Australian woman tackles shark in ocean swimming pool then throws it into sea with bare hands

'I was just trying to catch a little shark,' says Melissa Hatheier. 'If it had big teeth I wouldn’t have done it'

An Australian estate agent has been nicknamed the "shark wrangler" after she heroically rescued one of the creatures from an ocean pool and threw it back into the sea.

Melissa Hatheier stumbled across the bronze whaler while swimming at the Oak Park pool in Cronulla, a beachside suburb to the south of Sydney.

Footage filmed by her daughter shows the moment she wrestled the shark with her bare hands, before throwing it over the side of the pool and back into the ocean.

Posted to Cronulla real estate's Facebook page, it has garnered thousands of views.

Ms Hatheier told the St George and Sutherland Shire Leader that she was surprised by the attention.

"I was just trying to catch a little shark," she said. "If it had big teeth I wouldn’t have done it."

The shark was thought to be an infant and measured approximately 1m in length.

Ms Hatheier said she felt sorry for the creature when she saw it was getting stressed and knocking its head on the rocks that line the pool.

"I herded the shark into the shallows and then I just sort of jumped on him and put my knees on his fins," she told the paper. "I then grabbed him around the neck so he couldn’t swing around and bite me.

"He wasn't that heavy but his skin was very rough, like sandpaper. I just threw him over the edge of the pool into the water and watched him swim away."

Bronze whaler sharks can be aggressive when they are hungry, and place tenth in the number of unprovoked attacks on humans.