Kay Gilman's profile of Kim McKenzie ran in the November 18, 1975, edition of the New York Daily News. This version has been slightly edited.

Kim McKenzie is the Australian women’s surfing champion. That’s what she does for fun. How she makes a living is something else. During working hours, the husky 5-foot-9 blonde is the official shark catcher for the State of Queensland, hauling in an average of 350 saw-toothed monsters a year.

Kim is a 24-year-old who grew up in a beach village called Mooloolaba, which is fronted by the Great Barrier Reef. She is nonchalant about her unusual and dangerous profession.

"My father is a boat builder," she explains in her heavy accent, "so I always went fishing with him and helped him build boats. I was terrible in school; I could never pass anything—I just wanted to be around the water, so I quit before I got kicked out. When the shark contract came up four years ago, we bid on it and got it. Our job is to protect the swimmers at certain beaches. Now my father’s stopped doing it, and I’m the skipper myself.”

Kim traps the majority of the sharks in 600-foot nets placed outside the bathing area. Sharks trapped in the nets are usually dead by the time Kim and her mate bring them in. She also sets 27 drum lines with bait each day. The hooked sharks usually remain alive. Kim kills them with powerheads that contain 12-gauge shotgun shells.

Although Kim appears totally unfazed by daily encounters with all sizes and shapes of sharks, she has a healthy respect for her prey.

“The first shark my father and I caught was a Great White,” she recalls. “We brought it on board thinking it was dead, but it wasn't. It lashed around with its tail and knocked me against the wheelhouse. I was stunned and bleeding; my father was hurt worse. Finally we hung it off the side of the boat and shot it. Since then I have never brought a shark on a boat again until I was sure it was dead.”

“Sharks are definitely a threat to swimmers in Australia,” she continues. “I never swim alone or at night. Sharks prowl at night. I have a surfing friend who was attacked by a shark at dusk while he was on his board. His friends came to his aid, but he was badly mangled. I always surf at mid-day with plenty of people around.”

Kim picks up about seven or eight Great Whites (you remember the star of 

“They are definitely the most dangerous,” she says. “I saw 

 and I can see why people would be frightened by it, but most of the movie was inaccurate, as far as a shark’s behavior goes.”

Kim became Australia’s women’s surfing champion, a title she has held the past two years, on her days off from shark catching. Now she is preparing for the Smirnoff World Pro-Am Surfing Championship in Hawaii month, in which she and other women surfers will compete against men.

“I like competing against men,” she states. "I have a better time with them. I get too nervous with the girls. But no, I can’t beat the really good men. No girls can just yet. Maybe in another 10 years, but certainly not now.”

Kim, who is single, lives with some mates, as she calls her friends, and a Great Dane, and is in the process of building a beach house with her own hands in her hometown of Mooloolaba.

“I prefer American men to Australians,” she says definitely. “Australia is a man’s country and the men are male chauvinists, to say the least. American men are much more polite and thoughtful. Maybe someday I’ll get married, but so far most men end up boring me.”

"I’ll never get rich from surfing or shark catching,” shrugs Kim McKenzie, who combines a hair-raising vocation with a merely dangerous avocation, “but I don’t care. My only ambition is to be happy. Things always turn out good for me, so I’ll always be happy.”

"SHE'S CHAMP OF THE SURF," KIM MCKENZIE PROFILE (1975)

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