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Albany Whale World. Whale skeleton exhibit. Sperm whale 37 feet long.
Image by denisbin
Whaling World at the old Albany Whaling Station is on Frenchman’s Bay adjacent to Torndirrup National Park. It only closed in 1978. At the time of closure there were 102 employees at the station and three ships hunted the whales, mainly Sperm Whales as 7 tons of whale oil could be extracted from one Sperm Whale carcass. Media coverage and criticism and rising costs convinced the directors to close the station in 1978. In the previous year Greenpeace co-founder Canadian Bob Hunter visited Albany to spearhead the campaign against the Frenchman’s Bay whaling station. It was the last whaling station in Australia to close. A year later in 1979 Australia signed the UN declaration against commercial whaling and most countries had signed up to this regulation by the mid 1980s. Whaling had declined in Australia from 1938. Several whaling stations closed then as a ten-year moratorium on hunting humpback whales was introduced. But others continued at Moreton Bay in QLD and Byron Bay in NSW until the early 1960s. For an interesting book about this you could read a novel by a local Noongar Aboriginal author Kim Scott called That Deadman Dance and published in 2010 and the winner of the Miles Franklin literature award in 2011. The novel is based on Albany although a fictional place is used and covers white settlement and whaling industries in WA. Tim Winton grew up in Albany and based his acclaimed novel Shallows on Albany. Angelus is Albany in the novel. Winton wrote a play set in Albany called Signs of Life. The play is an extension of Dirt Music. He grew up when whaling still existed thus his Shallows novel was about whaling. Winton won the Miles Franklin Award for this novel which was published in 1993. His novel Breath (2008) is also set in Angelus. The Turning, (published in 2004) was also set in Angelus. Nearby Denmark appears in some Winton novels as Sawyer.
Whaling was one of the earliest industries in Australia. All states had whaling stations and American and other whales had temporary camps on Kangaroo Island and at Encounter Bay from around 1820 long before South Australia was colonised by whites. The major whaling station in SA was near Cape Jervis and it was run by the SA Company until the early 1850s. The same story applies to WA. Whaling began long before the Swan River colony was established in 1829. Whale oil was a prized commodity in the 19th century as it was the favoured oil for lamps for evening reading. By the 1870s it was replaced by kerosene or paraffin oil in western countries but even today, demand for whale oil is high in some under developed countries as it is used for lamps where there is no reliable supply of electricity. Whale oil was also used to make soap, candles and some very early margarines before vegetable oil was used.
Whaling in WA was a significant industry from the start of the colony. Southern Right whales, Humpback whales and some Sperm whales were hunted along the WA coats. By 1837 there were two whaling companies operating near Fremantle. Income from whale oil and bones was double that of wool in the 1830s! It was estimated that in 1845 there were 300 ships with American, English, Australian and French crews whaling off WA. The settlement of Dunsborough was established in 1845 to service a whaling station. In the 1860s foreign whaling ships had to be registered with the WA government. Whaling generally declined in the 1870s with the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania in America. But to revive the declining industry the WA government invited Norwegian companies to set up whaling bases in WA in 1912. The Norwegian company closed business in 1916 due to World War One. Whaling continued at Carnarvon in the north and at Albany in the south from this time onwards but with years of no whaling and changes in companies operating the stations. The Cheynes Beach Whaling Company started at Albany in 1952 and operated till 1978. The Carnarvon whaling station operated into the 1960s when the last company, Nor West Seafoods converted the whaling station into a prawn processing factory which it still operates at Shark Bay processing and branding its product as Banana Prawns.
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