Emergency services responded to a shark attack at Shark Beach in Sydney, Australia, on January 18, 2026.

Heroic friends pulled their 12-year-old mate out of the water after he was bitten by a shark in Sydney Harbour, but the boy is still “fighting for his life” in hospital, Australian authorities said.

“It was a horrendous scene at the time when police attended,” Superintendent Joseph McNulty, Commander of the New South Wales Police Marine Area Command, said at a press conference Monday.

“We believe it was something like a bull shark that attacked the lower limbs of that boy yesterday.”

He praised the boy’s friends for pulling him from the water onto a rock face, calling their actions “nothing but brave.”

It was “very confronting injuries for those boys to see, but I suppose that’s mateship,” he said.

Upon reaching the unconscious boy, emergency responders applied tourniquets to his legs to stop heavy bleeding before transferring him to a police boat.

Police officers performed CPR on the boy as they rushed to shore, where an ambulance was waiting.

The boy is now in critical condition at Sydney Children’s Hospital.

McNulty said the boy and his friends had been leaping off a popular six-meter (20 foot) rock into water turned brackish by heavy rain over the weekend. Brackish water is a mix of salt and fresh water which can attract sharks seeking food closer to the shoreline.

“We believe the combination of the brackish water, the fresh water, the actions of the splashing, may have made that perfect storm environment for that shark attack,” he said.

A 12-year-old boy is in critical condition after he was bitten by a shark at a Sydney Harbour beach Sunday.
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“He is in for the fight of his life now, and the actions of emergency services yesterday gave him that chance,” McNulty said.

Giles Buchanan, with NSW Ambulance, said by the time the boy reached them, “it was a resuscitation situation.”

“It was touch-and-go the entire time, and still he’s in a very dangerous position,” Buchanan said.

Less than 24 hours later, a shark took a bite from the board of an 11-year-old boy who was surfing further up the coast at Dee Why Point, the Northern Beaches Council confirmed. The boy was not injured, they said.

Preliminary assessments by the NSW Department of Primary Industries said the 15cm (6 inch) bite was likely from a bull shark.

Australia sees roughly 20 shark bites per year, about two or three of them fatal.

In November, two tourists from Switzerland were bitten by a shark in Crowdy Bay, eastern Australia. A woman in her 20s died in the attack.

However, shark attacks in Sydney are exceptionally rare, with only three fatalities in the past 60 years, including a 57-year-old man who was killed by a large shark while surfing at a Sydney beach in September.