In my sleep I’m a length of twine, my strands unraveling. I move up from deep ocean pulsing like an octopus. I pass through patches of light and shadow, warmth and cold. It’s a long way to the surface – there are changing pressures, unfamiliar currents. Pods of pilot whales approach, distinctive heart-shaped markings under their mouths: messengers from the dreamtime, unaware of deceptive coastlines, of danger up ahead.
I wake to the sensation of twisting and untwisting, winding and unwinding, my body trying to release itself. There’s a moment of openness – I’m freed from holding on, holding down. Whatever was bound is now unbound. Then I’m wrapped tight again, my breath caught high and shallow, fluttering in the space between my heart and throat.
At Farewell Spit in February this year almost seven hundred pilot whales stranded. Three separate pods beached over three nights with only eighty of the first four hundred surviving. Altogether three hundred died, including babies and young ones.
Pilot whales live in matriarchal groups. Their social bonds are strong; mothers suckle their young for up to two years. When one of them is ill or in trouble, the others go to help. Many won’t abandon their kin, even unto death. And when refloated after beaching, they won’t leave unless they have a female leader to follow.
In the Pacific whales are noted for being guides and guardians. The story of Paikea, an ancestor of Ngati Porou is well known – he was rescued from drowning by a whale and carried on its back to the East Coast. Paikea’s descendants continue to live there and the whale was transformed into an island, still visible today.
In South Australia, the southern right whale is the sacred totem of the Aboriginal people of the Mirning tribe. Whale Rock on the Great Australian Bite – shaped like the tail of a whale – is the place they go to when they die, their spirit taken by a whale back to the Morning Star, the origin of all dreaming. Whales and people live in a symbiotic relationship; if the whales die, people cannot survive.
Do whales have memory, a sense of history? Do they remember our slaughter of them? Do they approach our shores in panic and dread? Do they remember which coastlines are dangerous? And what do they think of those who now, instead of killing them, form human chains to prevent them from beaching, who spend days in the water trying to save them?
When the whales died at Farewell Spit there were reports of the survivors whistling softly to the departed ones. Was the stranding just bad luck? Their sonar fooled by the shape, size and density of the sandspit. Or was it more than that? A signal to warn us of the sorry state of the world, that our bonds to the earth and to the oceans are twisted and broken? When they died did part of us die too?
The largest recorded stranding in the world, of a thousand whales, was in 1918 on the Chatham Islands; the year the First World War ended – a period of unprecedented mass slaughter, followed by the Spanish flu. What was that if not the stranding of millions? Was that, too, a navigational error, some compass in us broken so we completely lost our way?
There are the physical animals – the whales – in all their mystery, wildness and beauty, and there are the mythological ones, the animals of our imagination, of our shared and separate histories. These are the animals and spirits of creation stories, of the dreamtime, the creatures and energies that keep the world alive and bound together. They inhabit – or used to – a place deep within our psyche. They were once our gods, our kin, our clan, our skin. They spoke to us of powers and qualities we didn’t possess but coveted: strength, speed, size, superior senses, flight, the ability to live in deep water.
Is there still in each of us the imprint of a whale? Now perhaps a stranded one, caught by a tide at its lowest ebb, our navigation faulty, our closest companions gone or dying? Are we whistling softly to our dearly departed, or are we winded with grief? By what mystery did we get here, thinking all the while we were safe in gentler currents and deeper water?
And is there in each of us a Jonah, trapped in the belly of something primal, something enormous, or a Captain Ahab, thumping about on his wooden leg, mad with the desire for revenge, obsessed by powers and forces he wishes to destroy? Maybe most of us are more like Ishmael as he signs on one more time to go to sea, asking as he does in the opening passages of Moby Dick, ain’t everyone a slave?
The bodies of the dead whales at Farewell Spit were buried or taken out to sea to decompose. A few were autopsied, their organs examined to determine the causes of their demise. The surviving whales joined new pods and swam further south, following the food that sustains them.
I dream of them, dark shadows in my sleep, whistling to each other, passing on the news of their fallen comrades to other pods, their bodies rising and falling on the tides, their bodies stranded, their bodies freed, my own body twisting and untwisting like twine as I fall into sleep and rise again to consciousness, panic lodged in my chest and throat.
If I could, if I knew, I would name what was unwinding in me – all I know is that for a few moments something was released and I was no longer a slave. Whatever was bound was, for the briefest time, unbound.