Australia shark attacks: Girl, 12, seriously injured a day after woman mauled in Whitsunday Islands

A 12-year-old girl is seriously injured and a woman is fighting for her life after two shark attacks within 24 hours in Australia’s Whitsunday Islands.

The girl was attacked by a shark at the idyllic holiday hotspot, near the Great Barrier Reef, on Thursday lunchtime.

Rescuers were called to Cid Harbour and the girl was airlifted to hospital, where her condition was described as “serious”.

The ambulance service said she had been bitten in her thigh and had suffered a “significant” loss of blood.

It comes less than a day after a 46-year-old Tasmanian tourist named as Justine Barwick was attacked by a shark in the same area.

She was badly hurt on the upper right leg, ambulance officials said, and a doctor who was on a nearby boat attended to her until rescuers arrived by helicopter.

The doctor, John Hadock, was about to go for a swim when he was summoned to jump into a dinghy and rush to Ms Barwick's aid.

"I was very worried that I might find severe bleeding still going. They had been able to stop the bleeding but Justine was very, very ill," he told Channel Seven television.

Tracey Eastwick, the regional ambulance operations manager, said: "It is horrific ... it is quite confronting to have two similar incidents in the space of 24 hours.”

Australia ranked behind only the United States in the number of unprovoked shark encounters with humans in 2017, according to the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File.

The island where the girl was bitten is a popular tourist site 900km northwest of Queensland’s capital Brisbane.

Last year, a spate of shark attacks off Australia's northeast coast led to the controversial deployment of protective nets, which authorities said would save lives and guard the country's reputation as a tourist destination.

Environmentalists say the nets can also harm a number of threatened and migratory species.