The Blood in Wineglass Bay 6

The peninsula had once been the exclusive domain of the Pydairrerme people- the Oyster Bay tribe, the last place the last Tasmanian aborigines were held. For some 30,000 years they lived there off the bounty of the sea and the forest. With the coming of Europeans, they fought a desperate guerrilla war to defend it until disease and deprivation did what musketry could not. By the 1850s, the Pydairrerme had been pushed out and the whalers had moved in, and then came sheep and cattle grazing, and coal and tin mining. Even the ancient Aboriginal middens were scoured for oyster shells to make lime.
“So what’s the story of the bay?” I asked.
“In the 1820s, whalers came to Wineglass Bay.” Said JB. “There was no job more laborious, more hazardous, and more disgusting.”
The Southern Right whales swam past Wineglass Bay in the winter months, on their annual migration from Antarctica. The shore bases that were set up, precipitated violent and fatal clashes with the local Aborigines. The whalers set out in small boats to chase and harpoon passing whales. They laboriously towed the dead cetaceans back to shore, where the carcasses were butchered, and the fat rendered in large iron trypots. The slices of blubber slices, known as ‘bible leaves,’ were kept as thin as possible for the processing. The extracted oil, cooled and barreled, was shipped to Britain, where it was used for lighting and industrial lubricants, and the whalebone for ladies' skirt hoops and corsets.
In less than fifty years, by 1750, the North Atlantic Right Whale had been nearly exterminated. It took less that twenty to do the same to the Southern Right Whale on the Freycinet peninsula, in the mid-1800s.
“In that short time,” Said JB. “Whenever the whalers went about their grisly business, the sparkling bay was dyed red with blood- like rich red wine in a glass.” Between the two near extinctions, the London Morning Post, on November 1, 1786, printed a propitious prognosis for Tasmania. This thief colony might hereafter become a great empire, whose nobles will probably, like the nobles of Rome, boast of their blood. The nobles wouldn’t likely be terribly disposed, to boast of the blood of the Aborigines or the Southern Right whales that they had slaughtered, to contrive their great empire.
By the 1840s shore-based whaling was in decline. Whale stocks had been severely reduced due to years of ruthless exploitation. Deep-sea pelagic whaling, with the sperm whale as the main quarry, would dominate the industry until the 1880s. The Southern Right whale would continue to suffer.
Waste from fish processing plants allowed seagull populations to soar, without any real reliably sustainable increase in their protein source. They turned to attacking and feeding on live Right whales. Because they need to spend up to a third of their time and energy performing evasive maneuvers, the mothers spend less time nursing, and the calves are thinner and weaker.
“This is one of the ten best beaches in the world.” Said JB. “Its climate is similar to that of France.” And how appropriate. The peninsula had been named for one of the Freycinet brothers, senior officers on Nicholas Baudin’s exploration of the region in 1802, on the vessels Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste.  

   ‘High granitic mountains whose summits are almost completely barren,
    form the whole eastern coast of this part of Van Diemen's Land. They
    rise sheer from the base. The country which adjoins them is extremely
    low and cannot be seen unless viewed from only a little distance at
    sea. It is to this strange formation that we must doubtless attribute
    the errors of the navigators who had preceded us into these waters
    and who had mistaken these high mountains for as many separate
    islands.’

But there had been a history of loss and sadness, over the wine dark sea.




   “And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the
     winds long to play with your hair.”
                                                                     Khalil Gibran