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........... ........... ............
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| 2 Nov. 2000 |
Girls, Murder and Dunlop Rubber: 'The Shark Net'
Verity Morgan
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Robert Drewe. The Shark Net — Memories and
Murder. Penguin Books, 2000. RRP A$38.30. |
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Robert Drewe has an unhealthy interest in
sharks. He thinks of them every time he dives into the sea. He even recalls
driving along the coast wishing for a shark attack, just so he — a young up and
coming journo — could write about it. To his disappointment, there are no
attacks and instead he writes about the dangers of man-eating sharks, using the
'the State's leading ichthyologist' for authenticity (ignoring
the scientists exasperated comment of 'You've got more chance of
dying from a bee sting'). However, when his article is published, it is
not his own story he reads in the paper, but one about a friend who drowned at
the local beach.
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1 |
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Drewe had left him body surfing just the
day before, and as he read the story he couldn't shake the idea that he
already knew the tragedy had happened: 'It seemed like I'd known
many things like this for the past year or more, things I'd mysteriously
witnessed, or hadn't acted on.' It is this notion of an ominous
undercurrent in his otherwise sunny and fairly happy youth in Perth which Drewe
manages to evoke so beautifully in his first book-length venture into
non-fiction, The Shark Net.
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2 |
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His opening line 'One night at a
time when people were being mysteriously murdered where we lived, and the police
had just fingerprinted my father and me...' is hardly your average foray
into suburban experience, and hardly one that can be ignored. In what follows,
this book proves to be no ordinary memoir.
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