The Last Season at Cheynes Beach
A Novel of the Final Australian Whale Hunt

About this book:

1978. The last whaling station in the English-speaking world clings to the rugged coast of Western Australia, its slipways greased for a final season. From the cockpit of a Cessna Skymaster, spotter pilot Jack Halloway scans the Southern Ocean for the angled blows of sperm whales—each sighting a paycheck for the men of the *Cheynes* fleet, each dive a calculation of fuel, quota, and survival. On the granite rocks below, Claire Vance raises her camera, returned to Frenchman Bay with a team of protesters, a rented house, and the certainty that this year the world is watching. Between them lies a town fractured by fear and loyalty, a federal inquiry already drafting the industry's obituary, and an ocean that has begun to run empty.

As the *Cheynes II* steams for the continental shelf and the first harpoons fly, Jack and Claire circle the same brutal truth from opposite sides: the whales are fewer, the bulls smaller, and the mathematics of extinction no longer lies. With the lyrical precision of a pilot's log and the moral urgency of a witness, *The Last Season at Cheynes Beach* renders the final Australian whale hunt in all its deafening machinery, its cloying stench, and its quiet, devastating humanity. No side escapes unmarked. No horizon stays clean.

A masterwork of historical tension and elemental storytelling, this is the novel Moby-Dick would write if it were set in the furnace of 1970s industrial whaling—where the hunt is filmed, the quotas are negotiated, and the last leviathans surface into a world that has finally decided to stop killing them.