Across Australia this year there have been 15 "unprovoked" shark attacks - including the one fatality at Cid Harbour - with seven of them in NSW, according to Taronga Zoo's Australian Shark Attack File. Swimmers were evacuated from Maroubra beach on Saturday morning after a four metre white shark was spotted near the coast. The sighting came just days after a 4.65-metre great white shark was caught in nets off the same beach. 'Shark smorgasbord' Hundreds of millions of beach visits happen each year. If sharks were keen on humans, bite numbers would be much higher, Vincent Raoult, a marine ecologist at the University of Newcastle, says. "It's a smorgasbord for sharks if you go to Bondi," he says. "There are flavours from every nation." Primary Industries Minister Mr Blair is highly attuned to community fears about sharks, being among the first to receive a text about a shark attack. "It's horrific for the person involved," he says, adding it can also be traumatic for the victim's family, friends and even local economies if people desert the beach.

Still, like stepping on a tiger snake on a bushwalk, there will always be risk involved in entering the surf, he says. "We can never be 100 per cent safe. We're not going to drain the oceans of sharks." Central to government efforts are so-called smart drumlines that snag the three key target species - whites, tigers, and bulls. The animals are released after being tagged with sensors that trigger alerts when they approach listening stations dotted offshore. The north coast, which will not have shark nets this summer after a two-year trial, will instead have 35 drumlines deployed daily between Lennox Head and Evans Head, depending on the weather. Support for nets surged after a cluster of shark bites in 2015 and 2016 but subsequently waned after they managed to catch just two target sharks. They netted about 200 other species - including turtles and dolphins - many of which died, Dr Raoult said. There are 51 such nets, though, between Stockton and Wollongong.

"The nets are a culling tool...very much a comfort blanket" for beachgoers, he says, noting sharks are just as likely to be caught on the beachside of the mesh, revealing their weakness as a barrier. Dr Raoult is also sceptical of the value of shark tagging - at up to $10,000 per GPS device - and the likelihood the 21 real-time listening stations along the coast will tell us much more than sharks are present without predicting their behaviour. "It's not quite a state of panic but there's more stress to everyone than there should be," he said. Research published this month by Dr Raoult has identified drones as offering much better real-time information to scientists and lifesavers alike about how close sharks are to swimmers and potentially the risk of an attack. At the cost of a few thousand dollars, drones are far cheaper than helicopters or other aircraft used along the coast. A blimp being tested at Kiama could be another low-cost surveillance option, he says. Even then, surface choppiness and dim light conditions can curb drones' effectiveness.

Advances on other technology fronts are perhaps more mixed. Less reassuring for those banking on deterrent devices is the recently published findings by scientists including Flinders University's Charlie Huveneers that the five tested didn't make much difference unless the shark was already close. "Even the [Shark Shield Freedom] Surf+, which was the most effective deterrent, did not have a substantial effect on sharks unless they were near, as shown by the short distance from which sharks reacted to this deterrent (about 1.7 metres)," it said. "Although the Surf+ affected shark behaviour and reduced the probability of the bait being touched or taken, this deterrent failed to stop sharks in 40 per cent of the trials." Potentially more promising is work by Nathan Hart, an associate professor at Macquarie University, to develop lighting for the underside of surfboards or kayaks that could mask their shape from below - a favoured approach by white sharks which have excellent low-light vision.