WHALING

Whaling

Whaling

Whaling in Australia

Whaling in Australia took place from colonisation in 1788. In 1979 Australia terminated whaling and committed to whale protection. The main varieties hunted were Humpback, Blue, Right and Sperm Whales.

There is no record of Australian Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people traditionally hunting whales, although it is said that aboriginal people did hunt with killer whales, in stories recounted at the Eden Killer Whale Museum. Aborigines were employed as boatcrew by some whaling masters (Taylor, 1997, 11-12).

Leaving Port Jackson in November 1791, Captain Eber Bunker of the William and Ann and Captain William Raven of the Britannia led the first ever whaling expedition in Australian waters. The two ships returned to Port Jackson with one whale each, which they processed on the shore. Bunker and Raven led a second expedition to Dusky Sound in New Zealand before returning to England with seal skins, in addition to whale oil.

Whale oil and baleen (whalebone) were profitable commodities and whaling was one Australia's first major export industries with coastal whaling stations helping build Australia. Sealing and whaling contributed more to the colonial economy than land produce until the 1830s.

From colonisation the whaling industry enjoyed 70 years of commercial success, until petroleum superseded whale oil. Also, the 1850s gold rush saw workers abandon whaling for the gold fields.

In the early twentieth century agriculture and mining suppressed a return to whaling. However, Norwegian whalers took an interest in the Australian waters and the Western Australian government encouraged whaling to develop new locations along its coast (Entwisle, 1998, pp.10-11).

From 1952 until 1962 a whaling station operated at Tangalooma, Queensland, on Moreton Island, which harvested and processed 6277 Humpback Whales during that period. It was forced to close after it had drastically reduced the number of whales in the eastern Australian Humpback population.

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