A great white shark, roughly four meters long, suddenly attacked Leah at Coogee Beach, turning a casual day by the sea into a terrifying fight for survival.
**‘You Ugly F—er’: Leah Stewart’s Incredible Survival After Four-Metre Great White Shark Attack at Coogee Beach**
As she came face-to-face with the black, beady eyes of a four-metre great white shark, Leah Stewart made a decision. She would not die that day. She would not leave her baby daughter without a mother.
“You ugly f—er, you are not taking me away from my daughter,” the 35-year-old Sydney mother recalls thinking in that critical moment. In an extended interview with *60 Minutes*, Stewart has told her survival story in detail for the first time, describing the terror, the fight, and the long road back from catastrophic injuries.
She was determined not to become “a girl that got mauled on the beach.” Instead, she said, “I’m the woman that punched the shark in the face. I’m the woman that fought like hell to be here, to be here for August, and it was the hardest thing in the world, but I fought my way out of there.”
August is her baby daughter. On 13 June, Stewart had just said goodbye to her on the sand at Coogee Beach before heading into the water. That farewell has stayed with her. “I said goodbye and yeah, that runs through my head a lot, like that goodbye.”
With her partner Fernando overseas at the time, Stewart was at the beach with family. She was swimming between the flags and close to shore when the attack occurred. It was the first recorded shark attack at Coogee Beach in more than a century.
### Face to Face with the Shark
Stewart has vivid, haunting memories of the animal itself. “Its face was horrific,” she said. “I’ll never forget its face. It was huge and its teeth and its mouth was massive and its eyes, it’s just black little beady eyes, we were just looking face to face. And it got to the point where it was about 30 centimetres from my face.”
The attack unfolded with terrifying speed. Stewart was finishing her swim and almost back to shore when she heard a girl behind her scream. She turned and saw a massive fin. She began stroking hard toward the beach. After about four strokes something told her to stop. She felt movement in the water, turned, and the shark was right there.
It seized her left thigh and dragged her under. In that moment she thought, “This is it. This is how I die.” Then her mind went to her daughter. “She’s not going to have a mum. She’s going to grow up without a mum, and I couldn’t handle that. I didn’t want her not to have a mum, so I just thought, ‘I’ve got to fight it. I’m going to do everything I can to be here’.”
She felt the shark shaking her. Somehow she managed to twist her body around. Remembering advice she had once heard from surfer Mick Fanning after his own encounter, she began punching the shark’s snout as hard as she could. “I twisted myself around, and I just started punching it over and over and over again, just punch, punch, punch. It was like fighting a dinosaur, it was so big. It was like punching a brick wall.”
“Thank you, Mick,” she later said.
### A Chance Gathering of Lifesavers
Stewart’s survival also depended on an extraordinary sequence of coincidences on the sand and in the water that morning. A group of people with exactly the right skills happened to be at Coogee Beach.
Among them was world champion paddleboarder Charlie Verco. Surf lifesaver Ben Heenan, then president of Coogee Surf Life Saving Club, was not on duty but was swimming with his partner, doctor Kassandra McGregor. They had just left the water when they heard intense screaming and saw blood. Heenan grabbed a board and ran back in while McGregor called Triple Zero.
Also present by pure chance was Dr Ian Ferguson, a high-level trauma specialist skilled in pre-hospital care of the most critically injured. He had stopped for a coffee before taking his daughter to a dance class. Riot squad officers, who had been assigned to beach patrols in the eastern suburbs following earlier incidents, were also on hand and carried tourniquets as part of their standard equipment.
Within seconds of Stewart being brought ashore, a makeshift medical team had formed. Because she had lost so much blood, conventional intravenous access was impossible. Ferguson drilled into the bone marrow of both of her shoulders to deliver fluids and, later, blood that was raced to the scene by helicopter. He later said he hoped she would survive to hospital but did not consider it a certainty at that point.
### Fighting for Life in Hospital
At St Vincent’s Hospital the situation remained critical. Extreme blood loss had produced levels of acid in her bloodstream far beyond what is normally considered survivable. Staff categorised her condition as not compatible with life.
The shark bite had taken the outer muscle of her left thigh. Her left arm was so severely damaged that it required amputation. Her right hand was shredded, with serious nerve and tendon damage. For ten days her family waited, not knowing whether she would live or whether she would suffer lasting cognitive damage from the blood loss.
Stewart underwent 11 surgeries, including skin grafts over the massive thigh wound. While in a coma she drifted in and out of consciousness, repeatedly reliving the attack. When she woke on 23 June she already understood the extent of her injuries. Covered in dressings, she told her partner Fernando and her mother Christine that she was experiencing phantom pain because the shark had taken her arm. They were stunned that she already knew.
### The Long Road of Recovery
Stewart has approached rehabilitation with the same determination she showed in the water. She has relearned to walk. She is working to regain function in her severely injured right hand and has begun writing again. On her final day in hospital she managed to write thank-you cards to the medical team that saved her.
Two months after arriving at hospital clinging to life, she walked out. The progress is remarkable, yet she is realistic about the challenges that remain. She has returned to Coogee Beach for the first time since the attack and believes that, in time, she may go back into the water. Not yet.
### A Place That Meant Everything
Coogee Beach was more than a location for Stewart. It was part of the rhythm of her life with Fernando and August. She swam there regularly—sometimes with her daughter, sometimes doing laps of the bay. “It’s how I relax,” she told *60 Minutes*. “It’s how I unwind and process everything in my mind. It’s what I look forward to every day is that swim. It was my thing.”
She was a fit and confident swimmer who took precautions. She avoided swimming at sunrise or sunset, preferred clear days, and stayed close to shore. “I was trying to do things right, but when you enter the water, there is risk.”
That risk became reality on a winter morning in June. What followed was a story of personal courage, extraordinary luck in the form of the right people being in the right place, and the skill of medical teams both on the sand and in the hospital.
Stewart’s account is raw and direct. She does not romanticise the attack or minimise the lasting impact. She simply describes what she did and why: she fought because her daughter needed her. In the process she became the woman who punched a four-metre great white shark in the face and lived to tell the story.
Her recovery continues. The physical and emotional work remains substantial. Yet the fact that she is home, walking, writing, and speaking publicly about the ordeal stands as powerful evidence of both her own resilience and the collective effort that pulled her back from the edge.
For Leah Stewart, the memory of saying goodbye to August on the sand that morning remains sharp. So does the memory of looking into the shark’s eyes and deciding that this would not be the end. She fought her way out of the water. She is still fighting her way forward—one step, one challenge, one day at a time.
