Here's another little thing about imagination which neatly brings together the idea of animals having their own reasons, and the fact that Australia's First Nations have some different ways of seeing the world.
The story of the orcas and whalers of Eden is one of those iconic Australian stories, popularised in Tom Mead's book Killers of Eden in 1961 and since the subject of various books and documentaries as well as a quite impressive little museum.
Eden sits on Twofold Bay in southern NSW, on the country of the Yuin people. The story involves three generations of the Davidson family, who ran a shore based whaling operation out of Eden from the 1840s to the 1920s. In the 1840s a number of different crews tried whaling from Eden, but only the Davidsons' survived. They were successful because they, and they alone, had the assistance of a pod of orcas who acted like sheepdogs, driving the whales towards their boats and harassing them until the whalers could secure and spear them.
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| Photo from 'Killers of Eden' web-page, http://www.killersofeden.com |
They didn't just show up when the hunt was on, either, they often initiated it. If they spotted a whale first they would send a messenger into the bay who would leap and splash about until the crew launched, and then lead them out to the quarry. For their troubles, the orcas would get a feast, being allowed to feed on the carcass for a day or two before the gases of putrefaction floated it and the whalers could tow it to shore.
Where did the Davidsons learn this trick, and why did the orcas not help the other whalers as well? The answer is almost certainly that they learned the process from the Yuin, although we should not discount the idea that the orcas themselves had a hand in teaching them. Uniquely among the whaling operations, the Davidsons' Presbyterian faith led them to an understanding that the Yuin people were entitled to the same pay and respect as non-Aboriginal employees, and this meant they had a lot of Aboriginal crew members. It seems the Yuin returned this rare respect by sharing some of their knowledge and, perhaps, introducing them to the orcas themselves.
It certainly appears that the orcas favoured the Davidsons from the beginning. Perhaps this was to do with seeing familiar Yuin faces in their boats. The Davidsons also took care of their orca helpers. Other crews made use of whale guns, the precursor to harpoon cannons, which fired explosive charges at the whales and frightened off the orcas. The Davidsons stuck with old style hand-held harpoons. The orcas took care of the Davidson crew members in their turn, rescuing those who fell into the sea and towing them back to their boats. We don't know what the Orcas thought, but the Davidsons knew them as individuals, understood their different personalities and gave them human names.
The Davidsons were unique in being the only European-Australian whaling or fishing operation to work this way. The original Yuin practice, however, is far from unique. Cooperative fishing was practiced around the Australian coastline prior to the British invasion. Its most common form was a partnership between humans and dolphins to catch fish. The dolphins would herd schools of fish towards the beach and the people would walk out with their nets to catch them. The two species would then share the catch, with each able to eat their fill.
The partnership between the Yuin and orcas was similar. The Yuin didn't catch whales from boats as the Europeans did, but from time to time the orcas would herd a humpback or right whale in towards the beach, and the Yuin would spear it to death. They would then give the tongue and other parts to the orcas and use as much of the rest as they could before it rotted.
For the Yuin, as with other First Nations, the dolphins and orcas were family. They understood these intelligent creatures as reincarnations of the spirits of ancestors, and hence as their uncles, aunts and grandparents. This was why these intelligent creatures helped them and they reciprocated by sharing food, and enforcing a taboo on hunting or eating them.
Gary Worete Deverell describes a similar philosophy held by his Trawloolway people in what is now north-eastern Tasmania.
This belief system rooted first nations people to their environment and helped them to see themselves as part of a wider web of life that went on all around them and stretched backwards and forwards in time. It was wired for sustainability and lasted for thousands of years, but was broken by the invasion.
In the post-Enlightenment era in which the invaders lived, humans are the pinnacle of the cosmos, and our technologies and capabilities are sufficient in themselves. The natural world is there to be exploited. We can enjoy it for its beauty or exploit it, but either way it is there for us to use as we please. The British also had technologies which meant that their need for such assistance was rapidly diminishing. Humans around the globe could already catch all but the largest whales unassisted by the 1840s, and by a century later our technology enabled us to almost drive them to extinction.
The Davidsons' contribution to this extinction was negligible - barely more than a dozen whales in a good season. Yet they couldn't preserve such knowledge on their own. While they made friends with the orcas, the Norwegian operations further north and south, with their bigger boats and more powerful tools, drove them off. The humpbacks and right whales themselves stayed warily off the coast to avoid the increasing dangers. While the older orcas kept up their friendship with the Davidsons the younger generation just viewed them as another bunch of humans, best avoided. When Tom, their last orca friend, was found floating in Twofold Bay in 1930 the relationship was at an end.
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We are in a position now where we have an urgent need to rebuild our relationships with the other creatures with whom we share the planet. Yet with our destruction of traditional views such as those of the Yuin we have lost the skill for such relationships. How can we rebuild the sense of cousinship, of interdependence, the Yuin lived by and the Davidsons benefited from?
It might seem, at first glance, that the idea of orcas and dolphins (or kangaroos) as our cousins is a long way from the scientific underpinnings of 21st century civilisation. But consider this: in 2012 the arch-atheist Richard Dawkins and Australia's most senior Roman Catholic, George Pell (then yet to be outed as a paedophile) held a debate on the relative merits of Christianity and atheism. At one point the moderator asked Pell if he accepted that humans evolved from apes. Pell conceded that it was probably true and that humans were likely descended from Neanderthals. Dawkins snorted derisively, as did most of the audience, and responded, 'Neanderthals were our cousins, we're not descended from them!'.
This idea of relationship is deeply embedded in the way we talk about evolution. Here, for instance, are two illustrations from an English translation of Ernst Haeckel's The Evolution of Man, first published in 1877. They are among the first examples of what is known as a 'Phylogenetic Tree' or Tree of Life.
On the right is a graphic representation of the entire history of life as Haeckel understood it, beginning with single celled organisms and working its way up to humans as the pinnacle with other species branching off along the way. The diagram on the left is, perhaps, not as pretty but more illuminating in some ways, showing more detail on Haeckel's understanding of the evolutionary lineage of mammals, including us. This 'tree' is virtually identical to the way you would draw a family tree, starting with a common ancestor and then showing the generations branching out from there up to the present generation. Looking across the tree you can then work out what degree of relationship you have to any of the other persons who are descended from this ancestor.
Of course Haeckel's diagrams are simplifications, and many of his details turned out to be wrong. But the basic idea has remained robust throughout the history of evolutionary thought, and similar trees are still used now to trace evolutionary relationships. They begin with a single ancestor or at least a small number of them, mono-cellular life-forms that emerged over a billion years ago, and gradually spread and diversify over time. Some branches peter out owing to extinctions, while others continue to diversify up until the present day. The full thing does not, of course, fit in a single diagram but you can still summarise it in one page.
Apart from their complexity, the other difference between Haeckel's diagram and its most recent versions is that humans are not necessarily the pinnacle of the tree and are certainly not its goal. We are simply among the most recent species to emerge. But the principle is the same - all across the branches of the tree we are linked by common ancestors and are, in the sense Dawkins uses the term, cousins at a greater or lesser remove to all the other living things around us.
So, cousinship with other creatures is not such a big stretch after all. Much as it was embedded in the beliefs and lifestyles of Australia's first peoples, it is embedded in the ideas and iconography of European science. The ways we get there, and the ways we talk about it, are very different, but the conclusion is the same.
We all have families. Some are happy, cohesive and supportive. Some are violent and abusive. Most are somewhere in between. The thing is, if you are part of a happy, supportive family you are much more likely to be happy, healthy and secure than if you come from a dysfunctional one. A healthy family is an environment in which children grow well, a home where we can be ourselves, a backstop in times of trouble. Without our families our lives will be nasty, brutish and short.
It's the same with the extended family of life. Currently, humans are acting like the family psychopath and we need to take care, or we will find ourselves outcast - but only after we have done immense damage to the relationships around us. Let's learn to do better.
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