John Grissim's profile on Australian national champion Kim McKenzie ran in the November 1974 issue of Tracks. This version has been slightly edited.

We were sitting at the table inside Kim McKenzie's snug little caravan when a thunderstorm broke the warm night stillness. The sound of the nearby surf gave way to pelting raindrops. Kim adjusted the flame on her propane lantern, then stared into space momentarily as she chased down a memory: “We once went up the coast about seven hundred miles. Five days at five knots and it was beautiful—moonlit nights and calm seas and the engine chugging away below decks. We’d camp in little bays and leave the next morning with Dad doing the navigating. We ventured into rivers completely uninhabited by humans, only wild pigs. One time we got caught in a storm and had to anchor in a bay for two days while it blew over, so we broke out our lines and fished and enjoyed it all.”

Just then a gust of wind rocked the caravan on its moorings. More talk of fishing with hand lines — and of a first encounter with a familiar prey: “You can always tell when you have a shark. It cruises right under you and keeps right on going as though it couldn't care less. The first time I hooked one on a line I was just a wide-eyed little girl. We were night fishing. The water was full of phosphorous. I thought I’d tied onto a slow-moving train. I pulled it up and all I could see alongside the entire length of the boat was this huge grey mass floating in this cloud of glowing green phosphorescence. I mean HUGE — at least fifteen feet, it was longer than the boat. I almost fainted. The thing was probably snoozing and wasn’t too aware of me, let alone irritated. It sure was eerie.”

She laughed, not girlishly but with heart, her teeth flashing in the lantern light. A tanned face around which cascaded this wonderfully unruly mop of fine ash-blond hair. Kim McKenzie can tell you a lot of great stories to pass the time when the sea is too rough for sharking or surfing. Lord knows, she’s collected a few during the past twelve years of going to sea, remarkable for a woman of 23. But then Kim McKenzie is very likely one of the most remarkable — and unique — young women in Australia today.

For starters, she is a fine surfer, having dominated women’s surfing competition in this country for the last two years, finishing first in the Queensland titles as well as winning the ’73 and ’74 National Championships. This is no mean feat considering she has had to overcome strong challenges by Judy Trim of NSW, Victoria's Gail Couper, and fellow Queenslander Phyllis O’Donell, the 1964 Women’s World Champion. Moreover, during this same period Kim has worked closely with her father Roy McKenzie who has a government contract to maintain shark meshing nets along the rugged 50-mile stretch of coastline from Noosa Point to the southern tip of Bribie Island. This year Kim was given authority to skipper her father’s 23-foot shark cat, a specially modified twin hull craft for this tricky and often dangerous job.

Recently, when word of her reputation as a sportswoman and “sharkie” reached the publicity-conscious government agencies responsible for promoting Australia abroad, Kim was written up in a series of press handouts released through Aussie consulates overseas. The article, together with her picture, appeared in a score of newspapers in a dozen languages throughout Europe, the Middle East and India. She is known today around the world as the Shark Lady of Australia and in fact has received many letters so addressed from readers everywhere (though she’s quick to add she’s not the only woman sharkie). Ironically she has gone largely unnoticed in her homeland—and she's quite happy to leave it that way. She’s not interested in stardom, let alone sensationalism.

But it is hard NOT to be sensational about someone with those credentials. Still, I had no idea what to expect when a couple of weeks ago on a sultry afternoon I stepped off the plane to meet Kim. She was barefoot and wearing corduroy shorts and a colorful peasant blouse over her bikini — along with a white shell necklace and a floppy wide-brimmed straw hat. Minutes later I was sitting in the passenger seat of her in her blue high-performance Toyota Celica LT, (complete with mag wheels, four-on-the-floor and black-primed bullet nosed side view mirrors on Swiss cheese mounts), listening to Carly Simon and James Taylor wail through “Mockingbird” at high volume on the eight-track, and heading for Caloundra for a quick surf (her second of the day).

Kim had already done a four-hour shark run that morning. PLUS — as we loped along the backstretch at an easy 60mph, she laid out this very together rap about her background, her job, life in a small town and the people around her. No nervous laughter, no games, no flirtation, no jive — just upfront and straight ahead.

It was Sunday afternoon and the pleasant two-to-three foot beachbreak at King's was crowded but Kim found no difficulty getting waves. No one dropped in on her. Not surprisingly, she looked very smooth. Later, after I checked into the Mooloolaba Lodge (a great little bed and breakfast place, by the way), I joined her for tea in her caravan (chicken and steamed veggies), after which we sorted out her life story.

The second of four children, Kim was born in Chatswood, Sydney, then moved to the Maroochydore area when she was three. Her father, a shipwright and fisherman, bought a fish shop in Mooloolaba where both Kim and her older sister worked off and on. At 14, she went to Maroochydore High School, eventually dropping out in her second year. “School was unimportant and they only wanted to keep me in 'cos I was so good at sports — mainly swimming and running. But I was hopeless otherwise. Besides, I was working at my dad's shop and I wanted to get a car and a surfboard.”

Over the next eight years she spent a lot of time at sea, sometimes fishing with hand lines with her father from a 20-foot boat, then later helping him build a 35-foot trawler aboard which they plied the night waters for king prawns. “The sea has been my life ever since I was twelve and I really love it. Surfing, too. I started in 1963, mostly in the Noosa to Caloundra area — beachbreaks, nothing too impressive. My older sister surfed also. In fact, there were half a dozen of us girls. My first board was a nine-foot balsa with three stringers, a round nose and a deep fin — really a fun board. Later on, of course, I went to McTavish’s board — a vee bottom, short, like seven-foot eight-inches. That was in ’68, a big year for the short boards.”

That same year marked her entrance into the Queensland titles after winning a number of local contests. “There were about fourteen girls competing. It was held at Snapper Rocks and it was big and hairy, a solid six feet — and I was scared (laughs). Phyllis O’Donell was in it and also Josette Lagardere. With Phyllis in there I knew I didn’t stand a chance. But it’s funny, while I’ve hardly ever beat her in the state titles, I often finished ahead of her in the nationals.”

For the record, Kim finished sixth in the ’68 titles (“but I was still stoked”), came in third in the state contests over the following three years (but wasn’t allocated a berth in the nationals due to technicalities), then in ’72 finished second in Queensland and second in the nationals (Gail Couper and Judy Trim finished first and third respectively). Since then she’s won both the state and national titles two years running.

The rain abated as the dinner dishes were moved aside to make room for the teapot. A cockroach scampered from under a fruit bowl and Kim grimaced. “Cockroaches, yech! I can’t stand ’em! Cockroaches and mice. They make me nervous. Gonna have to get the place fumigated.”

I asked her about the board she was now riding. “It’s six-foot-ten, a fast little hot-dogger with a pointed nose. Good for Queensland surf. It’s got a concave surface near the nose which holds it down and gives good stability for nose riding. The rails are low, a pretty thick nose, better for flotation, and a fair bit of kick also. A diamond tail with a deep fin as well as a lot of area. But I don’t really know the true technicalities of the board. I just tell my designer-shaper friend Eric Cowley what I want and he takes it from there. I’m very happy with his work."

We shifted to the old issue about women being hassled on waves: “I was hassled at first but I can understand guys freaking out over someone who didn’t know how to control their board. But now I’m a local, and accepted. They even respect me to a certain point. I don’t drop in on any guy unless he’s a bad surfer and is going to wreck the wave anyway.

"Truly, there are a lot of boys that get hassled other than me. But as for why there aren’t more women surfing today, I don’t really know. It may be the social stigma of masculinity, plus females don’t look good in wetsuits. But I will say it keeps you in great shape. It’s great for your breasts so, girls, go out there and get it on (laughs). You’ll definitely keep your figure with no trouble.

"But on another level, it seems the women just don’t have the drive the men have, regardless of the sport. Physically they’re not as capable, obviously, but then it’s not always strength that counts. You don’t need that much strength to get on a board and go out there. A guy will find a tube where a girl won’t even see it. Or she’ll play it safe.

"I surf well sometimes but I also know I miss the good moves sometimes and the guys are on to it right away. Like during the last World Titles people were saying that Margo Godfrey was as good as a man, but that’s a lot of crap. She was only a little better than me, a bit more drive, that’s all.

"Women still have a long way to go but maybe we should let the males stay winners, that’s the way men like to feel about it."

Kim claims to have unlimited free time to chase the waves, but she works a great deal — her contract requires her to tend her nets 20 out of every 28 days. She must also wash, repair and replace them regularly, as well as the drum lines (baited hooks suspended from anchored buoys). Traditionally it’s a man’s job, but there’s nothing particularly masculine — or even butch — about her.

True, that level-headed fisherman’s common sense is there, a sense of maturity, and yet there is something very feminine about Kim, a shyness, one based on her understanding her own innocence of life experiences others her age have shared. She doesn’t drink or smoke dope or tobacco and never has — and yet one can’t call her straight, not when she's going out there each day and cutting open the bellies of dead sharks to check for human remains or getting very high, naturally, just from being out on the water at sunrise, whooping and hollering as her boat planes down the backside of hefty ocean waves.

We did that one morning — bounced around on a few swells not far from the mouth of the Mooloolaba river. Regulations prevented her from taking me on a run to the nets but even a brief ride at full throttle was a convincing demonstration of her seamanship. Her twin-hulled boat is powered by two huge 105-hp Chrysler outboard motors that give her a full 30 knots flat out. How that girl manages to sit comfortably at the helm through bone-jarring seas is a total mystery. (“I usually go once a month to a chiropractor to put my spine back together,” she joked.) For my part, I collected three blisters and a bruised bum.

“I’ll tell you,” she yelled happily over the whine of the engines, “I really relax as soon as I get away from land, I really do. I don’t worry about dying or anything — if I lose my life at sea, well, that’s the way I want to go if I have to go.”

Later, when we were cruising at a slow speed, she filled me in on her views on sharks: “I don’t take any pleasure in killing them, or killing anything, but I have to always keep in mind how I’d feel if someone got taken near the beach. I have great respect for sharks. Certain species anyway, not all of them. Take the grey nurse for instance. We don’t catch too many but they’re lousy-looking things. Not very big, only up to nine feet or so, and very lazy looking, rounded nose, rather sloppy. They’re just a bag of shit compared to a tiger shark with its beautiful patterns. Or a blacktip. See, I compare sharks by body design.

"Without a doubt, the classiest shark of all is the white shark. Now there’s a beautiful fish, absolutely the last word in killing. It always looks in top condition. It has a sharp nose and its tail is incredibly strong, really thick, kind of like a surfboard on the side. It can do incredible maneuvers, has been clocked at speeds up to sixty knots and regularly grows up to thirty feet or more.

“The nets work very simply. A shark will bump into them and get slightly tangled up, then start rolling over and over violently to get unmeshed. That immobilizes them, at which point they drown, since they have to keep moving at all times to keep water passing through their gills. By the time I arrive, they're usually dead. My deckie Wayne Tracey and I cut it out of the net, then gaff it alongside and if it’s over six feet long, I cut open its belly and feel around in there with my hand to see if they’ve been eating anybody. Rather a rotten job. I’ve never come up with any remains but I've found everything else — mud crabs, sea snakes, turtles, bits of tin, sand, plastic, anything. The acid in their system is strong enough to dissolve glass and metal. Anyway, after I do that I cut off the dorsal fin to save 'cos the government pays me a few dollars for every shark I take over six feet.”

Later, when we returned to the boat harbor and moored at the fuel dock, a grizzled fisherman in his late forties walked over to ask Kim’s opinion on the sea state. He was debating whether or not to get his prawner underway. He listened carefully as she advised against it until the morrow, then nodded appreciatively.

Still later, while driving to the airport for my return flight to Sydney, Kim talked of her progress in learning celestial navigation, in preparation for the day she buys her own yacht and sails the world. Then, as if she were aware of my thoughts, she added: “It’s funny, I know I have an unusual job and that it freaks a lot of people out, especially guys, when they hear about what I do. But, truly, it’s a job I love and it’s part of the sea and the sea’s what I've always loved. And I know that I'm a mature person in a lot of ways, really an older person, but at the same time I also know I’ve got a lot of growing up to do, a lot of things to learn about. I’m behind in a lot of areas. But I’m just taking each day at a time and kind of following my instincts. I’m pretty sure everything will come in its own good time.”

We drove in silence for a moment. For an instant, I saw a faint suggestion of doubt pass across her face. She looked over at me and grinned broadly, then slapped ‘ol Carly and James into the tape deck and cranked up the volume. We both laughed as the car filled with music.

"KIM MCKENZIE: THE MOOLOOLABA SHARKIE," BY JOHN GRISSIM (TRACKS, 1974)

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