John Walker was a young man by the time he saw his first whale. It sounds incongruous as he sits speaking on the front verandah of his home in Eden, the southernmost town of coastal NSW, looking across Twofold Bay, which is now widely recognised as one of the surest places on Australia’s east coast for whale spotting.
John was born and grew up around here. And most Sundays, he’d fish with his dad from a rock somewhere along this sapphire-blue waterway’s shoreline. “In all that time, I never even saw a whale spouting,” he says. “By then they had pretty much disappeared.”
John recalls one momentous occasion, in the mid-1950s, when reports of a rare whale sighting almost brought the area to a standstill. “I was in 5th class, and the whole school closed down in the middle of the day. And we all went down to the cliffs about 150 yards from the school to see a whale, because the vast majority of us had never seen one.”
These days, whales – mostly humpbacks, sometimes right whales, and last year even a few blue whales – stream past here in their thousands.
During the colder months, as they head northwards to warmer birthing grounds, they breach and spout in the open ocean, and can be seen if you take a boat out. But during southern summertime migrations, as they head back south to feeding grounds in Antarctica, they often come right inside the bay and can be spotted from the shore.
John, now 80, moved away for a short period to study, but returned to work – as a classroom teacher and ultimately school principal – and to raise his own family.
“We now live in a spot where you can see the bay, and almost daily – from August until the end of November, early December – you can see whales,” he says. “They come right into the bay, quite close to the beach and the land. And if the weather’s right, and there’s a bit of a chop [rough weather] on, they play quite actively and they’re very easy to observe.”
Killer relationships
Measuring over 30sq.km with an average depth of 10.9m, Twofold Bay is the third deepest natural harbour in the Southern Hemisphere, after Sydney Harbour and South Africa’s Saldanha Bay. But it’s the
connection with whales that has made it truly legendary.
In a relationship that’s extraordinary on a global scale, the local Yuin First Nations people worked here with killer whales – which, despite their name, are actually the largest member of the dolphin family and are also known as orcas – to hunt for baleen whales such as humpbacks. The relationship was exploited and further developed by commercial colonial whalers in the area for about a century until the late 1920s.
Yuin Elder BJ Cruse, the chairperson of the Eden Local Aboriginal Land Council, holds knowledge – passed down from his father, Ossie, now aged in his early 90s, and his grandmother, whose second husband was a whaler – about the extraordinary connection between people and killer whales in the area. The traditional practice ceased with colonisation, BJ explains.
“But then the Europeans employed Aboriginal people within the whaling industry and used the relationship they had with the killers [orcas] to hunt for whales for commercial operations,” he says.
To this day, that relationship remains part of his people’s identity, BJ adds. Also significant to the Yuin, who identify as both mountain and sea people, is their association with the bogong moth, which they traditionally harvested for food near Mt Kosciuszko, where the insect overwinters in huge numbers.
These days, Indigenous people make up more than 8 per cent of Eden’s population of approximately 3300.
When John was growing up in the area, the last of the old whalers, Archer Davidson, was still alive, albeit very elderly. Archer was part of the locally renowned Davidson family who operated the whaling station on the southern end of the bay – famed as Australia’s longest-running shore-based whaling station – for four generations until its closure in the late 1920s.
A whale of a recovery
On the back of this incredible story of recovery, whales have also reclaimed their role as a crucial component of the region’s economy – only this time as a huge drawcard for tourism. “People have been whale watching here for ages now,” John says.
But there’s also an ongoing fascination among visitors for the hunting relationship between killer whales and humans. John volunteers at the Eden Killer Whale Museum, which, as part of its array of attractions and visitor experiences, boasts the skeleton of one specific killer whale – known famously as
‘Old Tom’ – who was among the last of the animals to work with the area’s whalers.
It’s part of an overall tourism package that draws many thousands of visitors to the area annually. In addition to the region’s rich whaling history, the bay is surrounded by stunning natural bushland, much of it once logged but now protected as national park. However, it’s Twofold Bay’s impressive depth that has most worked in its favour when it comes to tourism.
Huge cruise ships can pull into the bay and offload thousands of tourists, who then use Eden as a point from which to explore the area by bus, often travelling as far as Canberra, over three hours’ drive north-west.
“Last year, we had something like 42 or 44 cruise ships in, which has a significant impact on the local economy,” John says. Sometimes a ship can carry more people than the population of Eden.
When a large ship is in, John adds, it may provide up to 20 busloads of visitors to the killer whale museum, which is largely staffed by local volunteers. Each large boat can bring in up to $10,000 to the museum alone.
“It has enabled the museum to expand and develop a whole new approach to what they’re doing, which would have never been possible,” John says. “Like most museums around the countryside, it ran on the smell of an oily rag…until the cruise ships started arriving.”
Already more than 30 cruise ships of varying sizes are booked to visit the bay next year. A lot of them travel between Sydney and Melbourne and across to Hobart. And many of the passengers are believed to later come back to the area for a longer visit. “They do the cruise, get a taste of the place, and will then come back by road and spend a week or so,” John says.
As well as its historic industrial and cultural connection to whaling, the area has more recently relied on industries such as forestry, sawmilling and fishing. “But tourism is now becoming enormously important to the survival of the place,” John says.
When John was a teenager, most young people in the area tended to follow their parents’ career path into the fishing, logging, woodchip or tuna canning industries. That, too, has now changed. “Few people went away from the area,” John recalls.
“But these days most young people leave to further their education, and the high school now produces kids that go into all sorts of areas, from astrophysics to medicine to teaching – you name it.”
But, like John, many of them later return to rediscover and revel in the remarkable physical beauty and natural assets that they grew up witnessing. And nothing embodies that beauty quite like the sight of whales gliding into the bay.
