On the Whale’s Back

 Breakfast time on Monday September 27 last; that day’s Australian spread out on the kitchen table; the cat eyeing off my buttered toast, with strong hints that she wouldn’t mind a slice for herself. Situation normal in the Ryan household.

My eye caught a short news item: a teenager in Albany, Western Australia, had swum out and climbed onto the back of a southern right whale swimming some twenty metres off shore.

“Good boy,” I thought. “So Australia is still breeding some spirited striplings. We need every one we can get. I’ll make another cup of coffee, and enjoy reading the rest of this story at leisure.”

As the coffee brewed, my mind browsed idly over the curiously mystical relation of whales to the human race; and I thought also about other likely lads who (in the immortal words of Russell Baker) had “made something of themselves”.

The whale–mankind affinity goes back thousands of years in folklore, and is extensive among the peoples of the South Pacific islands. But it is expressed nowhere more memorably than in the Bible. I don’t think we feel similarly about other marine creatures—no romances, for instance, with a flathead or a squid. Mermaids? Well, perhaps …

The whales, on the whole, seem to come out of it rather well, and Jonah’s patron “great fish” is a good example of their amiability: when, after three days and nights of free board and lodging, the Lord decided that it was time to restore his prophet to the light, the obliging whale chose to swim in close to the beach to vomit forth his lodger, so that he should reach dry land safely.

At first sight, Herman Melville’s demonic white whale Moby Dick offers a different slant, for he smashed Captain Ahab’s neck, wrecked his ship, and drowned all but one of his crew. But remember, the crazed Ahab had pursued that whale from ocean to ocean; surely it would turn eventually on its tormentor of so many seasons?

And I thought also about the youth David, who so bravely did for the giant Goliath; and of the game little Dutch boy, who saved his province from flooding by plugging the hole in the dyke with his finger; and the little Cavalier lad in his fancy suit, standing upright and alone before those surly Puritan Roundheads—no chance in the world of his betraying the family by telling “when he last saw his father”. And in my own schooldays there was that kid who rode his bike at high speed over a crazy bridge some of us had fashioned out of some old bits of timber, spanning a dangerously deep gully in Gardiners Creek. The decking was only six inches wide—the standard measure in those days for a floorboard—but over he went without a waver or a wobble. Perhaps it might have been predicted of such a lad: not many years later he died in a gallant last stand against the Germans in Winston Churchill’s disastrous Greek campaign.

I might have been slightly in a Boy’s Own Paper-ish frame of mind as I carried my fresh coffee back to the newspaper and resumed reading, quickly to learn that a “local”, standing on shore, had snapped pictures of whale and boy during their brief engagement. “Better and better,” was my thought. “Now that young man and his family will have a perpetual souvenir of his daring.”

Alas, no such thing.

This deeply shocked prune-faced “local” (any such tell-tale would have to be prune-faced, wouldn’t they?) promptly alerted the Department of Environment and Conservation to the appalling crime they had just witnessed and officiously photographed. The lad is now being sought by the authorities—almost a fugitive from justice; he may be charged with “harassing wildlife” and face a fine of $10,000. As every decent and right-thinking citizen knows, this young criminal ought to have kept thirty metres of clear water between himself and his hapless victim. A southern right whale grows to a bulk of eighty tonnes: that was being harassed by a lad in his swimming trunks!

The morning sunshine faded; the coffee grew cold. Is that the sort of world we live in now? Yes, it seems that we do. And if the Nanny State continues to spread its mealy-mouthed tentacles (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) our young people will be reduced to a race of gutless ninnies.

A little shyly, in the circumstances of today, I confess once to having eaten whale. It was in 1948, my final year of university studies. A party of us went to a flash new restaurant which was trying to establish its credentials for “novelty dishes”. Whale steak was their “special” for that day, and we all ordered it. I remember it quite well—a thin beaten-out slice of perfectly anonymous meat, pan-fried like a wiener schnitzel. It was OK, we all agreed, and an Eskimo might have found it haute cuisine; to us, veal might have been tastier. As far as I know, none of us ever tasted whale again, but no one had the slightest feeling that we had done something different or daring, let alone a bit “off-colour”. We were not vegetarians, and accepted entirely that meat of whatever origin comes down, in the end, to the bloody slaughter (to someone’s profit) of an animal: a bullock, a lamb, a hare, a fowl. Or a whale.

How and when did whales acquire their present semi-sacred super-species status? For me, whales are certainly engaging and interesting creatures whose extinction I should deplore. But is there some moral distinction which compels more human sympathy towards a whale than to a cow or a sheep? The creation of the International Whaling Commission was a rational measure of conservation to set limits to whale-catching and, though there have been criticisms, its work by and large seems to have been effective.

But not effective enough for the crazier kind of Greens, whose almost hysterical “Save the Whale” campaign culminates in the hairy-chested high seas hypocrisies of Greenpeace. How many whales have been saved by the antics of the Greenpeace gang of pirates? One? Two? If it were any significant number we may be sure they would have told us.

The malefactor who really hopped on the whale was not the Albany boy, but Kevin Rudd, once our prime minister. (Remember?) At a stage when it seemed to suit one of his scheming ambitions du jour, he was not only on its back, but all over it like a rash. Frantic for Green votes, he went through an adoption ceremony for their love-children, the whales, and jets of virtuous steam hissed from his ears: We’ll teach those horrible Japanese to mess with Bob Brown’s whales! We’ll put an end to Nipponese depredations in “our Antarctic”. (Not ours at all.) We’ll haul them trembling before the International Court of Justice. (Really—how?) But give him credit, at least, for having alienated our top trading partner, embarrassed our important Asian ally just off the coast of China, and made a laughing-stock of Australia in the eyes of the world. And now, as our Foreign Minister, he has to sort that little lot out.

I don’t fancy Julia Gillard’s chances, either, of staving off the ratbag exorbitancies of Green and Independent demands. The Greens are a party increasingly under the domination of communists, Trotskyists, Maoists and Stalinists—mates of Ms Gillard not so long ago. No wonder Bob Brown has given notice of his intention to quit.

Australian voters should appraise with deep caution any policies emerging from the Greens; most likely they will prove (in Shakespeare’s derisive phrase) “very like a whale”.