It's a rum business, dealing with monsters. In one bit of Australia human beings are tenderly helping stranded whales back into the sea. Just a few miles away - anyway, as these things go in Australia - sharks are tenderly helping themselves to human beings with unprecedented frequency.
That's the wild for you. In one aspect, it is pitiful, delicate and helpless and people long to give it the best care they possibly can. In another aspect, it frightens the bejesus out of us. Both aspects are inescapable; both aspects are an essential part of our love for wild things: essential parts of being human.
The whales have been stranded on King Island, between Tasmania and the mainland; 194 pilot whales, small enough by whale standards but still hefty enough. Of these, at least 140 are dead, 15 have been towed back to sea and others gently succoured with wet blankets and sluicings.
Meanwhile, there have been three shark attacks on humans around Sydney in the last month, one in Sydney Harbour itself, which is almost like a shark attack in the Serpentine.
Nice of Australia to give us this elegant paradox, this intriguing parable about the place of the wild world in the 21st century. We love it, we fear it: and are happy for love and fear to be hopelessly confused. We find this contradiction uplifting, stimulating, exciting.
Whales have, for the past generation, become living, breathing symbols of the fragility of the Earth and the bullying tendencies of its most dominant animal. Whales, with their intelligence, their songs and their vulnerability, stand for all the bad things humans have done to the Earth. No wonder there are people out there doing all they can to help the poor buggers that got stranded.
Whales are benign, the wet, sad, giant teddies of the sea. Sharks, for far longer, have played the opposite role. They are the most feared of all creatures, not because they are the most dangerous but because they strike out at us from a world we cannot comprehend, a world we can enter only as trespassers.
Sharks embody every irrational fear that humans can command: the dread that the whole world is out to get us for reasons we cannot begin to come to terms with.
And, yet, the most fearsome animals are the ones we most cherish. The tiger is regarded as a thing of beauty: the idea of killing them all off because they are a bit fierce is anathema. We want to keep them because they are a bit fierce.
Both its ferocity and its fragility make the wild world essential to us. But this is a world that gets less fierce and more fragile with every passing day.
Simon Barnes