When I was seven or eight the whaling industry closed down in Albany. I had an awful haircut thanks to an aspiring teenage hairdresser down the road. I had to walk what felt like miles and miles to the bus stop. Mrs Marshall glared at me when I yelled at Simon for being a prat. Every kid I knew, their parents worked at the meatworks, the whaling station, on fishing boats, the fish factory, or else they were cleaners at the school.
The birth of Greenpeace in Australia?
Where was I?
Here?
I had a vague idea about a discrepancy in values happening but it was never argued at our dinner table. That wasn't our way. Newspapers were alien to me and I'd just started primary school. I do remember that after the whaling ended a strange quiet descended upon the town as everyone breathed in and tried to envision what would come next. I do remember the close conversations between my parents when they thought I was sleeping. A kind of tension. I remember the Great Whites winched up to be weighed and gawped at.
Anyway, the point of this post is that Chris Pash's
The Last Whale, the story of the last whaling operation in the Southern Hemisphere and the first Greenpeace action, has just been broadcast as a great radio documentary. It includes the testimonies of the old whalers and protestors from 1977. You can download the podcast here.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/the-last-whale/4711346Were you involved with the whaling, or the protests, or can you give me a picture of what your life was like in Albany in the 1970s? Really, I'm curious.
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