Ex-navy diver Paul de Gelder, who grew up in Canberra, lost his right hand and leg in an horrific Sydney Harbour bull shark attack, and is now starring on Channel Nine's new show Shark! putting celebrities face-to-face with their greatest fear, these apex predators of the deep.
On the debut episode of Shark! on Sunday night, de Gelder, an expert on the show, revealed that before the 2009 attack he hated sharks, but all that had changed in the years after that agonising eight-second mauling, as he worked to prove to people around the world that they had little to fear from the big fish.
"Now, I want to change people's perceptions of sharks," he said, on Shark! on Sunday night.
"I want to show them how amazing, how beautiful they are, how we can actually co-exist with them."
Speaking to The Canberra Times before the show aired, de Gelder was, well, a little more candid.
When asked if he puts bull sharks in that same sharks-are-great category, he answered with a booming: "Bull sharks can get f---ed!".
He's half-joking but admits "bull sharks are my least favourite sharks".
That's understandable.
A three-metre bull shark attacked him in Sydney Harbour during a counter-terrorism training exercise in 2009 when he was an elite Navy clearance diver. De Gelder was terrified of sharks. Now, a huge one had his "right hand and right leg in one bite".
While some shark attack victims remember a thud or pressure and then nothing, de Gelder remembers every moment, including the excruciating pain.
"It's indescribable," he said.
"You know, go into the lounge room and kick your shin as hard as you can against the coffee table and that won't even hold a flicker towards having your hand and the muscles of your leg ripped out of your body.
"That shark attack changed my life forever."
On Shark!, six celebrities are taken to the Bahamas, "the shark capital of the world" to confront their fear of sharks and work up to being able to dive, cage-free, with them, under the guidance of de Gelder and underwater photographer and conservationist Annie Gutteridge.
"It was a really, really wonderful experience," de Gelder said.
"Hoping we get season two so we can take another group of people."
But, before then, this first crop of celebrities on Shark! - actor Matt Nable, Olympics golden girl Ariarne Titmus, Home and Away legend Lynne McGranger, The Block's Scott Cam, NRL icon Sam Thaiday and influencer Tammy Hembrow - are over a number of weeks prepped and motivated to the point where they can, hopefully, swim with tiger sharks, hammerhead sharks and, yes, bull sharks, in the turqouise waters of the Bahamas.
Scotty Cam, 63, an ocean swimmer in his hometown of Sydney, has always been scared of sharks but never actually seen one in the water. He said filming the show was confronting, to say the least.
"It was pretty traumatic," he said.
"There was a lot of anxiety throughout the day, because we were diving most days. So you wake up in the morning, you're a bit nervous and filled with anxiety but surprisingly, once I was in the water - because I'm one of those guys, once I'm committed to something, I don't back out - so once I got in the water and got down to the bottom, quite deep, kneeling on the bottom, I was alright, pretty relaxed.
"No cages. No spear guns. No weapons. So there was no protection."
The celebrities' discomfort and fear are palpable, particularly for 25-year-old Olympics champion Ariarne Titmus, who has always been a natural in the pool, but never in the ocean. At the beach, she'd never go beyond where she could touch the bottom in the water.
"I'm afraid of the ocean because of the animals," she said, matter-of-fact.
Watching Titmus on Shark! whimpering in a cage surrounded by bull sharks is uncomfortable viewing. This is a girl who held no fear when it came to swimming, taking on the world and winning eight Olympic medals, four of them gold. But in the ocean, it's a whole other ball game.
Titmus said when she was asked to do Shark!, she laughed and gave it an "outright no". But then she thought she would never get another similar opportunity to face her fears.
"It was the scariest thing I've ever done," she said.
Titmus said before each shark challenge, she tried to prepare herself as she would before a swimming race - get in the right mindset and then "go to a corner of the boat and calm myself down".
"Then tears would be rolling down by face and I couldn't help it," she said.
"It's real. It's raw. I was just trying to give everything I could; to give every challenge a red hot crack."
Titmus said the support of her fellow celebrities - and the experts - made the difference.
"We gelled so well together and we're still in touch," she said.
For 49-year-old Paul de Gelder, Shark! is not his first rodeo. He's fronted 36 shark documentaries for the Discovery Channel since his attack 17 years ago. He's also an in-demand motivational speaker, his gravelly voice and no-nonsense attitude inspiring people to face up to their fears and live life to the full.
It's almost as if this was where he was always meant to be, after a pretty dismal childhood in Canberra.
De Gelder lived in the national capital from the age of 10 to 21, growing up in the inner-south with his parents and three siblings and going to school at St Edmund's College. His dad was a police officer and the family had moved to Canberra from Victoria.
Eddies, back then, was not a happy place for him.
"I came from St Benedict's Primary, just down the road, which had about 120 kids to about 1200 kids and I wasn't very good at sports and my own teammates picked on me. Basically, never got off the bench during sports because I wasn't very good at it," he said.
De Gelder said he felt no inspiration at school.
"I just wasn't doing well at Eddies. I couldn't focus on the teacher, I couldn't write things down. We were doing swimming training in the morning before school. We had six people [in our family] on a policeman's wage so we didn't have enough food at school. I couldn't stay awake and I couldn't concentrate.
"After year 10, me and a group of friends decided to try Narrabundah College and that didn't work. Everything got worse. A lot of it was our own fault, because we were so distracted by being teenagers and living in Canberra and not really having any other side hobby other than playing basketball at St Clare's and kickboxing.
"No one really gave us anything to look forward to. I didn't really know anything about the wider world and the fact that you could do anything you loved and make a living off it.
"I could never have imagined that I could travel the world and have adventures like my heroes Alby Mangels and Steve Irwin and now I get to walk in the footsteps of those heroes.
"Back then, you kind of only think you can be what you see. So, 'My dad's a cop, maybe I could do that. Or a baker. Or the milk delivery guy. I'm not smart enough to be a doctor'. So your ideas are really limited and if you're not getting any inspiration from the people you spend the most time with, which is your teachers, then, obviously, you're going to go off the rails because you feel you have no purpose."
De Gelder eventually got "kicked out of home" when he was 17.
"I left Canberra just before I turned 21. I got a job working at La Grange [bar] in Manuka but that wasn't a really healthy environment either, working in hospitality and I ended up getting jumped by a bunch of guys at a party and I decided, 'I can't live here anymore'.
"So, I moved to Brisbane where I got a job behind a bar at a strip club and I was a rapper. I opened for Snoop Dogg in 1998 and I thought, 'I've finally found my calling, I'm going to be a rapper'. But there wasn't a lot of money in white rappers in Australia in 1998. So that fell apart and I went back to working in a bar."
Feeling like a failure, de Gelder called his two younger brothers, Travis and Sean, who were both artillery soldiers in the army.
"They said, 'Whatever you do, don't join infantry, you're too soft. You won't make it'," de Gelder remembered.
"So, the next day, I joined infantry."
De Gelder found he still had some "underlying" fitness from that early-morning swimming training when he was a teenager and his bad habits including smoking cigarettes and marijuana had to go out the window during his basic training for the army.
"My fitness ended coming right back and I got the PT [physical training] award during basic training so that gave me a sense of confidence," he said.
He trained as an infantry soldier and ended up serving as an elite paratrooper and also as a United Nations peacekeeper in East Timor. He then became a bomb-disposal clearance diver for the navy. He'd found his worth in the miltary.
"Just that sense of value and pride serving my country and wearing that uniform, that absolutely changed the whole dynamic of my mindset and my life," he said.
In his specialist role as a diver in the navy, he felt, again, the comradeship of those he worked with, but, more than that, he also felt great pride in "being able to do something that so few people can achieve", working under the water in high-pressure situations.
All three of his siblings ended up joining the military. His sister Jacqui, an army nurse, is his "hero". In a nice coincidence, she ended up serving in Afghanistan with the rescue crew who helped save de Gelder after his 2009 shark attack, which would again change his life and his perspective.
His two greatest fears before the attack were sharks and public speaking. Years later, they both ended up being his life's work.
So many people wanted to talk to de Gelder after his attack that he decided to learn more about sharks. He came to have a deeper understanding and respect for them. And that they were important to the world's ecosystem, but under threat themselves.
There have been three fatal sharks so far this year in Australia, when the average is two to three in a year, enough for people to start calling for culling the big fish. But de Gelder is having none of that.
"I think sharks are already being culled, there's no point in culling them even more. The fishermen are out there killing them, they hate them. You've got all the shark nets and the drumlines killing them. And all the illegal fishing, unregulated fishing, shark fishing all around the world," he said.
"Sharks are under brutal attack from everyone all around the world so maybe we need to look at our own practices before we try to change the natural world because every time we try to do that, we have a ripple effect, a domino effect, which eventually starts to affect us.
"Take the cane beetle problem we had, and then we introduced cane toads, look how that went. Foxes, feral pigs, we have problems with all those things.
"So how about we just leave nature alone and let it take care of itself?"
