When Byron Bay was a whaling town

Mary Gardner

‘I saw my first whale this season. They’re early,’ the man says, with a thrill in his voice. The noise of the crowd at the gig drowns out his other words. Suddenly, I fall into a small time warp. Everything goes quiet and I hear again the voice of another, older man.

‘I grew up on a dairy farm on a ridge between Byron and Lennox. We always knew when there was a whale in the Bay. We heard the boom from the harpoon. When they shot one, it echoed all around.’

Photos from the 1950s show crowds of bystanders watching whales hauled up on the jetty. Like now, going to Byron to see whales was a popular outing. Another man tells me of his first visit to Byron back then. He was a child, maybe seven years old.  As he walks up to the body, which was over ten and a half metres long, he sees a man working.

‘He was cutting something. Maybe it was an artery or near the heart. But suddenly blood sprays all over me,’ he says.

Now, years later, the grown man shrugs. He moves the conversation on to another topic.

I read old newspaper clippings and memoirs about whaling in Byron from 1954 to 1962. The fishing fleet had just been devastated by the 1954 cyclone. Whaling employed 60 men.

I stretch my senses and imagine. The noise on the jetty from the crane and the chains. The shouting. The tonnes of dead weight slowly hauled up from the water where large sharks snapped at any part they could still reach. The smell up-close and throughout the town. The heat of the body, which needed to be processed quickly before it began to cook itself.

The men working 12-hour shifts six days a week. They had to be quick and precise. Mistakes would hurt a mate or cost money. Hauling, flensing, boiling down the blubber for oil. Some meat went to families or to the butcher shop. The rest was processed largely for agricultural use.

Out at sea, the crew of the Byron I had to look sharp too. Their ship was run on diesel and their harpoon used explosives. Although mechanised, the work at sea was still hazardous. Shifts went round the clock. There was a quota to meet.

In eight years, 1,046 whales were killed. The Byron work stopped because there was hardly a whale to be found.  Of course, they weren’t the only whalers in the South Pacific in those days. But by 1978, culture changed. Most whaling nations, including Australia, signed international treaties and gave up the hunt.

And the whalemen themselves? One of these veterans of our war with nature was Harry Robertson, who died in 1995. Born a Scot in 1923, an Australian from 1952, he was a ship engineer and worked in the whaling industries of Norway and Australia. He had a natural ear for music. Using the traditional folk style, he sang his own songs of the working life of seamen from Queensland to Antarctica. He helped start the Maleny and Woodford festivals. True as other folk songs about battles, his songs hurt, even as the tune sweeps you along:

The harpoon and the line fly true – bedding deep into the whale,
And she split the timbers of the ship, with a flurry of her tail,
The rigging struts were snapped in two, we reeled beneath the blow…

Heigh-ho ye trawler men come on, forget the snapper and the prawn,
And it’s out of Ballina we’ll sail, a-fishing for the Humpback whale.

For more info about Harry Robertson see his website: www.harryrobertson.net.