and our thinking, and to give our party, and our country, the new start that they deserve,” Badenoch said.
A business secretary in Sunak’s government, Badenoch was born in London to Nigerian parents and spent much of her childhood in the West African country.
The 44-year-old former software engineer depicts herself as a disruptor, arguing for a low-tax, free-market economy and pledging to “rewire, reboot and reprogram” the British state.
A critic of multiculturalism and self-proclaimed enemy of wokeness, Badenoch has criticized gender-neutral bathrooms and government plans to reduce U.K. carbon emissions. During the leadership campaign she drew criticism for saying that “not all cultures are equally valid,” and for suggesting that maternity pay was excessive.
Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, said the Conservative Party was likely to “swing towards the right both in terms of its economic policies and its social policies” under Badenoch.
He predicted Badenoch would pursue “what you might call the boats, boilers and bathrooms strategy …. focusing very much on the trans issue, the immigration issue and skepticism about progress towards net zero.”
Alberto Pezzali / AP
While the Conservative Party is unrepresentative of the country as a whole — its 132,000 members are largely affluent, older white men – its upper echelons have become markedly more diverse.
Badenoch is the Tories’ third female leader, after Margaret Thatcher and Liz Truss, both of whom became prime minister. She’s the second Conservative leader from a non-white background, after Sunak, and the first with African roots. The center-left Labour Party, in contrast, has only ever been led by white men.
In a leadership contest that lasted more than three months, Conservative lawmakers reduced the field from six candidates in a series of votes before putting the final two to the wider party membership.
Both finalists came from the right of the party, and argued they can win voters back from Reform U.K., the hard-right, anti-immigrant party led by populist politician Nigel Farage that has eaten away at Conservative support.
But the party also lost many voters to the winning party, Labour, and to the centrist Liberal Democrats, and some Conservatives worry that tacking right will lead the party away from public opinion.
Starmer’s government has had a rocky first few months in office, beset by negative headlines, fiscal gloom and a plummeting approval rating.
But Bale said that the historical record suggests the odds are against Badenoch leading the Conservatives back to power in 2029.
“It’s quite unusual for someone to take over when a party gets very badly beaten and manage to lead it to election victory,” he said. “However, Keir Starmer did exactly that after 2019. So records are there to be broken.”
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