WHALE WORLD ALBANY

WHALE WORLD MUSEUM

We came back from Porongurup and went to visit the Whale World Museum in Albany, what an interesting place. Apparently I have been there when I was about 3 years old, my sister Julie remembers the awful smell and watching the blubber being put down these huge holes in the deck and mum and dad bought some whales teeth there which are now worth about three times as much…. I don’t remember a thing.

We found it a very interesting place and learn’t a lot about the history of whaling. It was in 1976 that the last whale was processed here and since then they have done a lot of work around the place to keep it open to the public.

You can walk through one of the original ship used for whaling and see how they lived and worked for 6 out 7 days a week.



The Cheyne 1V used for whaling
you could explore this ship.



Inside one of the Mess Rooms



Second Mates room



The spear guns used to kill the whales.

A day for a whaler would start anytime from 4-6am on board the ship and would end 12 maybe 14 hours later depending on the weather. They would go out hunt down a whale, hopefully a cow ( female) because whales mate for life so if they get a cow the bull (male) would hang around they would more then likely get him to. If they caught a bull first the female would flee for her life, smart aren’t they! Once the whale was dead they would pump them full of air so they would float, tag them with a beacon and place a flag in them to show other whaling ships who had killed this whale, then they would let them float free and move on to the next kill. When the end of the day was near they would turn the ship around and start heading home collecting the floating whales as they went, tying them on behind the ship like floating balloons.

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Where the dead whales were tied up off shore there was a lot of sharks around trying to get a free feed so one of the jobs was to shoot the sharks and keep them away from the whales.

The whales would be pulled up onto the flensing deck with a winch and there they would be sliced to peel off the blubber and the meet sorted out, the only part not used in a whale was the heart, kidney and liver because they may have contained traces of mercury. The rest was used either for the oil or processed down to a powder for fertiliser or feed for cattle.The teeth were pulled because they were pure Ivory and worth a lot on the market. A product which I cannot remember now but starts with an “A” is found in the intestine of the whale and this is used in expensive perfumes, it is what makes the perfume stick to the body!!

Such an interesting place with a lot to see. The old tanks that were used to hold the oil have been turned into mini cinema’s each very different. To see the size of some of the actual bones of whales was also an eye opener. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in what happened not that long ago….



The bones around the door frame are the
jaw bones of a blue whale.




These are the bones from the last Pygmy Whale Caught
here at this plant




The shark cage used to run over the oil pipe line that ran
form the tanks on land  out to sea to the ships which came in to fill up. Men
would swim in this to check the line and make sure there were no
leaks. The jaws behind the boys were from a 3.6 meter
great white shark, considered a small one.