Dancing with Whales: The Lore-Fare Twist

“Sometimes parts of the [whale] stories are lost. Someone might get a part of a story but there’s a missing link, then in will come a fabrication to fill in the gap. This is something I could never do to my old fellas.” — Yuin Elder, the late Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison, Gurrawul the Whale

Whales are handsome and impressive creatures. It’s a pity they’ve been weaponised by green-left and Aboriginal-identifying zealots. These lobbyists are out to destroy Australia’s gas production, especially from new offshore projects. They co-opt and embellish ancient whale lore and songlines to stymie offshore gas proposals.

This whale-based campaign is no trivial matter. As The Australian put it a week ago, the east coast energy market is facing a perfect storm of higher global LNG prices, gas shortages, spiking power bills and blackouts. The Opposition claims Australia’s energy market is just “one unexpected event away” from an economy-destroying collapse. The campaign is not even successful in its own terms: in the past 40 years our primary energy sourcing from fossil fuels has merely crept back from 94% to 90%.[1]

This essay will first explore the lore and its green-black-red reincarnation as lore-fare. I’ll then list a few cases, and check out campaign group Friends of the Earth. There’s no conclusion as this battle rages from week to week.

WHALE LORE has become ever more fanciful. For sure, some pre-colonial clans left whale evidence in their rock art, totems and ancestral stories. Even today some 40,000 whales continue to traverse the NSW coast annually and in pre-whaling times the queue must have looked like a taxi-rank. Lore-keepers have added or back-cast material drawn from a century ago about orcas cooperating with the whaling industry around Eden. And today anything goes in retellings and woke-isms.

One example: green lobbyists World Wildlife Fund provides lesson templates for school classes drawn from Kaurna/Ramindjeri stories from around Victor Habour, SA, about “Kondili the Whale”.[2] The document puts it:

Some of the girls in the class expressed concern that so many of the characters from Dreaming stories are males and so for our purposes, some of the characters have been changed to females … We’re trying to have the children make connections with Dreaming stories from the past and to show the relevance and importance of the stories to them in the present.

In other words, any tale can now be tweaked or sanitised to a political or woke agenda. In contrast, the late Uncle Max Harrison, a Yuin elder, wrote,

“Our lore is not something that can be changed, [it] can never be changed. It’s not like British law that can be changed with the stroke of a pen.” — Gurawul the Whale, p88

Uncle Max seems an authentic guardian of old whale lore: he was taught and initiated (sometimes brutally) by his grandfather and five uncles in the bush over a period of 17 years. Thereafter to increase goodwill he shared what he could with the white community. He lost traction with the media and especially the ABC[3], when he campaigned against forced vaccinations after two of his great nieces died and blamed vaccines for hurting two more descendants. Ironically, he died at 85 last year in Sutherland Hospital from Covid complications, a fortnight after addressing a major anti-vax rally.

Helped by two ghost-writers, he authored the 100-page Gurawul the Whale  last year. The essence is that Gurawul was a land animal millions of years ago, possibly operating as a bunyip. “The old people were closer to nature than the scientists,” he writes, speculating that the bunyips were actually Diprotodons. The whales left the land to care for Sea Country creatures, and they leave bubble tracks to help Yuins’ travels. The Yuins on the beach sing and dance to reassure the whales and obtain seafood and medicines, “helping to restore peace in our land”. By agreement Gurawul strands itself to be ceremonially speared and while dying it regurgitates lore to the Yuin.

Uncle Max led 200 people in a “whale and Grandfather Sun ceremony” on Balmoral Beach, Mosman in 2002. He was concerned that such ceremonies could attract too many whales, instancing one small boat at Barranguba (Montague Island, off Narooma) getting surrounded by 300 of them (p55).

ABC favourite Bruce Pascoe, who has never identified his supposed Aboriginal ancestor, has taken on Uncle Max’s mantle as keeper of whale lore. Last year he was whale dancing on the beach at Apollo Bay with the Gurandgi clan and 90 others. While they danced, he writes, a whale and her calf breached several times: “Locals couldn’t believe it, having never seen whales in that stretch of water before .”[4]

That Pascoe’s dancing partners were astonished at the sight of a whale and its calf is quite surprising, suggesting they were new to the area, suffering vision problems or, most likely, that Australia’s premier fauxboriginal was making stuff up again. As the Victorian coastal town informs tourists, “From May to October Southern Right Whales can be seen along the Great Ocean Road, sometimes approaching within 100 metres to shore providing hours of entertainment.”

Uncle Bruce also recounts how his non-Aboriginal partner, Lyn Harwood ,actually led dancers in a recent t35-strong “moving ceremony” at Nangudga Estuary (Narooma).

“As the oldest woman in attendance, Lyn led the women into the circle and I could see how moved she was. The old dancer in her couldn’t be suppressed but I knew her knees would be quite remorseful the next day.” — Black Duck p205-6.

I have to wonder if nearby whales, being intelligent, were reassured and guided on their long navigation by Nangudga dancers led by a white woman volunteer.

Pascoe not only dances on beaches but sings whale songs to foreign whale-watch tourists outside Sydney Harbour. He recounts how he flew to Sydney to help the La Perouse mob handle the outings. “We saw whales and we sang their songs to the other passengers.”[5] (p256). In his Dark Emu, Pascoe retails this improbable story from Eden, NSW:

When the natives see a whale being chased by killer whales one of the old men pretends to be lame and frail and lights some fires a little distance apart on the shore and walks between them pretending to be lame and helpless to excite the compassion of the killer whales and the man calls on the killers to bring the whale ashore. When the injured whale drifts in to shore the other men come out of hiding to kill the whale and call on neighbouring tribes to join the feast.

This story is third-hand – Pascoe quotes Mutton Fish (2005) by Beryl Cruse, Liddy Stewart and Sue Norman, in which the authors quote ethnographer and retired surveyor RH Mathews from 1904, who quotes an Aborigine of the late 19^th Century. Pascoe tidies the account and erases Mathews’ scepticism of the “supposed” claim.[6] The rotting whale’s reek was said to have attracted others from well inland, but Pascoe avoids Mathews’ off-putting mention of Aborigines climbing into the carcass to anoint themselves with “medicinal juices” .

Pascoe then produces a morality fable about how the profit-hungry whalers got their comeuppance when “a disgruntled European whaler shot the lead killer whale. That was the last time the cetaceans cooperated with humans.” (p175).[7] The Eden Museum actually says the pod leader “Old Tom” died of natural causes in 1930.

The verified story is that around 1900-01 a killer whale known as Typee chased a minke whale into the shallows and they both stranded. An out-of-town drifter named Harry Silkes for reasons unknown knifed both whales. A photo of the dead pair  can be seen here here. Silkes’ crime caused outrage with both the blacks and the Eden whalers. He fled town, and the black community moved away to the Wallaga Lake reserve, depriving whalers of their skills. But according to zoologist Danielle Clode (now Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Flinders University) the mass slaughter of whales by the global whaling fleets might have caused the decline at Eden.[8]

Pascoe concludes with his usual hyperbole:

“Where else anything like the association with Orcas and [Yuins] whale hunting in Twofold Bay? These will deservedly come to rank amongst the great stories of Australian culture, as cornerstones of what and who we Australians are. These stories exemplify sharing the abundance.

Uncle Max and Pascoe claim that Aborigines somehow arrived in Australia from below modern Tasmania. When they lived on the sea-endangered Bass Strait 12,000 years ago, friendly whales blew bubble paths to lead some to safety on the mainland, while others got to Tasmania, Harrison wrote. Pascoe gives this story a New Age tilt, with the whales saying:

“You will meet fellow Aboriginal people there [mainland] and you will be asking them to share their land. So be polite, be respectful, do not fight for land. The sharing was done, probably not without hardship, but was conducted, as Gurawul had asked, in peace. Yuin Gurandgi live by that lore today.” — Black Duck, p91.

Pascoe passed on his ancient knowledge to a respectful Academy of Science audience in 2021, where he was opening plenary speaker.

A THEME these days is that past Aboriginal feasting on a beached or discarded whale were occasions for inter-tribal “sharing and caring”. However, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner wrote of the 1930s that a local clan on the fringe of white settlement resented another clan coming in for the same easy rations, who “under traditional law could have been murdered on sight.”[9] At whaling stations at the mouth of the Murray River from the late 1820s, the tonnes of discarded whale carcass were a magnet for outlying clans (Kondilindjeri – Tanane) who came in and clashed with the incumbent Ngarrindjeri, according to the late Aboriginal author/historian Joe Lane.

As for today’s anti-petroleum activists, the Indigenous crusade in Victoria against vitally-needed offshore gas is led by Yaraan Couzens Bundle, who set up the Southern Ocean Protection Embassy Collective (SOPEC) against seismic blasting. The local Friends of the Earth group claims the blasts are louder than atom bombs and can kill or deafen whales, apart from supposedly wrecking the climate. Says Bundle, “We are living in the time of mass extinction. When I look out at the magic of the Southern Ocean, I don’t want to see gas mines lighting up the horizon. I want to see rainbows from whale breaths. Resource extraction will push the already rare Southern Right Whale and other sea life species to extinction … Leave the Southern Ocean be.”

Bundle claims her clan has understood whale language for thousand of years. And she wants more funds from whites for her campaigns. “Yeah, pay the rent literally,” she says. [10]

In WA a custodian of Whale Dreaming is Ms Raelene Cooper, founder of Save Our Songlines. She persuaded the Federal Court to halt Woodside’s $16-billion Scarborough project off Karratha to protect her “spirit whales”.[11] She insists she and the spirit whales converse, and that the spirits also tell  fish what to eat, when to mate and where to migrate. Judge Craig Colvin ruled that Woodside with its 10 trillion cubic feet resource could cause “cultural harm” and awarded costs to Ms Cooper. Similar lawfare might also delay Santos’ $2-billion offshore Dorado oil and gas project 140km from Port Hedland.

WA Labor Premier Roger Cook is himself a former consultant to Aboriginal advocacy groups on land titles and resource proposals. Last December he accused well-funded green groups of manipulating and wedging Aboriginal communities over resource project approvals. The tactic was to split off individuals and factions to delay, cancel or appeal main-group approvals, he said.

In January, in an uncommon win for rationality in this field, Federal Court Justice Natalie Charlesworth found for Santos and its Barossa offshore gas project near the Tiwi Islands, against objections by several islanders. She panned the conduct of an Environmental Defenders Office lawyer. She also panned UWA Associate Professor Mick O’Leary for prompting Tiwi objectors and lying to them.[12] Dr O’Leary, an expert witness, apologised for his false “off the cuff” remarks during a workshop. The judge considered the pair’s conduct encouraged the objectors against the $6-billion project and its 385km pipeline from the Timor Sea to Darwin.

The objectors – unrepresentative of the whole Tiwi community – alleged risk of damage to their rainbow serpent, Mother Ampiji, and their shape-shifting “Crocodile Man” ancestor Jirakupai. Such damage would create calamities like cyclones and sickness, they claimed. Their case – which Judge Charlesworth threw out — also involved alleged construction harms to their cultural relics on the deep seabed from 18,000 years ago. It’s astonishing that any adult takes such claims seriously in the first place.

Charlesworth J. was also concerned that the objectors’ narrative

“is no more than a mosaic formed from snippets of sentences said by separate informants, arranged together so as to be presented as a coherent singular narrative shared collectively by Tiwi Islanders or at least a sub-community of more than one of them.”[13]

The issue has become red hot after federal environment minister Tanya Plibersek blocked the $1b Regis McPhillamy gold project near Orange a week ago, despite its potential for nearly 1000 start-up and continuing jobs. She cited a niche Aboriginal group’s claim about risks to songlines. The Orange local Aboriginal Land Council said that people without the “experience, expertise and authority” were making the objections: “We question the motives of people and organisations who participate in pro­moting unsubstantiated claims and seek to hijack Aboriginal ­Cultural Heritage in order to push other agendas,” it submitted in January 2023. The federal and NSW environment departments had no objections to the project.

I’ll finish with a closer look at whale-conscious Friends of the Earth (FOE), which claims two million adherents in 70 countries. Aptly abbreviated, FOE looks more red than green, and certainly knows how to make its tactics and alliances effective. Among its demands:

“Stopping further development of new onshore and offshore fossil gas projects across Victoria. Working with traditional owner groups, including Keerray Woorroong Gunditjmara First Nations Peoples, coastal communities, farmers and the tourism industry to advocate for an end to further fossil gas development.”

With 18 full-time-equivalent workers and 90 volunteers, FOE Australia runs on a budget of $3-4 million every year. Its 2023 annual report says it aims “to grow as a fundamentally anti-capitalist organisation, and actively building the power of working people and the struggle for economic democracy”.

Its Melbourne members “seek justice and liberation from all oppressive systems that devalue and exploit people and the environment, including patriarchy, colonialism, class oppression, capitalism, racism, ableism and heteronormativity.” The movement even opposes  high-yield farming, favouring instead of that supposed “patriarchal capitalist” model “equitable food systems based on the fundamental principles of a feminist economy.”

FOE partners listed in Victoria include Murray Lower Darling Indigenous Nations, National Parks Assn (Vic), Trades Hall and Unions (Vic), School Strike for Climate, the extremist Lock the Gate, Beyond Zero Emissions, City of Yarra and Bass Coast Climate Action Network.

FOE has teamed with a new Aboriginal group, Saltwater People, to campaign with Greens Victoria to ban offshore oil and gas (but not offshore wind farms) “in and near Victorian waters” ostensibly for the whales’ sake. FOE Australia has an “affiliate project” called Market Forces, which lobbies against the Barossa project of Santos, claiming it risks spills, pipeline eruptions and “devastating impacts” on the local environment. Market Forces has joined the activists’ squeeze on union super funds  to make Santos “uphold the rights of Traditional Owners or else dump their [offshore] investments.”

The media fawns on FOE. Its PR recruit for “No More Gas”, Jeff Waters, had a spectacular opening innings, getting more than 100 interviews with the Guardian, Nine and “various ABC outlets including extended interviews on ABC News Radio, and many ABC talk radio programmes across the country.”   But of course!

This survey of whale activism and embellished lore illustrates how a petroleum-rich country like Australia can afford a great deal of ruin. We combine anti-CO2 madness with “First Nations” madness and a lot of Parliamentary and judiciary madness to sabotage our world-leading petroleum and resources industries. Perhaps sanity will prevail before this great country is crippled beyond repair.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] In the UK, there’s a proposed giant 600squ km project in the North Sea involving 100 wind turbines of 3000 tonnes each reaching 250m high. If successful, the project will merely supply 2% of the country’s electricity.

[2] The story and variants derive mostly from an 1846 book Manners and customs of the Aborigines of the Encounter Bay tribe: South Australia, by Pastor H. Meyer, and from tales told to anthropologists Ron and Catherine Berndt in the 1940s, published in 1993: A world that was: the Yaralde of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia, Melbourne University Press.

[3] I could find only a few brief ABC mentions of Uncle Max in the past decade. He believed Aborigines were particularly vulnerable to vaccine harm.

[4] Pascoe, B., Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra, Thames & Hudson, 2024 p65.

[5] While not relevant to my whale article, the ABC this week disclosed the seed output from Pascoe’s Gipsy Point farm, which was meant to demonstrate the viability of pre-colonial Aboriginal farming. The output is 10kg of seed per week at $180-450 per kg. This is after injection of $2.2m of taxpayer and charitable funding into the 50 hectares in the past four years. In July he appealed for more funds, saying the project was now living from hand to mouth.

[6] From Mathews – The “lame” old man hoaxing the killer whales “occasionally calls out in a loud voice, ga-ai! ga-ai! Dundya waggarangga yerri- maran-hurdyen, meaning ‘Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho! That fish upon the shore throw ye to me!”

[7] Another Whale Dreamer, Yaraan Couzens Bundle, elaborates: “The whale industry crashed after that… So yeah, it just shows the greed of the Ngamatitj [whites], and the continuation of that greed is the same greed and poison that we’re fighting on sea country today.” She calls offshore gas development “animal terrorism” and “environmental genocide”.

[8] See the ABC film Killers in Eden, 2005, on youtube. (Details from 41 minutes). See also Clode, D (2011). Killers in Eden: the story of a rare partnership between men and killer whales. New South Books.

[9] Stanner, William E. H., 1958, Continuity and Change among the Aborigines. In Manne Robert (Editor), 2009, p152.

[10] Despite her climate credentials, Bundle has criticised offshore wind farms for seismic work in blue whale feeding grounds. “From the little tiny zooplankton, all the way up to the largest creature in the ocean, the blue whale, and everything in between, is at risk of major damage, and destruction, extinction.” On the other hand, WWF in its key document on threats to the whales includes climate but  omits wind farms.

[11] Whales have been migrating through the region in ever increasing numbers despite millions of seismic blasts.

[12] O’Leary’s “independence and credibility are such that I would not accept his evidence as sufficient to establish any scientific proposition at all … Dr O’Leary’s lack of regard for the truth, lack of independence and lack of scientific rigor are sufficient to discount or dismiss all of his reports for all purposes.” Charlesworth, J. (emphasis added)

[13] Lawyers sympathetic to the objectors discussed the case as unfair to the Tiwis because of their alleged generations-long subjection to white genocide.