The first European settlers in Western Australia set foot in Albany in 1826. Today Albany has about 40,000 inhabitants and is an agricultural and timber centre. Its first industry was whaling. The whaling station closed as recently as 1978 following opposition to whaling and the steep decline in whale populations. The old whaling station now houses a Whaling Museum where it is possible to visualise the huge scale of the slaughter and processing of Southern Right Whales and then Sperm Whales. The population of Southern Right Whales is now recovering, but not that of Sperm Whales. The museum has a collection of scrimshaw, finely carved whale bone or ivory, and of enormous whale skeletons.
High on the hill above Albany there is a moving First World War Museum, the National ANZAC Centre. The first convoys of ANZACs departed for the battlegrounds of WW1 from Albany. Each visitor to the museum is given a random card with one of the characters featured in the museum and invited to trace their life through the displays. I followed a nurse who went to Gallipoli and came back to lead a relatively normal life in Australia.
