It took me a few weeks to make the journey, but just before I left a video surfaced on my feed from someone who’d seen it. YouTube promoted the video as “recommended,” and the footage had accrued millions of hits in a matter of days, which had obviously been a disaster for the shark.

A friend recently told me something intriguing over a beer. According to them, I could see a four-metre great white floating in a tank of formaldehyde in an abandoned wildlife park, within an hour and a half’s drive. And they gave me the address.

Forewarned and forearmed, my friend and I bought some painfully expensive gas-vapour respirators and some less expensive snacks, and set off.

In the clip I could see someone had pried the roof off shark’s vitrine, allowing some idiot to throw in a broken television. And a network of cracks had appeared on the tank’s glass where someone had gone at it with a hammer or some other blunt object. To varying degrees, I figure everyone has a killjoy somewhere inside them, but some hold themselves back better than others. And apparently the video’s audience size had brought out the jerks—as well as some seriously dangerous formaldehyde fumes.

The shark’s shed was the first thing we found, all of a two-minute walk from the property gate. We just pulled up a roller door and there it was: a huge dark tank, surrounded by clutter. Since the tank had been damaged, its formaldehyde solution had turned a murky green so it was initially hard to make out the shark. But we let our eyes adjust and its shape emerged, silhouetted by light pouring through a hole in the roof. The animal was large and strange and perfectly complimented by the sound of rustling wind. A tag on the wall read “mysterious shark.”

Article is continued below, but while you're here you might want to watch a VICE documentary that also features animals:

Melbourne’s shark was never intended to become art. Initially caught in a fishing net in 1998 off the South Australian coast, the great white was preserved for display at a Victorian ecotourism centre devoted to fur seals. And given that fur seals make up a significant portion of a great white’s diet, you could see the synergy.