‘Don’t thrash about’: Valerie Taylor on what to do if a shark attacks you

“Australia is surrounded by oceans that have a remarkable population of these pre-historic creatures,” McKay says. “The reason they have survived for so long is that they have been designed so well.”

They play a crucial role in the ecosystem and the health of our reefs and oceans. Changing the balance of the marine life at the top of the food chain can have major repercussions right down to the bottom of it.

Taylor’s trademark blonde ponytail, tied back in a red ribbon, immortalised on the cover of National Geographic has finally been cut short, but the girlish enthusiasm for all things aquatic remains.

What saddens her the most is the massive depletion of marine life she has witnessed during a lifetime under the waves.

“There used to be so many fish that Ron and I once had to wait for 20 minutes while a school of Kingfish swam past because they were casting a shadow over a Wobbegong Ron was filming.”

Taylor has donated her famous pink wetsuit and the full-length chain mail suit Ron devised in the 1960s as a form of protection against shark bites to the exhibition and will be giving a talk on October 5. The museum also plans to show the National Geographic documentary, Playing With Sharks, which includes mesmerising archival footage of Valerie getting up close and personal with her underwater friends.

“Sharks are like dogs, there are good and bad ones, they have different personalities,” she says.

On one dive trip, she leant down off the back of their boat to hand feed a Great White. “There were three of them actually,” she recalls. “But one of them had his head out of the water looking straight at me.”

He could easily have leapt up and snatched her as she fed him and patted his nose. “But I knew he wouldn’t. He was a nice boy. Too polite.”

She and Ron always found it exhilarating to free entangled sharks. “You can feel their great energy, yearning to go back to the sea, just as everyone else longs to be free,” she says. “I’ll never forget the day we freed a Great White – he swam in a big circle back to Ron before he swam right out to sea again. He knew exactly what we’d done. It was his way of saying thanks.”

She’s one of the few people on the planet who have hitched a ride on the fin of a shark. And, certainly, one of the few to have resuscitated a shark with scuba diving gear.

“There was one shark that didn’t look too good after we cut him free. We didn’t think he was going to make it, so Ron gave it oxygen from his regulator.

“That brightened him up a lot. We ended up taking him in to Tweed Heads Porpoise World.” The owner enjoyed record numbers of visitors for months.

She’s been bitten four times; once dangerously. She was filming off Los Angeles, and was winched to safety for general surgery and plastic surgery for the teeth holes.

Most shark attacks, like the recent fatality at Little Bay – the first in 60 years – are unlucky accidents, she says. “Most of the time sharks think we are a large fish. It’s a mistake.”

“Humans need to hate something. It used to be witches and demons and spirits, now its sharks and snakes and big cats.”

She and Ron both fell in love with the ocean as spear fishers. But the more time they spent underwater, the more they realised they were killing creatures they knew and liked. They became conservationists when one day, at the end of a spearfishing championship, they looked with dismay at the hundreds of dead fish dumped on the beach after the competition. After that, Taylor says, the only thing they were going to shoot marine life with were their cameras.

They both regretted the way the film Jaws – which they shot footage for – demonised sharks and the way it prompted macho slaughter trips.

“Peter [Benchley, the author] wouldn’t have written it if he’d known the effect it was going to have,” she says.

She and Ron spent two months in the US after the film came out in 1975 giving talks on TV and radio about the fact that Jaws was fictional and that sharks “are not out to get us”.

On her and Ron’s watch, the grey nurse shark – “a harmless but ferocious looking creature” – is now a protected species. She would dearly love to see all the mesh nets removed from our beaches in her lifetime.

“Sharks are just going about their business. They don’t come out onto our territory, do they? So if we go into theirs, we should just leave them alone.”

Her advice for the beach this summer? “If you’re afraid of sharks, swim in an ocean pool. And don’t swim late in the afternoon or first thing in the morning.”

Ron died 12 years ago, and you can feel the ache of the loss. There is the physical ache of arthritis too; the only place she can dive now, she says, is in the warm waters of Indonesia where her two nephews run diving operations.

“Under the water I don’t seem to notice the arthritis. And there’s no gravity. It’s like flying. ”

She didn’t ever want to have children. Stricken with polio as a girl, missionaries who visited the hospital she was in put into her hands Lorna Done, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. They enthralled her, and set her on her path to lead an adventurous life.

For many years, she has received fan mail from girls and young women from all over the world.

She can be despondent about the environment but was recently encouraged by the avid enthusiasm of young men and women in the audience when Playing with Sharks won a US documentary award.

“They all wanted to know what to do, how to be activists,” she says. The next generation, it seems, is following in her wake.

Sharks opens Saturday September 24 and runs until April.