It’s not every day a 21-year-old aspiring opera singer performs two showstoppers before lunchtime. But that’s exactly what Freddy Shaw did on the morning of 4 June 2026 — and one of those performances was considerably more dramatic than anything on stage.
The Story: A Hero Hits All the Right Notes
As the Manly Observer recounts, Freddy Shaw was walking through Mona Vale on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, heading to a concert examination at the University of Sydney, when he witnessed a man collapse at Village Park on Park Street at around 11:15am. Most people, faced with that sight, would freeze. Not Freddy. He rushed over, rolled the man into a recovery position, and dialled triple zero — all while keeping himself composed enough to relay critical information to the emergency operator. The operator, listening to Freddy count the man’s breaths, quickly identified a potential heart problem and instructed him to begin CPR.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Freddy hadn’t performed CPR since his scouts and surf life-saving days — over a decade earlier. Working from old training and the real-time guidance of the operator, he got to work on chest compressions while bystanders sprinted to the nearest bus stop to retrieve a public defibrillator. A council ranger stepped in to give Freddy a break. When paramedics arrived five minutes later, the man was conscious.
Freddy stuck around to make sure the man was okay, then calmly made his way to his exam. How did it go? “Yeah, it was good.” The composure of the man. Truly operatic.
What This Story Really Tells Us
Look, we could make a lot of jokes here. An opera singer performing CPR — all that breath control, that trained capacity for high-pressure performance, that ability to project confidence in front of an audience. Freddy Shaw was, in many ways, built for this moment. (We’d like to think he kept perfect time on the compressions, ideally to a Verdi tempo.)
But underneath the good humour is a genuinely important lesson, and it’s one we see play out again and again in our work at Coastal First Aid.
CPR saves lives. And anyone can learn it.
Cardiac arrest is one of the leading causes of death in Australia. Every minute without CPR following a cardiac arrest reduces the chance of survival by around 10%. Bystander CPR — performed by whoever happens to be there, be it a paramedic, a council ranger, or a 21-year-old opera student running late to an exam — can more than double a person’s chance of survival.
Freddy Shaw had training from his scout and surf life-saving days. It was old, it was rusty, and yet when the moment came, it was enough. Paired with the instructions from the triple zero operator and the presence of a defibrillator nearby, that old training contributed to a man walking away from what could have been a fatal event.
Now imagine if Freddy’s training had been recent. Imagine if the bystanders around him had also known what to do. Imagine if you were there.
What would you do?
The Uncomfortable Truth About “Someone Else Will Handle It”
We hear a version of this a lot: “I don’t need to learn CPR — if something happens, there’ll be a paramedic nearby,” or “I wouldn’t know what to do anyway, I’d just get in the way.”
Here’s the reality. Paramedics are extraordinary professionals, but they cannot be everywhere at once. The average response time for an ambulance in Australia is somewhere between 8 and 14 minutes depending on your location. In a cardiac arrest, that is a very long time. The people who matter most in those first critical minutes are the ones already standing there — your family members, your colleagues, your neighbours, a stranger in a park.
That’s you.
And the skills required are not complicated. A CPR course takes just a few hours. You do not need a medical background. You do not need to be particularly fit or strong. You do not need to have a calm, operatic temperament (though apparently that helps). You just need to know what to do and have the confidence to do it.
That confidence comes from training. There is no substitute.
Learn CPR in Port Macquarie — Don’t Wait for Your Own “Mona Vale Moment”
Freddy Shaw didn’t know that Wednesday morning would be the day his old training was called upon. The man who collapsed in Village Park certainly didn’t plan on it either. These things happen without warning, in ordinary places, to ordinary people — at a bus stop, in a shopping centre, at a family barbecue, at the footpath outside your local pub.
At Coastal First Aid, we run Port Macquarie CPR courses every week, throughout the year, and we have dates coming up very soon. Our courses are held at Panthers Port Macquarie, right next to Settlement City Shopping Centre, with ample parking and an easy-to-find location. The training is practical, engaging, and designed to leave you feeling genuinely confident — not just ticking a box.
Ceck out all of our Port Macquarie CPR course dates and enrol in a CPR course todaywww.coastalfirstaid.com.au/first-aid-courses-port-macquarie
