When a fisherman slashed open the belly of a shark he'd caught at Lake Illawarra he got a shock - there was a human arm inside.
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In January 1962, Matt Lynch hauled in the 317kg black whaler on a handline just under 100 metres from the lake entrance.
He'd caught it at night and left it on a sandbank before returning the following morning to cut it open.
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The front page of the Mercury reported that a crowd of holidaymakers had gathered around the dead shark and witnessed the partially decomposed arm, severed at the elbow, being pulled from the body.
Police were called and took the arm to be X-rayed in the hope of finding some identifying features.
There was the belief it was the arm of William James McLeod who had drowned in the same spot just days earlier when his boat was capsized by a wave.
Despite being a strong swimmer McLeod disappeared under the waters of the lake and a search could not find his body.
Two weeks later an inquest into McLeod's death heard that efforts to identify the arm as his had failed.
Not surprisingly for a coastal city, shark stories have been a part of life for Illawarra residents.
Stories had routinely popped up in the pages of the Mercury detailing the cancellation of surf carnivals because a shark was spotted the water.
Sometimes all that had to happen was a shark to be around to warrant a story. It didn't matter that the shark hadn't bitten anyone, tried to bite anyone or even gotten within 20 metres of anyone, its mere presence was enough to get a few paragraphs in the paper.
It was a little pointless - it was highly unlikely the shark would still be there the following day when people read the story in the paper.
For some, sharks gave them a bit of notoriety - take Percy Sloan, for instance. In the 1910s and '20s, he was catching sharks off North Wollongong Beach.
One three-metre shark - dubbed "a monster" by the Mercury - was found to have somehow managed to eat a dog.
In what may be an urban myth, Sloan rode a shark into Wollongong harbour - dubbed Shark Alley by some because fishermen would throw offal overboard which attracted the beasts. The tale instantly becomes less impressive when the full story was told. The shark was dead at the time and being towed into harbour by a boat.
Another likely urban myth was the 15-metre long sea serpent "with fins like the sail of a boat" spotted off the coast of Bellambi in 1930. It sparked a wave of alleged sightings from Clifton down to Towradgi and yet, like the also mythical Loch Ness Monster, no-one managed to catch it.
However sharks were very real, with reports of people catching one appearing in the Mercury as early as 1871.
One of the earliest shark bite incidents occurred in 1922 when some guy named Hennessy was dangling his legs off a boat almost five kilometres off the coast of Port Kembla. It wasn't his feet that got bitten, though the shark did try for them.
Once it missed Hennessy, the shark chose to take a giant bite out of the boat instead.
In 1932 a shark had more luck with Thomas Starr at Bellambi. Starr was standing in the water with his boots off, catching lobsters from the rock when he felt something grab his foot.
A small shark had sunk in its teeth, leaving him with a laceration just over a centimetre deep.
Just under a decade later at Bellambi, a shark took issue with being caught by Robert Fee. When he landed the shark and tried to pull the hook from its mouth, the shark chomped down on his right hand causing some deep lacerations.
People didn't even need to be at the beach to run into a shark. In 1950, a Mr Hughes got into some trouble at Fairy Creek in North Wollongong.
He had been walking across the creek and was 10 metres from shore when he heard a splash behind him.
"I looked around and saw two fins cutting the top of the water," he said. "Needless to say I lost no time in making it to the bank."
That same year saw a 100-pound reward for anyone who could catch a shark and get it to Taronga Zoo, which was without a shark in a tank since the one they had died earlier in the year.
Three fisherman managed to haul in a 380-kilogram grey nurse out of nets off Austinmer Beach.
"Someone on board suggested he might be acceptable to the Sydney zoo," fisherman Charlie Mcauley said, "so we decided to have a go and tow him slowly back to Wollongong."
Six hours later they made it to Wollongong, where they kept it in the harbour overnight before a crew from the zoo came down with a large steel tank to take the shark back to Sydney.
It arrived in Sydney and was placed in a tank at the zoo - but Charlie and his mates never got their money. The shark had to live for a week for them to get paid; it only survived for four days.
Two of the worst attacks in the Illawarra happened in the 1960s. In February 1963 18-year-old Charles Dunn was mauled while skin-diving off Wombarra Beach.
The shark tore into Dunn's wetsuit and his legs, leaving gaping wounds that required 50 stitches. Dunn, who said he planned to sell all his skin-diving gear and give up the sport, felt the wetsuit had saved him from losing his calf altogether.
"I could have sworn the shark had swum off with my leg in its mouth," he said from his hospital bed.
Then, in 1966, a shark savagely attacked 13-year-old Ray Short at Coledale Beach.
Short, who was holidaying in the Illawarra with his family, was bitten while standing in chest-deep water. Rescuers dragged him to shore, only for Short to call out "it's still got me. Get him off."
The shark was still clamped onto his leg and did not let go until it was hit repeatedly on the snout with a surfboard.
Short spent three months in hospital, after surgeons managed to save his leg - but the shark did leave quite a few scars.
The teen asked for the teeth of the shark, which he passed onto the Coledale Surf Club as a way of thanking them for his rescue.
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