The story begins with a shadow beneath the waves. A great white, pitiless and silent. Dorsal fin like a mean knife. Eyes dark and empty. The setting: a tight-knit coastal town where the locals are being picked off, one by one. They need a hero – a man with the audacity to challenge a legend. There’s blood in the water. The cameras are rolling. Movie history is being made.
Behind the scenes, it’s chaos. There’s a mechanical shark that barely resembles a living creature and is far more trouble than it’s worth. The production is beset by so many delays and accidents, it begins to feel cursed. But the crew push on. There’s a lot riding on this big fish film: fortunes, careers, legacies.
You know this story. Or you think you do. But rewind the reel: this isn’t Jaws and Spielberg is nowhere in sight. We’re in Australia, four decades earlier – drifting in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef. The film is White Death (1936), and the man calling the shots is a celebrity novelist turned monster catcher: Zane Grey.
Today, his name barely registers: a footnote in fishing lore, a ghost in vintage paperbacks. But in his heyday, Grey was stratospherically famous. A reluctant dentist turned adventure novelist, Grey’s pulp westerns sold in the millions. His travels made front-page news. He was Hemingway before Hemingway (some even say The Old Man and the Sea was cribbed from one of Grey’s tall tales). Even death couldn’t slow him down: Grey’s publisher sat on a stockpile of manuscripts and kept rolling out new titles for decades. On the page, Grey built a mythic vision of the American West. Hollywood made it global, with dozens of adaptations, including Riders of the Purple Sage, The Lone Star Ranger and The Rainbow Trail. You may not know his name, but you know his frontier.
“It’s extraordinary to me that he’s fallen from social memory to such a degree,” marvels Vicki Hastrich, Grey’s latest biographer. Hastrich stumbled on to the author by accident while tracing the lineage of the literary western. Grey’s name popped up, not just as one of the genre’s defining figures (he wrote more than 80), but also as the namesake of a caravan park in Bermagui on the coast of New South Wales. Why was a cowboy writer from Ohio venerated in an Aussie beach town?
There was a story here, and Hastrich was the perfect person to tell it: author, angler, cartographer of the deep (her 2019 memoir, Night Fishing, is a quicksilver marvel of Australian nature writing). Hastrich knows the cultural weight a fish can carry. Her swashbuckling new book, The Last Days of Zane Grey, is the story of a very big fish; a tale of obsession and fading glory.
A lifelong sport-fisher, Grey spent his twilight years chasing a dream: to hook a great white. Australia lured him in 1935, and again in 1939, with the promise of shark-rich waters (there was also a secret lover in Sydney). Hastrich traces the arc of that quest: the role Australia played in Grey’s final chapter and the unlikely mark he left on the national imagination. A deep-sea detour into the Australian psyche.
“We just went crazy for him,” Hastrich tells me. “As far as I can tell, there were something like nine of Grey’s films in circulation when he arrived in Australia in 1935.” And arrive he did – with 166 pieces of luggage and the full weight of his own legend. The welcome bordered on hysteria, something the country wouldn’t see again until the Beatles. The reporting was relentless. “If he sneezed or farted, it made the papers,” Hastrich says, not entirely joking. “I was able to track him day by day – almost hour by hour.”
Thousands of people followed Grey up and down the east coast, camping alongside him as he trawled the sea for record-breakers: marlin, swordfish, tuna (Grey is credited with kickstarting Australia’s tuna industry with a single hefty catch). But beneath the glitz and spectacle, the 63-year-old author was struggling. He was financially overstretched and fraying at the edges. The Australia trip wasn’t just another adventure; it felt like a last chance to do something magnificent. Underwater photography was cutting-edge. If Grey could land a monster shark on film, he wouldn’t just make history, he’d put himself back at the centre of it.
Enter White Death. The behind-the-scenes story of Grey’s great white flop is pure writer bait: a top-shelf fiasco. Cameras failed. Boats broke. The weather was hellish. The cast and crew were bitten, burnt and blown up. A brush with the notorious “suicide plant” (the gympie-gympie) nearly cost one actor his sanity. And the star refused to show. No amount of burley or patience could summon a “villain fish” from the deep, so Grey had to settle for a much smaller reef shark – painted white by the art department and filmed from a distance.
And yet it’s here, in this laughable disaster of a film (you can watch chunks of it online), that Hastrich comes closest to understanding Grey’s cultural pull. “He’s not a gifted actor, that’s for sure. He’s very wooden in that film. But there’s a presence about him,” she says. “He has this sort of stillness on screen, a kind of physical charisma.”
For all the drama on screen, Hastrich’s richest material turned up elsewhere: a cache of love letters from Grey to his Australian lover, the Sydney poet Lola Goodall. Hastrich still doesn’t know how – or why – Grey’s letters to Lola were preserved (Lola’s replies were destroyed), but reading them required a crash course in code-breaking: all the racy parts were written in cipher. “I thought I had the key, but it didn’t match what I was seeing,” says Hastrich. “Just when I was about to give up, I realised what was going on, and I could add symbols to the code. It was so slow: literally one alphabet letter at a time for ages.”
Lola had always been treated as a blip in Grey’s story – dismissed as a dalliance. But the affair Hastrich uncovered was substantial, with hundreds of letters stretching over years. Lola was a middling poet in her mid-50s, still living with her mother, pretending – at least on paper – to be decades younger. Grey was ageing, lonely, carving out space for one last big love. “I came to think of them like two drowning people,” Hastrich says, “clutching and clawing at each other as they went down. They could both see their relevance in the world slipping.”
It’s the women, including Lola, who give this story its guts. There’s Dolly, Grey’s formidable wife, quietly running the family empire, and largely unfazed by all the girlfriends (she organises their travel). Miles Franklin makes a surprise cameo, impressing and infuriating Grey in equal measure. And we meet Chickie Nathan – an ice-skating socialite turned marlin wrangler – who holds her own against Grey at sea. (Chickie is a scene stealer; she deserves a biography of her own.)
Hastrich also offers a fish-eye view of interwar Australia: a country blind to the scale of its ocean bounty, and its fragility. “That’s the story nudging at the edges here,” she reflects. “Just as we’re starting to comprehend how abundant things are, they’re already depleting.”
Code-breaking wasn’t the only new skill Hastrich had to master; she braved a trip in a shark cage, determined to see Grey’s nemesis for herself. “The water was this sort of teal blue, a veil of particles of colour. And this shark loomed out of the veil, scuffed and scarred,” she tells me – still awed. “It was like this great, slow-moving bomb – and then it was just gone. That was the moment I understood the perennial allure of this formidable fish.”
That’s the thing about great whites: they come ready-made as metaphors. In the end, The Last Days of Zane Grey isn’t just about a man chasing a shark: it’s about a man in a duel with death itself. “This story didn’t need any massaging,” Hastrich laughs. “Everything you needed to make a narrative was already there.” Now she has hauled in Zane Grey, what’s next? “I’m ready to go and catch another fish.”
The Last Days of Zane Grey by Vicki Hastrich is out through Allen & Unwin
