The Last Season at Cheynes Beach
A Novel of Australia's Final Whaling Station

About this book:

The steam whistle at Frenchman Bay tears through the morning air, thick with the smell of boiled blubber and the knowledge that an era is ending. It's February 1978, and the Cheynes Beach Whaling Company—Australia's last station, the final outpost of a global industry in the Southern Hemisphere—is grinding through another season. Gunner Axel Lindholm has twenty-four years of salt cured into his hands. He knows the swell, the whales, and the iron logic of the hunt. But the barometer is dropping, the quota is shrinking, and on the dirt road outside the gate, protesters with cardboard signs are appearing where the timber trucks used to turn. Out on the water, a rubber Zodiac is preparing to chase the chasers into the gray swells.

Peter Bridgewater's *The Last Season at Cheynes Beach* plunges you onto the flensing deck and into the harpoon platform of the *Cheynes IV*, where the work is brutal, the bonds are forged in blood and oil, and the world beyond the headland is changing faster than the men can fathom. With the visceral authenticity of a master mariner and the moral complexity of a literary novelist, Bridgewater renders the thunder of the 90mm Kongsberg cannon, the sweet reek of ambergris, the silence that follows the kill—and the quiet desperation of a community watching its purpose vanish beneath the waves. This is not a polemic. It is a reckoning.

As the final chase unfolds across the continental shelf, Axel finds himself caught between the only life he's ever known and a future he cannot name. The whales are wilder now, the protesters are louder, and the station manager is gambling everything on one last tally. In the tradition of *The Perfect Storm* and *The Sea, The Sea*, this is a novel of men at the edge of the world, doing dangerous work in a dying light—where every harpoon fired echoes with the question of what we owe the past, the ocean, and each other.