The Whales Who Never Forgot

New research has revealed that even when whaling left only a few hundred survivors, humpbacks remembered the Great Barrier Reef

Humpbacks on Australia’s east coast were almost wiped out. From tens of thousands, only a few hundred survived the harpoons. Yet even then, they never forgot the Great Barrier Reef. A new study shows that cultural memory carried them through near extinction, and their recovery is proof of what happens when we give whales the chance to remember.

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In 1965, a pilot flying a fisheries survey over the Great Barrier Reef leaned out of his cockpit. Below him, the sea was flat and turquoise, broken only by a scatter of white plumes. At first, he thought it was a school of tuna. Then he saw them, dark backs rolling, tails lifting, calves rising beside mothers.

Humpbacks.

It was the kind of sight no one expected to see again. By then, the east coast population had been reduced to scraps. Soviet whaling fleets had killed more than 20,000 from 1959 to 1961 alone. Shore stations at Byron Bay and Tangalooma had closed, not because the work was done, but because there were no whales left to kill. From tens of thousands, perhaps only a few hundred remained.

A humpback hauled onto the Byron Bay jetty in the 1950s, shortly before whaling ended as the whales ran out. (Credit: Australian Telegraph)

The pilot circled in disbelief. The ocean had been empty for years. Yet here they were, surfacing in the shallows of the reef.

A new study published this summer confirms that the sight was no anomaly. Even at their lowest numbers, humpbacks never abandoned the southern Great Barrier Reef. They carried cultural memory of this breeding ground across centuries. The researchers call it “multi-millennial memory.”

Memory Older Than Science

For the Woppaburra people of the Keppel Islands, a small group of islands off the central Queensland coast, at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef, none of this is surprising. In their Dreaming (the Woppaburra’s ancestral law and creation stories), Mugga mugga, the humpback, is a creation spirit. One blowhole made the islands, reefs, and forests. The other made the people and their laws.

Woppaburra people on Great Keppel Island, 1897. (Credit: John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland)

Every spring, as whales arrived from the south, their presence was woven into ceremony. Boys becoming men painted their bodies with stripes echoing a whale’s throat grooves. Ritual scars were cut with oyster shells to mirror the markings on a whale’s flank. Songs marked the return of abundance, timed with the winds that carried whales into their waters.

This is cultural memory. A way of keeping knowledge alive across generations.

Science has its own words for this.

Philopatry: returning to the same places year after year.

Cultural transmission: behaviour passed through learning, not genetics.

Humpbacks inherit migration routes from their mothers. They pass songs across entire ocean basins. They return to breeding grounds for centuries. The Woppaburra did not need the terms. They always knew the whales would come back.

A humpback whale breaches off the Queensland coast. Once driven to near extinction, more than 40,000 now migrate past Australia each winter (Credit: Tracy Farr)

The Whaling Century

That faith was nearly broken.

Between 1904 and 1973, more than 200,000 humpbacks were killed in the Southern Hemisphere. Soviet fleets alone killed at least 48,000 illegally, disguising the numbers with falsified records. The brutality was industrial. Explosive-tipped harpoons. Factory ships processing whales into oil and meat within hours. Decks slick with blood.

On the east coast, humpbacks were intercepted on their migration north. At Byron Bay, residents complained of blood pouring into the sea from the station. At Tangalooma, the stench of boiling blubber hung in the air.

By 1963, the east coast population, known as Breeding Stock E1, had collapsed to about five percent of its original size. Some estimates put the survivors at 200 animals.

Elsewhere, cultural memory did not survive. Gray whales vanished from the North Atlantic. Humpbacks abandoned traditional breeding grounds in parts of the Pacific. Migration routes disappeared, carried to the grave by the whales who knew them.

Yet on the Great Barrier Reef, even when there were almost none left, the whales still arrived.

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