In Australia, where people spend a lot of time at the beach, the government has realised that it must prevent sharks from swimming near its beaches.
As a result, they've introduced a beach-netting program. Beach-netting, or meshing, involves setting large nets parallel to the shore; this means that the nets on New South Wales beaches are set on one day, and then lifted and taken out to sea on the next day. When shark-netting first began in 1939, only the Sydney metropolitan beaches were meshed these beaches were chosen because beaches near the city are usually the most crowded with swimmers. Ten years later, in 1949, systematic meshing was extended to include the beaches to the south of Sydney. As a result of the general success of the program in Sydney, shark-meshing was introduced to the state of Queensland around 1970. The New Zealand authorities also looked at it, but considered meshing uneconomical - as did Tahiti in the Pacific.