The Shore Whalers of Western Australia: Historical Archaeology of a Maritime Frontier

Abstract

It would be difficult to claim that the shore-based whaling industry which operated in Western Australia in the 19th century was a commercial success. If later conventional histories are to be believed, the whaling companies established with a flourish on the west and south coasts in the late 1830s lasted only several years into the early 1840s. In that time the industry provided limited financial returns, after which it apparently faded into obscurity with just the occasional hint of inconsequential activity on the economic and geographic margins of the colony. Similarly, for those years when hopes were high the written record of the industry is robust. Once the prospects of whaling being the economic saviour of the colony had receded the documentary evidence diminishes to the blandest and briefest of government and newspaper recordings. Despite this, many coastal communities continued to engage in whaling as an important part of their local seasonal economies, with the industry surviving over 40 years until the late 1870s and possibly beyond. As with other colonies, later successes with pastoralism, timber and mining washed away both interest in and understanding of the early significance of whaling. In Western Australia particularly, any memory of 19th century shore whaling is overshadowed by its 20th century descendant. With the Cheyne Beach Whaling Company operating near Albany until 1978, popular images of whaling are of motorized chase vessels, explosive harpoons and massive mechanised processing plants processing a catch of hundreds of animals per year. Any notion of the earlier industry is ambiguously associated with sealers, runaway convicts and assorted other ruffians operating at the physical, social and legal edges of European settlement.