The Last Season at Cheynes Beach

• Chapter 1 The Spotter's Sky
• Chapter 2 Return to Frenchman Bay
• Chapter 3 Salt and Diesel
• Chapter 4 The Cheynes II
• Chapter 5 A Familiar Coastline
• Chapter 6 The Zodiacs
• Chapter 7 Eyes Above the Swell
• Chapter 8 The Flensing Deck
• Chapter 9 Ghosts of the Station
• Chapter 10 The First Interception
• Chapter 11 Radio Silence
• Chapter 12 A Town Divided
• Chapter 13 Sperm Whales at the Shelf
• Chapter 14 A Shifting Tide
• Chapter 15 The Inquiry
• Chapter 16 Storm Over King George Sound
• Chapter 17 Between the Harpoon and the Hull
• Chapter 18 Old Loyalties
• Chapter 19 The Last Quota
• Chapter 20 Grounded
• Chapter 21 Smoke on the Water
• Chapter 22 The Final Run
• Chapter 23 Silence in the Bay
• Chapter 24 Closing the Slipway
• Chapter 25 The Empty Horizon
• Chapter 26 After the Hunt

At five-thirty in the morning, the Albany aerodrome smelled of wet kikuyu grass, cold aluminum, and the faint, sweetish ghosts of avgas spilled the afternoon before. Jack Halloway stood by the port wing of the Cessna 337 Skymaster with a dented stainless-steel thermos wedged under his arm and a flashlight tucked between his teeth. The south-easterly was coming off King George Sound at twelve knots, carrying enough damp chill to make his knuckles ache as he unscrewed the fuel drain valve.

A clear blue stream hissed into his sample cup. No water, no sediment. He tossed it onto the tarmac, where it vanished instantly into the dark, and moved around the nose to check the front prop.

The Skymaster was an odd-looking bird, built with one engine in the nose and another in the tail, like a twin-engine plane that couldn't decide whether it was coming or going. Pilots who flew conventional twins liked to call it the Mixmaster, or the push-pull, and they made jokes about what happened if the rear engine caught fire and you couldn't see it. Jack didn't care about the jokes. The high wing gave him an unobstructed view of the sea, and if one engine quit sixty miles south of Bald Head, the other would still bring him home without trying to yaw him into the Southern Ocean.

"You're up early, Jack," a voice called from the open doors of the hangar.

Davey, the junior mechanic, was shuffling out with a clipboard and a mug of tea that was steaming like a freshly harpooned bull. He was nineteen, wore overalls two sizes too big, and had a permanent smear of grease across his left cheekbone.

"Whales don't wait for the sun to warm the tarmac, Davey," Jack said, pulling the flashlight from his mouth. "She's dry. You top up the oil on the rear?"

"Two quarts, just like you said. And I wiped the windscreen with the good chamois. No streaks."

"You're a gentleman and a scholar."

"Tell that to the bloke who signs my pay." Davey leaned against the hangar doorframe, squinting toward the eastern horizon where the sky was just beginning to bruise from black to a thin, watery violet. "Heard on the wireless last night they're expecting a big blow by Friday. Another front coming up from the Bight."

"There's always another front," Jack said. He climbed onto the step, swung himself into the left seat, and pulled the door shut with a solid, metallic clunk.

Inside, the cockpit was cramped and smelled of old vinyl, woollen seat covers, and the peppermint lozenges Jack kept in the side pocket for when the altitude dried out his throat. He ran through his pre-start checks by touch as much as by sight, his fingers finding the magnetos, the mixture levers, the trim wheel. At thirty-eight, he had spent more hours in this particular seat than he had in most of the beds he'd slept in over the past decade.

He cracked the throttle, hit the starter on the front engine, and waited for the Continental to catch. It coughed twice, spat a puff of blue smoke into the dawn, and settled into a steady, rattling idle. A moment later, the rear engine joined in, vibrating through the soles of his boots.

By the time he taxied out to the runway, the first real light was touching the tops of the karri trees along the ridge. He called Albany Flight Service, got the local pressure—1018 hectopascals, steady—and pushed both throttles forward.

The Skymaster gathered speed, bouncing slightly on the rough patches of the strip, before lifting cleanly into the cold air. Jack banked gently to the south, climbing at five hundred feet a minute, and watched the town of Albany unfold beneath him.

From fifteen hundred feet, Albany looked like a place that had been dropped onto the granite hills and left to grow around the edges. The red roofs of the houses along Middleton Beach were still in shadow, though a few chimneys were already sending up thin threads of woodsmoke. Princess Royal Harbour lay flat and dark as slate, bordered by the long timber jetties and the bulk grain silos that stood like concrete sentinels near the water's edge.

He trimmed the nose up and swung out over the narrow entrance of the sound, passing between the granite mass of King Point and the low, scrubby hump of Breaksea Island. To his right, tucked into the curve of Frenchman Bay, the whaling station was already awake. Even from two miles away and two thousand feet up, he could see the pale plume of steam rising from the boiler house and the faint, greasy slick that sometimes lingered near the slipway when the tide was slack.

He didn't look at it for long. The station had its own world, its own smell, its own rhythms. Jack's world was out past the headlands, where the water turned from green to cobalt and the swells rolled in unbroken from Antarctica.

He levelled off at two thousand feet and set his course: one-six-zero degrees, straight out toward the continental shelf.

The first twenty miles were always the quietest. The morning sun cleared the horizon behind him, throwing long, blinding spears of gold across the tops of the swells. When the light was low like that, looking east was useless; the glare turned the sea into a sheet of hammered brass that made your eyes water within ten seconds. So Jack looked south and west, scanning the dark troughs between the waves, letting his gaze drift in slow, systematic arcs from the strut of the wing out to the fuzzy blue line of the horizon.

Spotting whales wasn't like spotting ships. A ship had hard edges, a wake, a silhouette that didn't belong to the water. A whale belonged to the water entirely. You weren't looking for the animal—not at first. You were looking for a disturbance. A smudge of white that didn't break like a wave. A patch of smooth, oily water where a pod had just sounded. A congregation of albatrosses wheeling low over nothing at all.

And above all, you were looking for the blow.

A humpback's blow went straight up, tall and bushy, like a garden sprinkler. A right whale's made a neat V. But they weren't hunting humpbacks anymore—hadn't been since the sixties, when the numbers collapsed and the government finally shut it down. These days, it was all sperm whales. And a sperm whale's blow was unmistakable: angled forty-five degrees forward and to the left, short, sharp, and dissipating fast in a stiff breeze.

Jack reached down, uncapped his thermos with one hand, and poured a measure of black coffee into the plastic lid. He took a careful sip, balancing it against the gentle bump of the morning thermals, and picked up the microphone.

"Cheynes Base, this is Charlie-Whiskey-Charlie. Airborne at zero-five-forty-five, heading one-six-zero, twenty miles south of Bald Head. Over."

The VHF radio hissed for a beat before the station operator's voice came back, tinny and flat. "Copy, Charlie-Whiskey-Charlie. Weather at the bay is light south-east, visibility ten miles. Cheynes Two and Cheynes Four are already on the shelf, working east from the canyon. Three is still in the sound with a fuel line issue, should be clear by eight. Over."

"Roger, Base. Tell Two I'll sweep the western edge of the drop-off first and work my way across to them. Out."

He hung the mic back on its hook and settled in.

The shelf was where the world dropped away. Thirty miles off the coast, the seabed plunged from a couple of hundred fathoms down to two thousand, carved by ancient underwater canyons that funneled cold, nutrient-rich currents up from the deep. Giant squid lived down there in the pitch black, and where the squid were, the sperm whales followed.

Jack could always tell when he crossed the line. The water changed color—not all at once, like a painted border, but in a slow, brooding shift from the lively slate-blue of the coastal shelf to a deep, heavy indigo that looked bottomless.

He dropped down to fifteen hundred feet. At that height, the sea was close enough to read. He could see the wind-streaks, the subtle cross-hatch of a secondary swell coming up from the south-west, the occasional dark shadow of a sunfish basking near the surface.

For forty minutes, there was nothing. Just the steady drone of the two engines, the occasional crackle of static on the radio, and the slow, hypnotic sweep of his eyes across the empty blue.

It was a job that drove some pilots mad. Before Jack took the seat, the company had hired a young bloke out of Perth who lasted three weeks. The kid had been a wizard at instrument flying, could land in a pea-souper without breaking a sweat, but out here over the Southern Ocean, with no landmarks and nothing to do but stare at water for six hours a day, he started seeing whales in every whitecap. He'd called the chasers onto three separate pods of dolphins and a floating log before the skipper of the Cheynes II told him over an open channel to go back to flying mailbags.

Jack didn't mind the emptiness. He'd grown up on a sheep station north of Kojonup, where the paddocks went on forever and the only thing that moved between dawn and dusk was the shadow of the windmill. You learned how to let your mind go quiet without letting your eyes go lazy. You learned to wait.

At seven-fifteen, the sun was high enough to take the worst of the glare off the eastern quadrant. Jack banked into a wide, lazy turn, bringing the Skymaster onto an easterly heading that traced the jagged edge of the Albany Canyon.

Ten minutes later, he saw it.

It was three miles ahead and slightly to port—a tiny, crooked puff of white against the dark indigo, gone in less than two seconds.

Jack didn't reach for the radio yet. One blow could be a trick of the light, or a wave slapping a floating timber. He held his heading, counting the seconds in his head.

One, two, three...

At twelve seconds, another puff appeared, a hundred yards to the left of the first. Then a third, slightly behind. All of them angled forward, leaning into the wind like smoke from a damp chimney.

"Hello, boys," Jack murmured.

He banked left, tightening his turn as he closed the distance, and dropped to eight hundred feet. As the Skymaster came overhead, the water cleared, and he saw them.

There were six of them, maybe seven, strung out in a loose line heading west-southwest. From the air, sperm whales didn't look like the sleek, graceful creatures in the picture books. They looked like massive, scarred railway sleepers—blunt-headed, corrugated along the flanks, dark brownish-grey except where the pale scars of old squid battles crisscrossed their snouts. They were logging at the surface, resting between deep dives, their broad tails moving with a slow, effortless rhythm that barely disturbed the water.

Jack checked his compass, glanced at the direction-finder needle, and reached for the microphone.

"Cheynes Fleet, this is Charlie-Whiskey-Charlie. I have a pod, six or seven bulls, logging at the surface. Position is... bearing one-seven-five from Bald Head, range thirty-eight miles. Heading two-four-zero, making about three knots. Over."

The radio burst into life almost immediately.

"Charlie-Whiskey-Charlie, this is Cheynes Two. Say again that range?" The voice belonged to Skipper Nielsen, a Norwegian who had been chasing whales since before Jack was out of short pants, and whose English still carried the heavy, rolling cadence of Bergen.

"Thirty-eight miles, Skipper. Bearing one-seven-five from Bald Head. I'm orbiting overhead now. You're about twelve miles east of me, aren't you?"

"Ten miles," Nielsen corrected. "We see your wing. Coming hard to port now. Keep an eye on them, Jack. If they sound, give me the clock."

"Copy that, Cheynes Two. I'll stay on them."

Jack pulled the power back slightly, setting the Skymaster into a wide, gentle orbit at a thousand feet, careful not to let the shadow of the plane pass directly over the whales. Sperm whales weren't as skittish as the old humpbacks had been, but a low-flying twin-engine aircraft could still spook them if the noise bounced off the water the wrong way.

Five miles to the east, he could see the Cheynes II now—a tiny, rust-streaked sliver of steel throwing up a white bone in her teeth as she cranked up to full speed. Behind her, a smudge of black diesel smoke hung low over the swells.

Jack watched the whales. They were big bulls, most of them forty-five to fifty feet long, the kind that carried the heavy spermaceti oil in their heads that the station paid bonuses for. One of them rolled slightly onto its side, exposing a pale, wrinkled belly, before righting itself and blowing again—a long, steady plume that drifted away on the south-easterly.

It was a clean, mechanical thing from up here. No blood, no noise of the harpoon, no thrashing in the red foam. Just dark shapes in blue water, and a little toy boat steaming toward them. Jack had been down to the flensing deck at Frenchman Bay a few times over the years, mostly to drop off paperwork or have a yarn with the manager, and he'd seen what happened once the whales came up the slipway. It was grim, greasy, back-breaking work, and the smell stayed in your clothes for a week.

Up here, there was no smell. Just the clean, cold air leaking through the window vents and the steady hum of the engines.

"Charlie-Whiskey-Charlie, Cheynes Four," another voice crackled. "We're six miles south of Two. Do you want us to swing up and flank?"

"Negative, Four," Nielsen cut in before Jack could answer. "Stay on your line. There's only half a dozen here, and they're moving slow. If they split, I'll call you."

Jack glanced at his fuel gauges. Both main tanks were still three-quarters full; he had another four hours of endurance easily, more if he leaned the mixtures back. He reached into his flight bag, pulled out a crumpled paper bag from the bakery on York Street, and extracted a cold sausage roll.

He was halfway through it when the lead whale arched its back, lifted its broad, triangular flukes clear of the water, and slid vertically into the deep.

One by one, the others followed. Within ninety seconds, the surface was empty again, marked only by a series of smooth, circular slicks that the wind was already beginning to tear apart.

Jack clicked his stopwatch. "Cheynes Two, they've just sounded. Time is zero-seven-thirty-two. Heading was still two-four-zero."

"Copy, zero-seven-thirty-two," Nielsen said. "We'll hold this course for twenty minutes and see where they come up. Keep your eyes peeled, Jack."

"Always."

He widened his orbit, climbing back to fifteen hundred feet to get a better view of the surrounding miles. A big bull could stay down for forty-five minutes, sometimes an hour, and travel three or four miles underwater before surfacing. When they came up, they'd be hungry for air, blowing hard and fast, and that was when the chaser would make her run.

As he circled, Jack let his eyes drift north, toward the faint, hazy line of the coast. You couldn't see Albany from thirty-eight miles out, not really—just the darker smudge of the Stirling Range far inland, floating above the morning mist like a row of blue teeth.

It was 1978, and everyone in town knew the wind was changing. You heard it in the pubs on Friday nights, saw it in the Albany Advertiser every second day. There was talk of a federal inquiry—the Frost Inquiry, they were calling it—and rumors out of Canberra that the government was finally going to pull the plug on the whole industry. Last year, a bunch of protesters had turned up in Zodiacs, buzzing around the chasers with cameras and banners, making headlines in Sydney and Melbourne and London.

The station workers hated them, naturally. Called them long-haired bludgers from the eastern states who didn't know a hard day's work from a hole in the ground. And maybe some of them were. Jack didn't have much time for politicians or city folk telling country people how to live.

On the other hand, he'd flown over this ocean for six seasons now, and he wasn't blind. Ten years ago, you didn't have to fly forty miles out to find a pod of fifty whales. You'd see them ten miles off Bald Head, sometimes right at the mouth of the sound. Now, the chasers were burning more diesel every week just to reach the edge of the shelf, and the bulls were smaller than they used to be.

He didn't say that at the pub, of course. A man who flew the spotter plane didn't bite the hand that bought his avgas.

The stopwatch ticked past thirty minutes. The Cheynes II had slowed to a crawl, rolling heavily in the beam sea, her lookout perched high in the crow's nest with binoculars glued to his eyes.

Jack banked east, sweeping a mile ahead of the ship's bow. Nothing. He banked west, checking the water two miles behind her. Still nothing.

Then, at thirty-eight minutes, a mile and a half off the Cheynes II's starboard quarter, the water boiled.

A massive dark head broke the surface, followed instantly by a thick, forceful blow that hung white in the morning air. Two seconds later, a second whale surfaced fifty yards away, then a third. They were blowing fast, catching up on oxygen, their dark backs gleaming like wet slate in the sun.

"Cheynes Two, you've got them!" Jack called, banking hard to point his nose toward the pod. "One-and-a-half miles off your starboard quarter. Bearing three-zero-zero from your bow. They're blowing hard, looks like all six are up."

"I see them!" Nielsen's voice was tight, focused.

Through the windscreen, Jack watched the Cheynes II heel sharply to starboard as her rudder went hard over. Thick black smoke belched from her funnel as the telegraph rang full ahead, and she began to claw her way across the swells toward the pod.

Jack climbed back to two thousand feet and stayed clear. His part of the job was done for now. From here on, it belonged to the skipper, the gunner on the bow platform, and the men on the winches.

He watched for another ten minutes, circling high above the chase, until the Cheynes II closed within a hundred yards of the trailing bull and he saw the tiny, distant puff of white smoke from the harpoon cannon. Even from two thousand feet, he knew the sound it made—a dull, flat thump that carried across the water.

He didn't linger to watch the rest. He picked up the mic one last time.

"Cheynes Two, I'm going to push further east along the canyon, see if there's another pod working the shelf. Give me a shout if you need me."

"Copy, Jack. Good hunting."

"You too, Skipper."

Jack levelled the wings, set his heading for zero-nine-zero, and let the Skymaster carry him out into the bright, empty morning. Ahead of him, the Southern Ocean stretched all the way to the horizon, cold and indifferent, waiting for whatever came next.

The overnight bus from Perth smelled of vinyl, damp wool, and the faint, sour tang of someone’s half-eaten meat pie. Claire Vance woke with her forehead pressed against the cold glass of the window, watching the karri forest give way to the low, scrubby heathland that announced the southern coast. Her neck was stiff, her mouth tasted like copper, and her canvas rucksack was digging into her shins, but as the bus crested the last rise and the grey-blue expanse of King George Sound opened up below, she felt a sudden, sharp clarity.

It was eight-fifteen in the morning. The sky was the color of a bruised plum, clearing slowly to a pale, washed-out blue as the sun climbed behind the granite ridges. Down in the town, chimneys were sending up thin threads of woodsmoke, and the water in Princess Royal Harbour looked flat and cold as a sheet of tin.

Claire rubbed the condensation from the glass with the sleeve of her denim jacket. She had been away for nine months, spending the winter in Sydney and Melbourne, living out of borrowed flats, stuffing envelopes, and arguing with men in suits about media strategy and fuel budgets. Down here, none of that mattered. Down here, there was only the water, the wind, and the station.

The bus hissed to a stop at the terminal near the bottom of York Street. Claire waited for the handful of other passengers—two elderly women in sensible coats, a young bloke in a shearer’s singlet, and a travelling salesman with a leather briefcase—to file down the steps before she hauled her rucksack off the overhead rack.

The air outside hit her like a wet towel. It was twelve degrees, maybe less, with a brisk south-easterly blowing straight off the harbor, carrying the smell of salt, kelp, and the faint, sweetish dust from the grain silos down by the wharf. She zipped her jacket to her chin, slung the heavy Nikon camera bag over her shoulder, and started up the street.

Albany hadn't changed. It was a town built of granite and stubbornness, clinging to the hills as if it expected a gale to blow it into the sea at any moment. The shopfronts along York Street were wide and low, with corrugated iron verandas and faded painted signs advertising hardware, drapery, and stock agents. A few Holden utilities were parked nose-in to the curb, their trays loaded with fencing wire or empty milk crates.

She stopped at the corner milk bar, a narrow place with steamed-up windows and a laminex counter that had seen better days. Inside, it was warm and smelled of frying bacon and Nescafé. A radio behind the till was playing a scratchy country song, and two men in flannel shirts were sitting by the window, hunched over mugs of tea.

"Morning, love," the woman behind the counter said, wiping her hands on a striped apron. "What can I get you?"

"Just a black coffee and a cheese toastie, please."

"Coming right up."

Claire leaned against the counter, waiting for the kettle to boil, and glanced at the stack of newspapers beside the cash register. The Albany Advertiser was folded open, its front page dominated by a story about wool prices at the Fremantle sales. Below the fold, a smaller headline caught her eye: FROST INQUIRY TO HEAR SUBMISSIONS IN ALBANY NEXT MONTH.

She didn't pick it up. She already knew what it said. Sir Sydney Frost had been appointed by Canberra to decide whether whaling in Australia had a future, or whether the country was finally going to shut down its last station. Half the town thought the inquiry was a foregone conclusion—a political stitch-up designed to appease the eastern states. The other half thought the government wouldn't dare throw a hundred men out of work in a regional port.

"Here you go, darling," the woman said, sliding a chipped ceramic mug and a paper plate across the laminex. "That'll be eighty-five cents."

Claire paid, took her food to a small table near the back, and ate quickly. The toastie was greasy and burnt at the edges, and the coffee was instant, but it warmed her stomach.

As she chewed, she watched the two men by the window. They were older, maybe in their fifties, with weathered faces and thick, calloused hands. One of them was talking about a tractor he was trying to sell; the other was nodding slowly, staring out at the street. Neither of them looked twice at her. To them, she was just another backpacker passing through on her way to the Stirling Range or Esperance.

That wouldn't last. By the end of the week, the rest of the team would be driving down from Perth with the Zodiacs strapped to the roofs of two battered Land Rovers, and the whole town would know they were back. Last year, they had been a novelty—a bunch of long-haired kids from the cities making a nuisance of themselves in rubber boats. This year, with the inquiry looming and the station’s future hanging by a thread, nobody was going to treat them like a joke.

She finished her coffee, wiped her mouth with a paper napkin, and walked back out into the cold.

Her first stop was three blocks up the hill, at a weatherboard house with a overgrown garden and a rusted bicycle leaning against the veranda. Helen Ward, a high school geography teacher who had quietly let the protesters use her spare room the previous season, answered the door in a dressing gown, holding a mug of tea.

"Claire," Helen said, her face breaking into a tired smile. "You made it. Come in, before you freeze to death."

Inside, the house smelled of beeswax and old books. Helen cleared a pile of student essays off the kitchen table and poured Claire another cup of tea—proper leaf tea this time, strong enough to stand a spoon in.

"How was the trip?" Helen asked.

"Long. The heater on the bus broke somewhere past Williams." Claire pulled off her jacket and rubbed her hands together. "Thanks for holding the car for me, Helen. I really appreciate it."

"It's a terrible old thing, Claire. The third gear grinds if you don't double-clutch, and the heater only works when you're going uphill. But it'll get you out to the bay and back." Helen leaned against the sink, watching her carefully. "Are the others still coming on Friday?"

"Friday night, if the Land Rovers make it past Kojonup without throwing a rod. We've got a house rented out at Emu Point for three weeks. Cash upfront, under a false name."

Helen sighed, shaking her head. "You know it's different this year, don't you? Last year, people were angry, sure, but they mostly thought you'd get bored and go home. Now..." She trailed off, looking out the kitchen window toward the harbor. "My brother-in-law works at the slipway. He's been there fourteen years. Last week at Sunday dinner, he told me if the station closes, he'll have to sell his house and move to Kalgoorlie to look for work on the mines. People are scared, Claire. And scared people don't listen to reason."

"I know," Claire said quietly. "We're not here to pick a fight with your brother-in-law, Helen. We're here to stop the boats."

"To him, it's the same thing."

Claire didn't argue. There was no point. She had spent the last six months having the same conversation in a dozen different ways, and there was never a clean answer. You couldn't save the whales without costing someone their job, and you couldn't save the jobs without killing the whales. You just had to decide which one you could live with.

Ten minutes later, Claire was sitting behind the wheel of Helen’s 1966 Holden HR sedan. The vinyl seats were cracked and patched with black gaffer tape, and the engine coughed twice before catching with a loud, metallic rattle. She eased it out of the driveway, ground the gears once finding second, and pointed the nose south, toward Frenchman Bay.

The road wound around the edge of Princess Royal Harbour, past the massive concrete grain silos and the timber jetties where a single cargo ship was taking on barley. Beyond the town, the road narrowed, hugging the curve of the coast through thickets of peppermint trees and coastal scrub.

It took twenty minutes to reach the turnoff. As she rounded the final bend, Frenchman Bay opened up before her—a wide, sweeping crescent of white sand and turquoise water, sheltered by the massive granite headland of Bald Head to the south. It was one of the most beautiful places Claire had ever seen, and one of the strangest.

Half a mile down the beach, tucked into the curve of the shore like a scab on a clean limb, sat the Cheynes Beach Whaling Station.

Claire pulled the Holden off the road into a gravel parking area near the public picnic ground, well clear of the station’s gates. She turned off the engine, sat for a moment in the sudden silence, and rolled down the window.

The smell hit her instantly.

It wasn't the sharp, clean smell of a fish market. It was heavy, sweet, and thick—a mixture of boiled fat, diesel exhaust, and wet bone that seemed to coat the back of your throat. Even from half a mile away, with the wind blowing off the water, it was unmistakable. Once you smelled a whaling station, you never forgot it.

She grabbed her camera bag and stepped out onto the gravel, locking the car door behind her. She walked down the sandy track toward the beach, then turned right, following the hard-packed sand at the water's edge toward the low granite rocks that separated the public beach from the station's perimeter.

The tide was coming in, pushing small, glassy waves onto the sand. A pair of silver gulls wheeled overhead, screaming at nothing.

Claire climbed up onto a flat shelf of granite, sheltered from the wind by a clump of coastal tea-tree, and lifted her binoculars.

Through the lenses, the station jumped into sharp focus. It was a sprawling collection of corrugated iron sheds, rusted oil tanks, and towering chimneys, all connected by a web of pipes and catwalks. A thick plume of white steam was pouring from the boiler house, drifting sideways over the water.

Down at the water's edge, the wooden slipway sloped straight into the bay, slick with grease and dark algae. There were no whales on the flensing deck yet—the chasers were still out on the shelf, miles beyond the horizon—but the deck wasn't empty. Two men in oilskins and gumboots were hosing down the timbers, washing away the remnants of yesterday's catch. Even from here, Claire could see the faint, rusty tinge in the water where the runoff met the bay.

She lowered the binoculars and let out a long breath.

She had stood on these exact rocks in August of last year, watching them winch a forty-foot sperm whale up that slipway. She remembered the sound of the steam winch straining, the low, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the bone saws, and the way the gulls had gone mad, diving into the red foam at the bottom of the ramp. She had thrown up behind a bush the first time she saw it. By the third day, she had stopped throwing up and started taking pictures.

A movement near the station's main gate caught her eye.

A battered Ford utility had pulled up outside the wire fence, and a man in a grey woollen jumper was climbing out. He didn't go through the gate. Instead, he leaned against the bonnet of the ute, lit a cigarette, and looked straight down the beach toward the granite rocks.

Claire froze, her hand still on the binoculars.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. The man was too far away for her to see his face clearly, just a solid, broad-shouldered figure with a cap pulled low over his eyes. Then he pushed off the ute, dropped his cigarette into the gravel, and started walking down the beach toward her.

Claire’s stomach tightened. She thought about turning around and walking back to the Holden. She was alone, she didn't have a permit to be on company land—though she was pretty sure the rocks below the high-water mark were public—and she didn't want trouble on her first morning back.

On the other hand, if she ran now, she’d be running all month.

She stayed where she was, letting the binoculars drop to hang against her chest, and watched him come.

He walked with a slow, rolling gait, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his trousers. As he got closer, she saw he was in his late forties, with a sun-creased face, a greying beard, and a pair of pale, watery eyes that looked like they’d spent too many years staring into salt spray. He wore heavy leather work boots, stained dark with oil, and his jumper was frayed at the cuffs.

He stopped ten feet away, at the base of the granite shelf, and looked up at her.

"You're on private property, miss," he said. His voice was rough, like gravel in a bucket, but not particularly angry.

"I'm below the high-water mark," Claire said, keeping her voice level. "That's Crown land."

The man glanced down at the wet sand, where a wave was curling around the base of the rock, then back up at her. His eyes dropped to the Nikon hanging from her shoulder, then to her face.

"I know you," he said slowly. "You were here last year. On them little rubber boats."

Claire didn't blink. "Yes."

He spat into the sand, a neat, practiced gesture. "Thought so. You're the one who got hosed off the bow of the Three."

"That was my friend," Claire said. "I was driving."

"Right." He pulled a crushed packet of Winfield Blues from his pocket, tapped one out, and lit it with a battered brass Zippo, cupping his hands against the south-easterly. "Well, you're early. The rest of your mob ain't here yet."

"How do you know?"

He gave a short, humorless laugh. "This is Albany, love. Everybody knows everything before you've even bought your bus ticket." He took a long drag on the cigarette, blowing the smoke out sideways. "You're wasting your time, you know. Coming back here."

"We'll see about that."

"No, I mean it." He gestured back toward the station with his chin. "We got a quota to fill. Hundred and fifty whales, maybe less if the weather turns sour. They're gonna shut us down anyway—everybody knows it. Canberra's already made up its mind. All you lot are doing is making a hard year harder for blokes who are just trying to pay off their mortgages before the axe falls."

Claire looked at him. There was no hatred in his face, just a deep, heavy weariness. It would have been easier if he had yelled at her, called her a communist or a hippie, given her something solid to push against.

"If you know it's ending," she said softly, "why keep killing them?"

He looked at her as if she had asked why the tide came in. "Because that's what we do. Because the bank doesn't care about the whales, and my wife's got arthritis that needs doctoring in Perth. You think I like standing ankle-deep in guts for ten hours a day?" He shook his head. "Go home, miss. Take your camera and go somewhere nice. Margaret River, maybe. Good surfing down there."

"I'm not going anywhere," Claire said.

The man stared at her for another few seconds, his jaw working slightly. Then he shrugged, turned on his heel, and walked back toward the station. He didn't look back once.

Claire stood on the rock until he disappeared through the wire gate, then sat down on the cold stone, her knees suddenly feeling a little weak.

Out beyond the headlands, the ocean was empty. No chasers, no blows, no smoke on the horizon. Just the endless, rolling swell coming up from the south, breaking white against the dark granite of Bald Head.

She reached into her bag, pulled out her notebook, and flipped to a fresh page. Day one, she wrote, her fingers stiff from the cold. Station operating. Slipway clear. Locals know we're coming.

She capped the pen, tucked the notebook away, and looked up at the sky. Somewhere out there, beyond the shelf, the boats were already hunting, and the spotter plane was circling in the cold air. She could almost hear the engines.

She stood up, slung her camera over her shoulder, and walked back down the sand toward the Holden. There was a lot to do before Friday.