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MALE VOICE 1: If he does come at you, then you simply do not have a chance.
MALE VOICE 2: What we are dealing with here
is a perfect engine, an eating machine.
MALE VOICE 3: Monsters like these came to dominate the seas,
some 350 million years ago.
MALE VOICE 4: Never was an animal like that. Never!
The power and the aggressiveness of the thing is beyond belief.
MALE VOICE 5: Ancient Indians prized his teeth for arrowheads.
MALE VOICE 6: Of the man eater that is still at large.
And I know what a shark looks like because I've seen one up close.
MALE VOICE 7: You got a job. We got a panic on our hands.
MALE VOICE 8: The shark is always the winner.
VALERIE: Pyjamies.
Change of shirt.
And I'm good to go for Fiji.
And I'm going to be wearing a pink wetsuit for the bull sharks,
and I used to in the early days, and then I was asked
not to wear it anymore because it made me stand out,
and the bull sharks noticed.
Well, I thought that was good, but apparently it's not.
I'm looking forward to it because I'll be seeing a lot
of good friends.
I haven't seen them for more than a year.
I usually get out of the water screaming my head off with joy,
jumping around, "I love it. I love it." And I do, I love it.
And maybe...
maybe I'm a bit funny... Actually, but I do,
I just love going down there.
I love seeing that big bull shark, here. Going, "Ha!"
MALE TV HOST: Now the spearfishing, were you successful?
VALERIE: Well, I was pretty good at it.
I was about as good as a girl can get.
One day I was down there,
a shark came along and frightened us out of the water.
It's quite exciting.
VALERIE: They don't have hands.
They feel with their nose or in very few cases,
they feel with their teeth.
MALE VOICE: Val has a little bump on the bottom of her chin.
She said it's a shark's tooth.
I can feel it in there. It's very painful.
MALE TV HOST: Valerie, thanks for coming in.
You've been telling us for so many years that sharks are really nice fellows.
Well, I haven't changed my opinion.
FEMALE VOICE: Are you serious when you compare sharks to dogs?
VALERIE: Yes, because it's like any animal.
Once you get to know it and understand it,
you have a different attitude towards it altogether.
And there are all sorts of dogs.
And there are all sorts of sharks.
And the dangerous dogs probably bite more people, and kill more people
than the dangerous sharks in the world.
JEAN-MICHEL: We know so very little about what's in the ocean.
And Valerie was one of the pioneers.
Now, of course, her name was connected to sharks, sharks, sharks.
But she was doing many other things.
JEREMIAH: Most of us were afraid of...
Well, not afraid, but we were always cautious and concerned
when we saw a bunch of sharks around.
With the exception of Valerie,
who thought that was going to be a good time.
People were making a lot of bold claims about sharks and so on,
and how dangerous they were.
Valerie was the only one that I had met... (CHUCKLES)
...at that stage that felt
they weren't that dangerous, and you could actually
play around with them.
Long before anybody else.
VALERIE: The first time I ever could see underwater,
I was 14 years old...
and I saw a piece of kelp.
I thought it was amazing.
It was going to and fro and to and fro.
And I knew I had to see more.
I would slide into the water...
from the world we all know...
into another world.
A different world, alien.
I was not part of that world, I was just a visitor.
And I think that was the start.
My father had stomach ulcers, and he found it very easy to eat fish.
And you want to please your parents and I used to go out and spear him fish.
And I was very good at it.
Back in the '50s, there was so much marine life,
you learnt how to hunt.
How to stalk a fish while holding your breath.
The first shark I saw...
was a grey nurse.
I was just terrified, expecting to be attacked at any minute.
We got out and we were all right.
I just knew that they were killers.
MALE REPORTER 1: The main holiday hazard in Britain is the weather,
but in Australia, it's sharks.
WENDY: No one wants to be bitten by a monster.
When you think back to the '50s and '60s, the saying was,
"Good shark is a dead shark."
That was it.
MALE REPORTER 2: Outside the harbor, sharks are caught every day
by big game fishermen.
JEREMIAH: In those days, we didn't have the information that we have today.
Nature was considered a dark, evil, you know, space,
something to do with the dark side.
VALERIE: Spearfishing was nerve-racking, but every single step
of the way was an adventure, a step into the unknown.
And every time you did it, you came out with a little more knowledge.
I understood my prey.
I eventually joined a club. It was very exciting.
There were dozens of clubs through Sydney.
Spearfishing was very much a macho man's sport.
When they had the first lady spearfishing championships,
there were seven women.
There was about 700 men. There were just so many men.
MALE VOICE: (CHUCKLES) There we go.
WENDY: In the '50s, diving was a completely male culture.
I've talked with Valerie, about what it was like
to be a woman in this male-dominated culture.
Because it was that way, she had to be stronger and sharper,
better than everybody, to make it.
JEREMIAH: She was quite lethal.
She would've been the lady slayer back then.
JEREMIAH: And interestingly,
most of the great environmentalists and conservationists,
they all started with hunting.
Because they were the only ones who were out, involved in these things.
MALE REPORTER 3: Valerie is responsible for the boy's safety.
She will demonstrate how to deal with dangerous sharks.
This dangerous shark is the largest ever killed
by a lady skin diver anywhere in the world.
VALERIE: I've only ever killed one shark.
I wish I hadn't.
But at the time, there was no one to say, "This is a bad thing."
Only say, "Oh, very good."
Killed a lot of fish.
The attitude was there was so much life in the ocean.
You could take what you wanted, and never make a difference.
MALE REPORTER: A girl like Valerie Heighes knows that once she gets ready to dive,
she must also be ready to defend herself from the dangers
that are always there below the surface.
VALERIE: I think all mothers wanted their daughters
to get married and have children.
It's not that I didn't want children. I wanted to do other things.
I wanted to have my own special life.
VALERIE: Well, when I was 12, I was diagnosed with polio,
infantile paralysis.
VALERIE: They told me until I could walk I could not go home.
I hated it in there.
They started sending me books.
They sent me the great classics,
Lorna Doone, Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn.
I just loved those books, I read them over and over.
I read Huckleberry Finn so many times. It took me on a mental adventure.
I'd made up my mind I was going home.
I struggled and struggled every day.
And in nine weeks...
I walked out and my mother came and got me.
They said I couldn't and I did it.
VALERIE: I'm grateful that it didn't paralyze me for life.
I'd read those books and it made me see of all the possibilities in the planet.
I didn't know how to achieve any of them, but I knew they existed.
MALE REPORTER 4: But no one's anxious to be slaving over a hot stove,
least of all mermaid Valerie Heighes.
Anyone who's interested in having their picture taken by a mermaid,
just line up, please.
When someone like Valerie comes down here with a camera,
you can bet all the best-looking fellows will offer to pose for her.
VALERIE: The club used to have these trips, you know.
Ron was there, I noticed him because I used to see him spearfishing.
He was different from the other guys.
VALERIE: Ron had won four Australian National titles,
and the World Title at this stage.
He was the best.
I was looking for adventure in the underwater world,
and I used to take my 16-millimeter camera out with the team of spearfishermen
that I was with in those days. Just experimenting.
VALERIE: I used to be there, and he would ask me if I'd model for him.
And I was extremely flattered. Of course I'd model for him!
RON: I clearly remember the first time that I filmed Valerie underwater.
I was very interested in Valerie because she was very attractive.
VALERIE: I had fun. Just flirting away, I guess.
I made my own bikinis.
And then one day, Ron said, "I'm going to buy you a bathing costume."
It was yellow.
RON: She was interested in the underwater world like I was.
She was aggressive, she wasn't one of these wimpish women.
VALERIE: And then we decided to get married.
I was the woman spearfishing champion,
Ron was the world spearfishing champion.
We were at the top of the trade.
Ron and I discovered spearing a fish often attracted sharks.
RODNEY: During that period of time, divers were dragging
four or five fish through the water.
And of course we know now that if you want to attract sharks
you get fish blood, and you drag it through the water,
and so we were just bringing bait basically for a shark.
VALERIE: We heard about Rodney's shark attack with horror.
He was a friend!
RODNEY: There was 485 stitches in my chest,
and 94 in my hand here,
and every tendon except this one was broken.
They had to stitch them back again.
MALE REPORTER: Do you hope to continue skin diving one day?
Oh, I'll get in the water somewhere, sometime, but I don't know.
VALERIE: We knew it was a great white shark that bit him.
We were excited about the possibility of getting footage of this beast.
Rodney had the idea of doing a great white shark trip.
Of course I wanted to go at the time, but I couldn't go.
The owner and captain did not want a woman on board.
RON: Rodney arranged an expedition with Alf Dean.
Alf Dean held the world record for big game fishing
for great white sharks.
DOUGLAS: At the time, other people had photographed other sharks.
But there were no images of great white sharks alive, underwater.
RON: I'd never, ever seen it before on other people's documentaries,
so I could see the potential.
RODNEY: After a couple of days we pulled up at Memory Cove and Alf said,
"I've caught and seen quite a few sharks here."
So, he started his whale oil drip.
We got up in the morning, and saw great, big sharks.
DOUGLAS: The very first time I saw it, the hair stood up on the back of my neck
because it was such a big shark.
DOUGLAS: Holy cow! That's a mean-looking shark.
RODNEY: Ron actually sat on the duckboard at the back, filming some footage...
and saw submarines with teeth.
RON: I thought this was a very impressive animal.
I thought I had something unique there.
VALERIE: It's like liking a lion, I guess.
It's a special beast.
After that, I hate to say it, it was just kill, kill, kill.
RODNEY: On that trip, Alf thought it was his duty
to catch and kill as many sharks as he could, and we ended up on the boat,
five ten-to fourteen-foot great white sharks spread out.
And that was actually the first time I started to realize
we've got these great big, incredible animals,
just killed and lost forever.
VALERIE: I thought it was sad.
Really changed the way I looked at the world and spearfishing.
After that, Ron said, "Actually, killing fish upsets me.
"I'm not doing this anymore."
We put our spears down, and never did another competition again.
We said, "From now on, I'm shooting them with my camera."
SYLVIA: It was a personal revelation that made that transition,
experience that convinced them.
It wasn't somebody telling them, they could see for themselves.
And I admire that.
VALERIE: We were selling more and more footage for television.
They wouldn't just buy any underwater film...
they wanted dangerous marine animals. Or what they thought were dangerous.
They wanted drama.
And if I could be in the film fluttering around
amongst all these creatures,
that was even better.
Valerie would go down and just pick up anything
and bring it up and play with it and just... It was remarkable.
Here's this beautiful Australian gal doing all these crazy things
that nobody's supposed to be able to do.
VALERIE: Ron often asked me to do very dangerous things.
He used to call me sometimes "Give-it-a-go-Valerie,"
whether I was cooking a new food or...
diving with sharks. (CHUCKLES)
I wouldn't say I thought I was a Bond girl.
Everything thing I did was to make money.
Ron was always wanting new camera equipment.
He made all his own housings.
He was a genius.
I'd say the cleverest man I've ever met.
We did whatever we could to make a living
out of what we loved to do.
Do you want me to feed those little tiny fish,
or do you want me to save it up for the big trout?
There's not many of those little fish around.
We'll look for the tiny yellow shells in the dendrophilia.
DOUGLAS: Back in the 1960s,
there were a handful of people in the world
that were shooting film underwater. There was Hans Hass in Germany.
There was Stan Waterman in the United States.
There was Cousteau in the South of France.
VALERIE: We saw Jacques Cousteau on television.
He had a lot of money from the French government...
and he had a lot of people to help him.
Whereas, we didn't have any of that.
One thing we did copy a little bit from Captain Jacques,
he always wore a red beret.
So, I always wore a bright hair ribbon.
That was my trademark.
JEREMIAH: The Taylors were out there doing their thing.
They were owning and exploring, you know, the marine environment by themselves.
I mean, it was just Ron and Valerie.
This was the golden age of new underwater information.
VALERIE: Very little was known around the world about sharks
in those days.
You can watch it from the boat all you want.
You can cut it up and study everything about it.
It was like, "Oh, it will do this." And be a great scientist.
But you still haven't seen it underwater in action.
The first great white shark I saw
was like a freight train coming out of the mist.
VALERIE: It was magnificent.
After that, I never missed a trip to go out and see sharks.
I found them very exciting
and this little tin boat
is sort of freedom when you get on the ocean.
The whole world is yours.
We were both always thinking of ways to find an area where there's good sharks.
Marion Reef is in the middle of the Coral Sea.
A fisherman knew about it.
And he said, "There's a lot of sharks out there."
So we baited up and we realized this was a good spot to film.
VALERIE: So we got to know them better than most other animals.
Next year we went back,
and before we even dropped anchor,
the sharks came up to our tinny.
They knew the sound of our boat.
They knew there'd be food, and we realized a shark can learn.
And you can teach one a very simple trick very quickly if you want to.
I knew what would make a good image, I was a photographer.
There was a nice pink coral and I knew where the sun was going to set.
I started waving a bit of food around in front of the coral
and a whitetip came in straight away, and I bopped him on the nose,
and wouldn't give it to him.
Eventually, he came over to the pink coral and I gave him the food.
I did that twice and he knew if he swam over to the pink coral,
in a certain direction, he'd get a piece of food, just a small piece of fish.
And it worked. It worked.
The shot was exactly what I had planned.
They learn. Faster than you can teach a dog.
JEAN-MICHEL: (CHUCKLES) She had the courage to face up to a species
which we didn't know very much about in those days, connecting with nature,
and she was able to share her experience,
and adventures with the public.
She helped everybody, including us,
because she would show us what she was doing,
when historically we were staying away from them.
Well, she didn't.
She was the one getting close to it,
and she would follow it and she was fascinated
to learn not just about the way it looks, but the behavior of that fish.
VALERIE: And then we got our very big chance.
Blue Water, White Death was a film,
was dreamt up by Peter Gimbel, an American.
And he had a fascination with sharks.
And he wanted to make a feature film.
Peter had seen two of Ron's documentaries
and he knew we could work with sharks.
We're looking for the animal that I think is considered to be
the most dangerous predator still living in the world.
VALERIE: Peter Gimbel had us along to guarantee someone there
who knew how to handle these beasts.
And he gave us, Ron and I, the adventure of our lives.
We set off in search out of South Africa...
and we followed the whaling fleet
because they told us that huge great white sharks came in
to feed on the harpooned whales.
STAN: How far ahead of us are the other ships now?
Oh, now about...
As an underwater shooter, I just saw in it a wonderful adventure.
A search taking us to the Indian Ocean,
searching for the great white shark.
I think that Peter, and Ron, and myself, and Valerie gradually found our courses
narrowing down onto sharks.
This charisma that they have.
JAYNE: Blue Water, White Death was probably the first
of its type ever made.
And to have a female in there,
and a pretty blonde female in it with all those males.
Well, you're gonna use the far cylinder first.
We turn this one off and this one on,
-so I... -Yeah.
JAYNE: She had to earn her way on that boat.
I've got both.
-Which camera's going, Ron? -This one here.
MALE VOICE: There's a shark right under the bow!
RON: Hold it, there, there's the other one.
There's another one! There's another one. There are four down here now.
Four sharks. Now I've lost the other.
-MALE VOICE: There you go. -It's like trying to count chickens.
GIMBEL: With this amount of food in the water, we expect the great white...
but he doesn't come.
VALERIE: But other sharks came up from the great depths.
We never saw the bottom, there was no land.
We'd never encountered oceanic whitetips before.
The species of shark responsible for more human deaths
than all the other sharks in the world put together.
STAN: The idea of getting into the water, outside of the cage
in the middle of all of those sharks and everything was pretty mind-blowing,
but we thought we might get away with it.
VALERIE: When it was decided that we would leave the cage, I thought,
"Yeah, we'll die. Now we die."
Never for a second did I think of not going.
Carcharhinus longimanus, he's the one
that will take 200 people in the water after a ship sinks. They come in packs.
We had noticed that before they bit the whale,
even though it was dead,
the shark would bump it two or three times, then bite it.
And we figured that the shark would bump us before it bit,
and if we bumped them back hard
we could make ourselves a place in the pack.
The cameramen, they all had these giant housings
made out of metal.
I had a stick.
We went into another world.
A world that existed 20 million years ago.
We were accepted as other marine animals come to feed on the whale...
but only after we had made a place for ourselves with the pack.
It seemed, to some...
just plain foolhardy, what they were doing.
But what they did in the end was to provide the evidence
that if we mind our business, they mind theirs.
It's mutual respect.
You wouldn't believe! You couldn't believe!
It was fantastic!
Everything happened!
They hit the whale and blood went everywhere,
and Stan and Peter were miles away, they were just surrounded by sharks,
and look, there must've been a dozen sharks,
charging in on them all at once, and then
as Peter said, he just kept his finger on the button and spun in circles,
that's all he could do.
Well, certainly they were exhilarated when they came up from those dives
because they didn't know that they could survive it.
In those days, people didn't dive with sharks.
But, when you look at those images...
a hundred huge oceanic whitetip sharks,
that can't happen today.
There aren't enough sharks.
And those images, I think, represent a historical record
of what there was at one time, and that's incredibly valuable.
VALERIE: We were still looking for the great white shark.
PETER: I'm sorry and I won't... I'm not going to accept these predictions.
I still think we can attract a great white shark to this rig.
VALERIE: Ron and I tried to tell him where to go?
We knew we were in the wrong place.
Hello, darling. Hello, sweetie. Come on.
Eventually, Peter did listen.
We all went to South Australia.
MALE VOICE 1: Here he comes in now! There it is! The great white!
-MALE VOICE 2: Oh, he's gotta be 12. -PETER: Oh, yeah.
PETER: That is a great white!
STAN: The public loves, of course, danger.
Yeah, I said you'd get it. I knew you'd get it.
STAN: Add to that a beautiful woman.
You have a successful documentary in the makeup of it.
MALE VOICE 1: Tear it up! Hey! Hey!
VALERIE: I really didn't realize what a big film it was going to be.
MALE VOICE 2: Here he comes now, right up!
I bet Gimbel's elated with joy in there!
MALE VOICE: Right up towards the cage!
CARL: There was a genius in the making of the movie.
Valerie set the standard by being the first glamourous female
to go out and have these dangerous adventures,
and I was hooked.
Get back in, Ron! Silly fool.
I don't know what he's doing out of the cage.
-There, look at him! -MALE VOICE: Where is he? Where is he?
VALERIE: Sitting on top of the cage.
JAYNE: I'm from a little village in Wales, and our local policeman,
he had posters of her up on his wall as a child. (CHUCKLES)
It's worldwide! She was really, really out there.
MALE VOICE: Get in, Valerie. Get your hands inside that cage.
Valerie in Blue Water, White Death, she was a revelation to me.
She was strong.
VALERIE: There were no divers anywhere who hadn't seen Blue Water, White Death.
And among them was a diver called Peter Benchley.
WENDY: Valerie and Ron were definitely Peter's idols.
He was aware of the excitement of sharks.
Peter had an idea for a novel about a fish,
and I said, "Peter, I just don't think that's gonna work."
RON: Universal Pictures got us a book from Peter Benchley called Jaws.
VALERIE: They sent us the galley proofs and a letter saying,
"Do you think this story would make a good feature film?"
We both read it and Ron wrote back and said, "Yes."
Please help me! Help!
Now this is not a boat accident, and it wasn't Jack the Ripper.
(SIGHS) It was a shark.
VALERIE: Jaws was our first big Hollywood deal.
Ron said, "I've got to do a good job here, it could be important."
They had already decided that Steven Spielberg
was going to be the director.
He said, "Get the live white shark footage first."
VALERIE: We had done this sort of thing so often,
going out and trying to get a performance out of a shark.
I was pretty proud to get a call asking me if I could organize a major expedition.
And at that time quite young and I was pretty excited.
Peter postulated in Jaws that the shark was a big one, a 16-footer.
And, of course, Spielberg decided to make it into a 25-foot shark.
And this caused a lot of toing and froing between Universal and Ron,
backwards and forwards.
Steven Spielberg was very young.
It was his second major film. He looked, to me, like a teenager.
RON: I said, "Steven, there is a problem here.
"Our white sharks are only about 13-feet long."
He said, "No problem. We'll send down a half-size man and half-size cages."
VALERIE: Everything we filmed was half-size
to make our sharks look bigger.
RODNEY: Skippy was my abalone dive boat.
We used my little boat as the stand-in for the boat in the Jaws movie.
You're gonna need a bigger boat.
VALERIE: They sent out this little man called Carl Rizzo.
He was a half-sized man, perfectly formed.
RODNEY: Who used to actually be a stand-in for children
on horseback riding and stuff.
The little guy comes up to me, and he says to me,
"When they pump oxygen into you,
"do you have to suck it in or is it pushed in?"
Which, I knew straight away, he had no idea how to dive.
VALERIE: He was allergic to the sun, he was allergic to salt water,
and he was very allergic to sharks.
And I remember when he saw his first great white,
he was very nervous.
He looked at this big thing swimming out behind the boat,
and he said, "I should've asked for more money."
SHAW: If I can get him close enough to this cage,
-I think I can get him in the mouth... -That shark will rip that cage to pieces!
You got any better suggestions?
RODNEY: I'm in the small half-size boat looking after him,
and I wound him down in the winch.
When Carl saw those great white sharks swimming around, he was terrified.
The director yelled out, "Quick, pull up Carl.
He's drowning, he's drowning!"
So, I wound him to the top, and I was saying,
"What's the matter? What's the matter?"
And he said, "My mask. My mask, it was filling up with water."
VALERIE: It was his reluctance that saved his life.
RODNEY: I was about ten meters down, filming up.
There's a shark there and I'm thinking, "Why isn't Carl getting in the cage?"
VALERIE: Rodney was about to pick him up and pop him in.
And the shark came in, and it bumped into the cage,
and got its head stuck in the bridle.
MARTIN: Pull him up. Pull it!
VALERIE: And I picked up the 16-millimeter camera,
and I shot it on film.
When we were shooting the Australian sequences
of the great white sharks.
One of the great white sharks jumped into the cage boat.
There was a horrible cracking sound, the bit of the decking
where the winch was attached to the boat broke off.
MALE VOICE: It's getting away!
VALERIE: I saw Rodney pull Carl back.
The shark grabbed between its jaws, which can close and squeeze
at 21 tons per square inch, grabbed and twisted the cage,
and then sounded with the cage.
RODNEY: And everything broke off and came tumbling down past me.
VALERIE: The shark got out of it and swam away.
We had what we call a good performer.
It wasn't in the script...
but they put it in because it was good.
Well, how'd you get sharks to do that?
How did they get a shark to do all those things on cue?
VALERIE: Well, we better not tell her the secret.
Well you have to... You put them in training
-at least three weeks before the film. -VALERIE: Yes, training.
MALE VOICE: The 1975 release of Jaws is considered
the first Hollywood blockbuster.
FEMALE VOICE: Have you seen Jaws?
Who hasn't seen Jaws by now?
Tale of a murderous white shark on the loose.
RODNEY: We just absolutely had no idea
that people would be queuing up for miles to see it.
FEMALE VOICE: The line is about 12 people
-abreast around the block. -MALE VOICE: Yeah.
-Wonderful. Just wonderful. -FEMALE VOICE: Yeah.
Ron and Valerie Taylor! Yeah!
VALERIE: It was very well done.
And we never expected this to happen, the reaction.
RODNEY: We thought it would just be a third-rate Hollywood B-grade movie
that hardly anybody would ever see.
MALE REPORTER 5: It has already made more money than any motion picture in history.
And, of course, I jumped out of my seat just like everyone else,
'cause the whole theater explodes with terror.
MALE REPORTER 5: And some people are now seeing phantom sharks
every time they go near the water.
People always come up to us and ask us on the tower,
-"Is that Jaws?" Or whatever. -I'm too young to die.
CARL: I can't tell you how many people said,
"You go diving in the ocean? It's full of sharks!"
When I saw Jaws, I was very devastated because I said,
"Nobody's gonna want to go in the ocean."
VALERIE: Jaws is a fictitious story.
And it not only astounded Ron and I, but it astounded Universal,
and Richard Zanuck, and David Brown.
But the public believed it.
Shark!
VALERIE: We were amazed.
You don't walk around New York worrying about King Kong.
It must be an instinctive subconscious fear of being eaten alive.
Smile, you son of a...
Ha! (LAUGHS)
VALERIE: But Jaws did... It did set things back.
The thing that I regret is that people went out and killed sharks everywhere.
We became very upset by this.
MALE VOICE: Wow! What a ripper! Million-dollar film!
Ho! Ho! Ho!
PETER: Valerie and Ron Taylor, the great Australian cinematographers
and divers, called me and said,
"People are going out on these slaughter trips
"to prove some sort of macho nonsense about themselves.
"And sharks are being killed left and right, and we are worried
"that there may be actually an endangerment of some of the species."
VALERIE: Peter Benchley said he'd have never written the book
if he had known what the aftermath would have been.
HOST: People who saw the movie Jaws are afraid of sharks.
Have we reason to be afraid of them?
You should treat them with caution,
but you don't go around being afraid of motor cars.
Universal took Ron and I to America, and we toured the States,
doing every talk show, telling people
that sharks were not like the shark in Jaws.
RON: But there's an interesting point that not all sharks are dangerous.
You say that sharks are not dangerous, and yet both of you took part
in two movies that portray sharks as being very dangerous.
How do you justify something like that?
We have been criticized for promoting sharks
as being man-eaters and dangerous.
But Jaws is actually a fictional film, but it's such a realistic film
that people tend to believe sharks are dangerous.
I don't think that people should stay off the beaches
because they're afraid of being attacked by a shark.
They're much more likely to fall over and break a leg on the way to the beach
than they are of being attacked once they're in the water.
Ron, Valerie Taylor, thank you very much. We'll be right back after this message.
Take the whole jaw out, teeth fall out, you put 'em on a gold chain
and then go to the movie and see Jaws, everybody thinks you're the best.
VALERIE: I feel if there's a shark in the area
and the swimmer stays relatively calm,
there's a very good chance the shark will look at him, say,
"Well, I don't want that," and go away.
When they start panicking,
there's a very good chance they'll get bitten.
HOST: Once a shark bites, what does it do to the rest of you?
Most sharks just let go. They test with their teeth.
FEMALE VOICE: We have the fresh teeth that have been pulled out
of a shark recently.
MALE VOICE 1: We ran out of shark's teeth, out of shark's jaws.
MALE VOICE 2: It's just a killing machine.
It's more dangerous to have a backyard pool. Did you know that?
MALE VOICE: Just wish we had more of it to sell.
FEMALE VOICE: I find them very frightening, as a matter of fact.
They didn't listen to me. Frankly, they didn't care.
The killing still went on.
Yes, what, what? Oh, well, that's it, isn't it?
What about you? What are you up to?
Jaws gave all sharks a bad name.
You know, there are over 400 species of shark in the ocean.
-Come on. -Maybe five or six
are potentially dangerous.
Most sharks are totally harmless, like the grey nurse shark.
DOUGLAS: Here you have a grey nurse shark that looks like this fierce animal.
Because their teeth are hanging out of their face,
people think, "We've gotta kill that shark."
I mean, they were completely exterminated off the coast of Florida.
And that same thing could've happened in Australia.
They were being slaughtered.
So I started writing letters.
And I pleaded with the politicians.
And I wanted the grey nurse to be totally protected.
As a spearo, I had killed one grey nurse...
and now I wanted to save them.
I needed to save them.
Once I get my teeth stuck into an idea, I don't let go.
There's nothing like having a good piece of underwater film
and saying, "See, it's harmless. It's like a dog."
I kept at them, and at them, and at them.
It worked. It's now legally protected.
You know, it was the first shark in the world to be protected.
JEREMIAH: Valerie led the way.
A huge piece of what conservation has become today
all began, you know, with those little grey nurse sharks.
CARL: Valerie tried to explain and soften the ignorance
to create an audience of...
shark lovers.
There was that occasion where they actually had a shark
that was tangled in a wire and they cut it loose.
VALERIE: When you see a great white struggling for life, you want to save it.
CARL: Towing a shark tail first is something you or I might hesitate.
They did not hesitate.
Yes, there was risk, they put that aside. They instinctively helped the animal.
VALERIE: Pretty dangerous thing to do.
But that shark knew exactly what we were doing.
CARL: Wow, not a sign of aggression. Remarkable moment.
VALERIE: It swam out to sea...
and was caught by a fisherman five months later.
Conservation? There is no such thing on killer sharks,
because the general public realizes they're killer sharks
and that's all there is to it.
VALERIE: Great white sharks are in big trouble.
They're a very big animal, they live a long time,
and they breed very slowly.
I have a file that must be half an inch thick of letters I've written
to have the great white shark protected before it's too late.
You know what they're doing? They're actually feeding that garbage
to the government.
Telling them that they're an endangered species and all that.
They ought to be in jail.
VALERIE: The only sharks he knows, the only sharks he works with,
and he does it from the safety of the back of his boat I might add,
are sharks that are fighting to survive.
Those sharks he catches are trying to escape.
They want to live, just as you or I would try to escape,
and want to live if someone hooked us in the mouth.
MALE VOICE 1: This is the stuff nightmares are made of.
MALE VOICE 2: Shark. The very word
is enough to scare most people out of their wits.
MALE VOICE 3: Great white sharks have no peer when it comes to terror.
VALERIE: Anti-conservationists call sharks "God's mistakes."
It's just a heap of rubbish.
They have been around unchanged for millions of years.
That's not a mistake.
RON: Twenty-four hours a day, they're on the prowl.
VALERIE: I don't really think that a shark swims around saying,
"A-ha! There's a human, I must swim up and eat him."
They don't think like that.
RON: There's gonna be a major problem.
VALERIE: Ron and I decided to prove to the general public
that sharks were not out to get us.
I first got the idea for a suit of mail in 1967 when I saw a commercial diver
protecting his hands with butcher's gloves.
VALERIE: Ron made a decision
that we would try ourselves out as shark bait.
Marine biologist Jeremiah Sullivan
has traveled from America to join the operation.
JEREMIAH: At the time, I was just a young student.
I was studying the sensory systems of sharks as a marine biologist.
The shark suit provided us an opportunity to do things
that have never been done before, to really learn something.
VALERIE: Everything you do in life is a calculated risk.
Even a cup of tea could burn you.
If only he would bite me instead of the fish,
it would be a good test of the suit's protective qualities.
SYLVIA: When I heard about Ron and Valerie's desire to test the theory
that it's really dangerous to go in the water, period,
because there's sharks, period, that they will eat you, period.
And Ron and Valerie wanting to show that, you know, it's not that way.
You can bait yourself. "Well, come and get me."
And the sharks had to be encouraged somehow.
JEREMIAH: We still didn't really know what would happen
with shark bite pressure.
I knew what probably would happen, but now, this was the real deal.
VALERIE: Scientific opinion had the crush power
of a shark's jaw as very serious indeed.
Eugenie Clark, the great shark expert,
said I would have the imprints of the mesh on my bones.
The sharks don't have crush power.
This is a misconception.
We knew how they would bite.
They rely on the cutting edge of their teeth.
They try to saw through the metal and nothing happens.
They can't get anything in. And we proved it with the mesh suit.
RON: The editors of National Geographic wanted to use the story,
and they sent our story to some American shark experts,
and they rejected it as a hoax.
But then we showed the editors our film.
And the editors realized that the experts were wrong.
The editors gave their referees a kick in the backside.
JEREMIAH: It's been 40 years that they've been manufacturing
these things on a commercial level.
Now, there's a global shark diving industry, about a billion dollars a year,
that, to a certain degree, has been built out of the information
that was gathered by use of the suits that Ron and Val and I
started playing with so long ago.
VALERIE: It used to be brilliant for blue sharks.
Back then, we saw them every day.
They're a nice shark. All the ones that bit me are all dead now.
They were finned.
They're gone, they didn't deserve that.
RON: There's a big market for sharks.
The shark fin is being taken in enormous numbers.
And you just can't continually take something unless you replace it.
In the last twenty years, with the increase
of the middle-class in China,
and the increase in shark fin soup consumption...
there were 100 million sharks killed every year for twenty years.
VALERIE: Sharks are part of a web of life. We've just interfered.
It's a terrible thing to kill a beautiful wild animal for its fin.
Just like killing an elephant for its tusk, and the tiger for its skin.
You can't expect a fisherman on a little island
to not catch sharks for their fins,
and sell them to the Chinese traders.
It means good money.
I used to climb on to the shark finning boats...
and take photographs.
And one day, there'll be very few sharks left.
And these photographs will be proof of where they went.
Shark pics. How many, many, many. Sharks, sharks, sharks.
SYLVIA: We only have ten percent of the sharks left.
And it really is all about knowing, that leads to caring.
Come on. These are magnificent creatures,
every one an individual.
VALERIE: Look at them.
SYLVIA: Every one deserving of our respect.
VALERIE: Here's one of my old shots that I really like.
SYLVIA: We just need to think differently.
VALERIE: See how he smiles. Big smile on his face.
The only way to halt the complete decimation
is to make enormous marine national parks
where you cannot take a thing.
For a long time, we could guarantee great white sharks
off Port Lincoln, South Australia.
Hello, sharkies!
RON: Right on top.
That's a different one! That's Maria, I'll bet you.
RON: Fins right out in the water.
Let me look. I bet it's Maria.
JAYNE: She'd love the whole world to be protected
if she had half a chance.
Sweetness. Come on.
RON: Shark.
JAYNE: But particularly in South Australia, you know,
it has been a huge part of her life.
-RON: Welcome back. -VALERIE: Hurry, hurry! She's coming back.
RON: Hurry. She's coming back.
And great whites, I think Valerie would chain herself to a cage
if she thought somebody was going to kill one unnecessarily.
Just to show that, "Hey, it's not gonna hurt me."
VALERIE: I wanted to show all sharks have different personalities,
and I've never seen anybody hand-feeding a great white shark
off the back of a boat.
There were three sharks around. And one was very sweet.
I wanted to give that nice shark, it was a boy shark, my fish.
Mark, my nephew, was so worried about it. He hung on to my shirt, and I thought,
"That's not going to do any good.
"If this thing grabs me, all you'll have left is a handful of shirt."
Don't tell me they don't have personalities. They do.
JAYNE: We need people like Valerie out there to do that.
And she went through government to get that area protected.
Thankfully, it happened.
It was named Ron and Valerie Taylor Marine Park.
I think it's ironic that the same place where they filmed Jaws
is now a place where great white sharks are protected.
VALERIE: When we made our first shark film, Ron said,
"Well, we've done the shark film, now we'll go to something else."
We were still doing them.
And we couldn't make a living doing the same thing with a butterfly.
Gee, it'd have to be some butterfly.
Our marriage was a type of adventure.
Ron, he liked me to be in front of his camera.
He liked me to be diving with him.
And it's not just loving someone. You can love a lot of things.
There's all sorts of love.
VALERIE: He didn't feel very well.
And he went to our doctor.
And the doctor said he has acute myeloid leukemia.
He said it's always fatal.
Getting ready for a night dive.
I like night diving.
It's very interesting because you see critters at night
that you don't see during the day.
MALE VOICE: All right, guys! Good luck, guys! Learn lots!
Bye!
JAYNE: You'd never see Valerie afraid of anything.
She knew he was going to die.
But she didn't face it.
VALERIE: I didn't think Ron would ever die.
I'd look at that beautiful man and think that, "He can't die."
He was quite beautiful.
I thought.
FEMALE ANNOUNCER: Ron Taylor and his wife Valerie gave away hunting to become famous
for their dedication to marine conservation.
Mr. Taylor died peacefully at a private hospital
near his Sydney home this morning.
VALERIE: I do miss him. I miss him so much.
He was everything.
Mostly, I miss just cuddling up in bed, really.
I go to bed and there's no Ron.
It's a sort of lonely thing. I take a pillow.
I put it on my left side, my pillow.
Ron and I did our last dive together in Fiji with the bull sharks.
It was special.
-Hello. -FEMALE VOICE: Hi. Bula.
-Bula. -FEMALE VOICE: (CHUCKLES) Bula.
MICHELE: I know, personally, that it's been difficult at times
for her to dive places that she dived with Ron.
I remember her saying that she thought she would never be back there again.
DOUGLAS: There's a lot of memories involved.
Ron and Valerie were instrumental at the beginning of getting
this great conservation success story started.
They became very, very involved with the local community.
Due to overfishing, you had a completely dead reef, no fish on it, nothing.
And over time, by feeding the sharks, now it's the only place I know of
where you're likely to see as many as 80 or 100 bull sharks.
-VALERIE: Ben! -Hi!
-(SPEAKS FOREIGN LANGUAGE) -VALERIE: Ah!
-How are you? -VALERIE: I'm good.
Welcome home. Welcome home.
-Thank you so much. -Thank you.
How was your trip?
-Okay. So, you're going to look after me? -I will.
You're going to find it hard.
-Why is that? -I'm so old.
-No. -And I hurt.
I'm still young.
-Yeah! Good. I like that. -(CHUCKLES)
-And you're very strong, I can tell. -Thank you so much.
I understand that you have a nice pale wetsuit, is that right?
I have a pink wetsuit, but I've...
-Wow. -...hurt my shoulder...
-Mm-hmm. -...and I can't get it on. Anyway.
-BEN: Sad. -I better get myself organized.
VALERIE: Oh, my fingers. Poor old fingers.
Concentrate. Concentrate.
Ouch. Never mind. It's all right.
Every dive has the potential to be a great adventure.
People think you're mad, but you're not.
It's something that many people would love to do, but they're too afraid.
I guess there's always the chance a shark could make a mistake,
and that's what it would be. A mistake.
BEN: Good morning, Valerie!
-G'day! (LAUGHS) -Good morning!
-MICHAEL: Good morning, Valerie.
-Oh, Michael! -MICHAEL: Yes.
Oh, darling!
-How are you? -I missed you!
VALERIE: The village that owns the reef, protects sharks.
And they guard it like it's a rare jewel,
which it is.
And it has made the village much richer and given work to the village people.
So we're probably gonna see bull sharks coming from here,
and grab the tuna heads just above us.
This is our favorite part.
-Gently go on there. -(GROANS)
I'm sorry. Sorry, darling.
There we go. We've got you all sealed up here.
VALERIE: Yeah.
I am ready, I can't believe it. Oh, no I'm not.
-(MALE VOICE CHUCKLES) -All right. There you go.
MALE VOICE: Thanks.
VALERIE: Someone is going to have to get me up.
MALE VOICE: There's three big Fijians here!
-VALERIE: I like that! -MALE VOICE: All right!
Good air. Plenty of air.
-I'll jump. -BOATHAND: Over here.
VALERIE: Nature made the perfect animal.
That wonder has never gone away.
It's a survivor from long ago.
VALERIE: Underwater is wonderful.
It's a great feeling, and so many people don't really understand it
because they feel it's full of dangers, which it isn't.
I will probably be diving when I'm in a wheelchair.
There's no gravity. I can fly.
-Hello. -MALE VOICE: Hello.
It's a fabulous area down there.
It certainly is.
Very rich. Terrific corals.
Well, a shark hit me. I hope they got it.
Did you see the shark hit me?
Yes. A nice display.
-It didn't mean it. -BEN: Yeah.
It was only his tail.
I think some of them probably recognized you.
-I think so. -BEN: You were so close.
-VALERIE: Yeah. They come in. -(CHUCKLES)
I do know them. Like, I've known them for a long time I think.
SYLVIA: No one can do everything.
And Valerie has clearly done more than her share.
But there is cause for hope.
And all we have to do is look at Valerie and say,
"Look. Look what she's done, why not you?"
Anyhow...
here's to the sharks!