Marcia Hathaway - in remembrance

I used to fish in a secret spot on the Middle harbour. I always felt uneasy there. Something dark and sinister was lurking. I wasn't suprised to find out why. Here's an article from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Forty three years ago today, on a sultry Monday of the Australia Day long weekend, Marcia Hathaway and her fiance Frederick Knight were wading in the shallows off Sugarloaf Bay in Middle Harbour. On the beach, two friends were gathering oysters while 20 metres away, three other companions were aboard the cabin cruiser Valeeta.

The very day they had set out on their boating picnic the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald carried a cautionary tale under the headline: Australia Day holiday surfers warned of sharks.

The Herald reported that on the day before, beach patrol aircraft had sighted 66 sharks off the Northern Beaches, shark alarms were sounded at eight beaches and Narrabeen was closed for two-and-a-half hours.

A former shark net contractor was quoted as saying that 95 per cent of shark attacks around Sydney occurred between December and February. "Surfers and harbour swimmers should take particular care for the next few days," he warned - prophetically, as it turned out.

As a journalist, you would have expected that Knight, a 38-year-old from Double Bay, might have been aware of the warnings. Maybe he thought that sharks weren't a threat in water that was less then a metre deep.

Who knows? But approximately five minutes after the couple entered the water, Hathaway, a 32-year-old actress from Milsons Point, was attacked by a shark. Although her fiance bravely fought off the creature, her injuries were so severe that she bled to death shortly after - the last person to die as a result of a shark attack in Sydney waters.

There are a couple of curious footnotes to this tragedy:

The floodlights that illuminate the sandstone facade of St Stephen's church in Macquarie Street were donated in memory of Marcia Hathaway. A plaque inside carries the following inscription: "The floodlights of this church were donated by members of the performing arts to the glory of God and in memory of Marcia N. Hathaway, actress and devout Christian, victim of shark attack in Middle Harbour 28/1/63." Apparently Hathaway, was one of thousands of Australian who "made a decision for Christ" during a visit to Australia in 1959 by the US evangelist, Billy Graham. She and her mother became regulars at the Presbyterian church opposite State Parliament.

- Stephen Hutcheon SMH