Review – The Age

(First Posted Saturday, October 25, 2008)

Fiona Capp in The Age newspaper today (Saturday, 25th October, 2008) reviews The Last Whale by noting that few issues raise such emotion as whaling.

However, the author, Chris Pash, doesn’t hit the reader over the head with the anti-whaling case.

‘By telling the story of the final years of the industry in Australia from both the whalers’ and the protesters’ perspectives, he (Chris Pash) captures the shift in public mood that made whaling morally unacceptable,’ Capp writes.

She says the book includes intriguing characters, both whalers and anti-whaling protesters, who carry the emotional freight of the story. One such character is Jean-Paul Fortom-Gouin, a Frenchman known among anti-whaling activists as The Phantom. He financed the direct action against Australia’s last whaling station in 1977.

The Last Whale follows the lives of the whalers who operated the last whaling station in the English-speaking world and the activisits who tried to stop them. Chris Pash was a young reporter at the local newspaper, the Albany Advertiser, during the direct action against the whalers, the first campaign by Greenpeace in Australia.

The last whale harpooned by Australians was a female sperm whale off Albany, Western Australia on November 20, 1978. The whaling station closed the next day. The 30 year anniversary of the closure will be marked on November 21, 2008, at the whaling station, now a musem called Whale World.

Listen to the radio interview with Chris Pash or watch the video clip with archival material.

The Last Whale by Chris Pash was published October 2008 by Fremantle Press and is available in all good book stores in Australia.

Tags: albany western australia, chris pash, fremantle press, greenpeace, save the whale, the last whale, whales, whaling, writing book review