Maybe Douglas Adams Had The Wrong Species….

Whales congregating in unprecedented numbers, but we don’t know if that’s normal after almost hunting them to extinction. Because we’ve never had the science to do that back then, before we you know, hunted them to the point of near-extinction…

We really are a planetary parasite. But now, we have science. We should be using it to make things better. (And yet are STILL using it to eat the planet rather than fixing it.)

This new phenomenon of whales congregating is unknown to us because we actually seem to lack a mechanism to remember almost anything. Ask the majority of people what WWI started over, go on. Or WWII. Or how much of the world’s population the Spanish Flu killed. Or, for that matter, how long the COVID pandemic raged on for.

(Clue: The COVID pandemic is still ongoing, it's infecting, disabling, or killing more people now than it did at the "height" of what we think was the pandemic 2020-2021... How's THAT for getting the collective forgetties?)

And that brings me to another possibly relevant point – culture. Our continuing memories of our history form part of our culture. And as we’ve seen even here in Australia, is that recorded history shapes the current culture. Those who win the wars really do write the history books. And recorded can also mean passed on by verbal records – tales that are handed down verbatim through generations – or written, drawn, painted, sculpted. It can mean built into our very architecture like the spiral staircases of castles and keeps.

Australian history and culture? Well, the idea that no-one lived here before Europeans arrived was promulgated for centuries. Terra nullius became a black eye for the right-wing party here. How the historical and archaeological findings and the verbal and painted histories of the people who started living here 60,000 years before Europeans, can be so diametrically opposite, is testament to how winners of wars write histories and erase the indigenous history.

We still let mining companies erase entire compendiums of aboriginal history by blowing up caves whose paintings record history from tens of thousands of years ago. None of our history books contain more than a mention of “myths” of the “Dreamtime” when that IS the history of the country and we should be studying it far more than the last few hundred years of colonisation.

History Impermanence

Which brings me around to how hard it is to establish a “true” historical record – we brought a European history to this country and erased a history that existed here. We have surveyors, archaeologists, history specialists, and they’re taking notes, recording their findings on paper and in digital form, and still we don’t know what went on just since we arrived here.

If I wanted to know why the population of aboriginal people plummeted, all I have are my school curriculum history books (I am talking about the history books that were around at the time I went to school almost sixty years ago) which don’t really tell me how many of the indigenous people were slain, nor how many settlers they retaliated against, and in fact, not one single word mentioned the horrific acts of large-scale genocide that took place. 

Yet if you care to read back even in our own records, you can see the suppressed mentions of killings of indigenous people by the settlers, but we’re still not really thinking about it as a country. It’s finally starting to happen – these dark chapters are being brought to light, but note how extraordinarily difficult it has been for the indigenous Australians to preserve their mainly verbal and painted history in the face of themselves being reduced in number and losing key historians.

Culture Impermanence

Bear with me, bear with me, I’ll circle back to the whales again soon. You cansee where this is going, right?

In Germany in the 1930s there arose a new culture, one that found Jewish people to be a form of terra nullius, a race in which no humanity existed, so to speak. In just a few years, the population was charged up with propaganda and public education to believe a manufactured history, and collectively commit attempted genocide. 

Culture changes. If enough people believe that every person is responsible for their own safety and that every other person is out to rob them, you get a gun culture such as is in America. If you believe that someone else – anyone else – should be looking after your safety and security, you end up in a culture that by law must place labels on bottle of bleach urging people not to drink it.

Now Imagine

… if, in Australia, 90% of the population died from some new disaster. Imagine that the university libraries and public libraries were all destroyed, and only 10% of the historians, scientists, etc, are left. Imagine that Australia is the Last Place On Earth, there’s no outside contact of any kind. 

Imagine knowing what a society we had, what science and technology, agriculture, manufacturing, but only in that same dilute patchy form. 

It’s Where The Whales May Be right Now

Perhaps these congregations are where a new whale culture is being disseminated to the younger whales, Perhaps what we’re seeing are desperate efforts to bring back the Old Whale Empire. So to speak, at any rate. There’s been a collective loss of memories and experiences due to the tens of thousands of whales hunted each taking their piece of the “culture” with them. 

Youngsters are more curious, they find out things that the older don’t bother with because their collective older experiences tell them it’s not worth pursuing. But perhaps the sharing of that is necessary and that’s why younger animals are provided with endless curiosity and energy. Perhaps that’s how any species that teaches itself specialised hunting and foraging techniques make advances, and the congregations are the way to disseminate all that information.

Of course, they may also just not remember collectively where the best congregating grounds are. They could also be facing a hunger crisis where many of the older humpbacks that knew where the feeding grounds shift to with the season are gone and the younger ones are just cruising around looking for food.

Between them and the Orca attacks on ships and the mass beachings, they may just be trying to make contact with us because collectively the cetaceans are quite intelligent and cultured but lack a way to make the changes that need to be made.

They may have figured out that we’re to blame and are just aggressive against us.

Or, they may be calling their mothership.

We really need to listen, and work it out. Douglas Adams may have known something…

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