A tale of mistaken identity and whalebone picnics
Tim the Yowie Man
Tim the Yowie Man
In summer, swimmers dried off on it after a dip, while in the cooler months, families gathered around it to picnic. The fact that the out-of-place bone was used as a bench from the mid-1940s is remarkable. But wait till you hear how the bone got there in the first place.
The timing of its arrival provides a big clue: during World War II, RAAF pilots were stationed along the NSW South Coast, on the lookout for Japanese submarines. A dive into our Defence archives comes up with two documented cases, in 1942 and 1945, of whales being mistaken for, you guessed it, enemy submarines.
The first account is outlined in John Lever’s obscure booklet, No.6 OTU, Base Torpedo Unit, and
R.A.A.F. Beaufort Torpedo Operations. According to Lever, the crew of a Beaufort A9-20, captained by Flying Officer Schlank, spotted the US Liberty ship SS William Dawes on fire near Tathra, south of Batemans Bay. Schlank’s men dropped messages to the sinking ship’s crew to tell them help was on the way, then remained to overwatch. Lever writes that, during this time, a “submarine was spotted and attacked with depth charges”. The crew saw oil come to the surface. However, as Lever details, “The next day two Navy Intelligence Officers interviewed the crew…The verdict was that a whale had been mistaken for a submarine.”
This doomed whale’s carcass didn’t wash up on Long Beach – but three years later, another whale, which had met a similarly untimely end, did. “Two businessmen fishing on [Long] Beach saw a whale washed up dead with a large gaping hole in its side,” reported the Wagga Wagga Daily Advertiser on
17 March 1945. “Air force men who inspected the body gave an opinion that the whale had been killed by a bomb from the air, well out to sea… Perhaps it had been mistaken for a submarine.”
Curiously, not all wartime whale deaths were cases of mistaken identity. On 9 July 1941 the Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate reported, “The headless carcass of a 50ft whale drifting along the coast near Grafton has attracted hundreds of sharks. It is believed that an RAAF bomber scored a direct hit on the whale during practise.”
As for the whalebone bench, it’s been missing for years. The Long Beach Community Association has been leading the charge to locate other bones from the same whale, taken by locals to decorate their yards. Now, if you’re thinking that around 80 years is a long time for a whalebone to survive intact, think again. According to David Stemmer, Collection Manager, Mammals at the South Australian Museum, just how long a whalebone could last depends on its exposure to the elements and the age of the whale at death. “The jawbone of a younger animal would be less ossified and break down faster,” he says. “If it was exposed in full sunlight for most of each day, it would also break down a lot faster than being shaded or partially shaded. An adult jawbone that was only partially exposed could potentially survive for 80 years.”
