On the evening of 3 August 1914, after it had become clear that catastrophic war would soon break out in Europe, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey looked out the window from his office on Whitehall, London, and, as the gas street lamps below were being lit, famously remarked: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
The quote has since been widely repeated whenever people in western democracies feel powerless against the supposedly overwhelming forces of history. But it’s seldom been uttered in Australia. That’s because we Australians are not as morbidly fatalistic about powerful forces as Sir Edward was.
Rather than lament the dying of the light in Europe, Australian men signed up en masse to keep their European cousins’ lights burning, and fought with the sort of aggression and bravery that has defined our nation’s character ever since.
None of the historic forces since then – the Great Depression, another World War and communism – has seemed so formidable as to invoke in us Sir Edward’s feelings of powerlessness and pessimism.
Until now.
Australians have become increasingly, and depressingly, resigned to a future where everything is worse than it used to be: we live in smaller homes, eat blander food, consume dumber entertainment, buy goods with shorter life spans and passively watch as entire Australian suburbs are colonised by migrants who are deliberately accelerating our transformation into a Third World shithole.
As our metaphoric lights go out, so too do our literal ones, thanks to our increasingly erratic, expensive and inadequate energy production, which large sections of our population, brainwashed by environmentalism, mistakenly and wishfully call “progress”.
As this forlorn defeatism slowly darkens our formerly bright and sunny island nation, confirmation that we are no longer worthy descendents of our bold, pioneering predecessors comes from increasingly new and surprising places.
The latest one: surfers.
Since the 1960s, surfers have, more than most other groups of Australians, epitomised our fearless culture, happily scouring our own rugged coast for challenging adventures, then exploring even more dangerous coasts overseas. When the pursuit became a sport, we, through sheer exuberance and reckless abandon, won more world titles than our relatively small population deserved. Australian surfers were admired and welcomed almost everywhere they went.
Surfing World magazine, founded in 1962, has for most of that history recorded and reflected this wild Australian subculture. But the latest edition unequivocally, if unwittingly, announces that those wonderfully uninhibited, halcyon days are well and truly over.
The edition is a special, focusing on one specific topic: the danger presented to surfers by the increasing size and abundance of sharks inhabiting Australian waters.
In it, co-editor and co-owner Sean Doherty returns to Forster, NSW, the town of his youth, where he and other generations of surfers safely enjoyed plenty of uncrowded, quality waves from the 1980s till about 2015, when large, aggressive marine predators started moving in and spoiling the fun.
His piece includes the coastal equivalent of Sir Edward’s sad observation: “A decade after sharks moved in, it feels like the surf culture of the town is dying.”
Doherty’s lament is worse than Sir Edward’s, and not just because it’s less poetic. Sir Edward was anticipating the demise of modern civilisation, which he loved, because the world’s greatest armies, equipped with new weapons capable of industrial-scale slaughter, were squaring off across Europe.
Doherty is lamenting the demise of something he loves as dearly – surfing – because it is threatened not by a formidable foe but a stupid fish.
The solution to Doherty’s problem is simple: turn predatory sharks off our beaches into delicious fillets of flake, and, in the interests of justice, prosecute the politicians and bureaucrats who have for the past 25 years knowingly perpetuated the lie that sharks are both endangered and essential to maintaining the ecology of the ocean, a lie that has ended dozens of Australian lives and dramatically affected hundreds, if not thousands, more.
If Surfing World still adhered to the surfing culture it once represented, it would be emphatically advocating for the controlled management of the animals that are eating some of its readers.
Instead, as Doherty says, it passively explores “what happens for surfers when white sharks turn up one day and become part of daily life”, which, according to the magazine, includes fewer people going surfing, and enjoying it less when they do. As if magazines don’t have enough challenges without unquestioningly reporting on the disappearance of their own readership.
The edition does include some lighter moments, though. It quotes Murray Adams, who was bitten by a great white at a break in South Australia in 2023. His injuries were luckily not severe, although he was bleeding. He swam to the surface, saw the shark thrashing about in the water in front of him and thought, “What the fuck are you angry about? I’m the one who should be panicking.”
There’s also an incredibly inspiring interview with Kai Mckenzie, who lost a leg to a shark near Port Macquarie in 2024 and hasn’t let it affect his optimism and love of surfing in the slightest. The edition might be worth the $20 cover price for that story alone.
But the rest of the issue expresses a depressingly meek resignation to a problem that is perfectly solvable.
Dismiss this as a fringe cultural issue if you want, but it’s emblematic of our entire, increasingly defeatist culture. We aren’t just watching the lights of our wonderfully free and happy civilisation go out, we are extinguishing them ourselves.
