Description Sunset on Cheynes Beach
I comb the beach for relics of a grisly trade:
The remains of whales, bone worn to the trabecular,
Ocean-rounded, like petrified sponge.
Humpbacks were hauled in here, and sperm whales
From beyond the continental shelf: murdered,
Factoried, flensed and rendered.
Here the sea would churn with blood, the strand
Clotted with it; great steel boilers bilged out
The stench of flesh and blubber.
Now, the dry-docked whale-chaser lies
Stranded, its belly exposed, the rudder
Like a flailing tail, the harpoons rust-blunted,
And the spent breakers sigh their way to land.
Gulls and oystercatchers paddle the littoral
And only sun pinks sand and sea.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2011. Whaling stations sprang up in Albany soon after the establishment of the town in 1826, and in 1952, the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company began killing Humpbacked and Sperm whales with the aid of three whale-chaser boats and a whale-spotting aircraft. Public outrage only reached proportions significant enough to close the station in 1978. The spot is now occupied by a museum ? ironically popular with whale-lovers - and the Cheynes IV chaser is in dry-dock beside it. This poem was inspired by a conversation with a sailor who was involved in the Greenpeace protests against the whaling station ? which included steering boats deliberately between the chasers and the whales - in the 1970s.
