G'day legend,

Small confession.

I made a mistake.

I read the Facebook comments under the recent shark attack posts. Comments like this:

While Mary and Megan elegantly solved the problem for us, I feel Glenn really brought it home.

Stay safe, stay home and outsource your food supply to someone else...

Dulcie and Jackie agree and they aren't alone.

I spent too much time specifically reading the comments on stories about the 3 spearfishermen killed by sharks.

At first they just made me angry — the ignorance about sharks and spearfishing was one thing, but the comments about the Australian fathers who died were something else.

Callous at best, hateful at worst.

And underneath them all ran the same worldview: that safety is the highest value a life can hold. That a life unmarked by risk is a life well lived. That the correct posture is a comfortable seat on the couch, insulated by society's technological marvels from ever having to feel hardship, difficulty or fear.

It made me think about how much we've changed as a society — and about the divine spark in a person that makes them seek adventure, claim agency, and do hard things simply because hard things are good for us.

What angered me most was imagining the children of those men one day reading those comments.

Reading strangers reduce their fathers to men who "made poor choices" — as if they were too dim to grasp the risks of water they'd spent their lives in — rather than what they were: strong, courageous, capable men who braved the natural world to hunt intentionally, and in doing so modelled for their kids everything this lifestyle stands for.

And it made me stop and realise just how rare men like Steve Mattaboni, Daniel Turpin and Michael Jensz are becoming.

The values we hold — living wild, connecting with nature, challenging ourselves, reclaiming our food and our sense of agency — aren't recognised as values at all by a lot of these people. I refute that with everything I've got. Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying "many people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75," and Braveheart's William Wallace gave us "every man dies — not every man really lives." But Hunter S. Thompson put it best: "Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a ride!'"

Because that's what spearfishing is. Not ignorance of risk or disregard for consequence, but a conscious choice to live fully — a refusal to bow to our basest fears. We dare to enter the wild. We step into the food chain and hunt our own food. We live wild, at least some of the time, so that we keep some wildness in us.

Nature is raw. Adventure is necessary. And we were made for it.