What started as a "short" 10-year project for amateur whale-watchers Trish and Wally Franklin has become a life's work – and one of the most comprehensive studies of humpback whales ever undertaken.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The wind fills the sails of the Anna Kristina and the 100-year-old ship flies across the warm waters of Hervey Bay, timbers groaning, chasing the pods. As they approach, Wally Franklin furls the sails, slowing the Kristina to a gentle glide. The mother whale and her calf watch with silent curiosity as the vessel settles alongside them. Then Wally gently mimics their movements from behind the wheel, until the whales forget they are there. Trish and Wally Franklin. Only then does Trish Franklin lean over the side and whisper to them. “You’re beautiful,” she says. Then she takes her photos. Hundreds and hundreds of photos, her camera clicking over and over again. These photos – there are now half a million of them, taken over 30 years by two people who started this research project with little formal training in marine biology – form one of the most comprehensive databases of whale identity, movement and behaviour in existence. Using them, Trish and Wally were able to uncover the secret of Hervey Bay. They think this place might have helped save the southern humpback whale.


But the photos also record an entire relationship, a marriage, children, love and devotion. A man, a woman and the whales, all intertwined. The shallow waters of Hervey Bay are that shade of light aquamarine that you see on postcards. The sea floor is lined with sand, gradually deposited here from around the world over hundreds of thousands of years. Dig through it and you might find a grain from the vast mountain ranges that once formed Antarctica. The bay is formed by the overlapping dunes of Fraser Island to the east, which absorbs the blows from the wild Pacific. The whales first discovered this place in the '80s, it is said. Hear Trish and Wally's recordings of whales here: Southern humpback whales, Megaptera novaeangliae, embark on one of nature’s great migrations every autumn, swimming thousands of kilometres from their feeding grounds in Antarctica through the deep ocean to a secret lagoon in the Great Barrier Reef, where waters are warmer and they can mate, breed and give birth. As they swim, they sing, all singing the same tune, the haunting melodies carried by the water for hundreds of kilometres.


In the '60s we hunted them almost to extinction. Soviet whalers discovered their migratory routes, harpooned the mothers and children and dragged them up on deck to bleed out. At the species’ nadir, there were maybe 200 eastern Australian humpbacks left. That, Trish thinks, is about when the whales discovered Hervey Bay. As they migrate down from the Reef to Antarctica between August and October, a few mothers will quietly sneak their children 40 kilometres across a shallow pass to get into the bay, where they will stay for a couple of weeks, away from the males, who like to remain out in deeper ocean. In the early seasons, only a few came. But that number has swelled and swelled and now as many as 11,000 enter every year. The bay's shallow waters allowed young whales to get some sea miles up without running afoul of whalers or the deep ocean’s many other hazards. With the species’ numbers dwindling, a nursery that dramatically increased the survival chances of the remaining humpbacks in the wild was vital. Certainly the species appears to have recovered far faster in the Pacific than the Atlantic. “I’d hate to even contemplate what would have happened if they hadn’t discovered it,” Trish says.


Under the shallow waters, mother bonds with child. She swims slow and close, the calf frolicking in the slipstream her bulk creates or, if it gets nervous, hiding safely under her vast belly. Humpbacks have thick blubber that helps them maintain neutral buoyancy in the water; to a 15-tonne whale, swimming in water is like playing in zero gravity. Mother whale uses her huge head to nudge her child into the shallows, right up to the shore, teaching him how to edge close to the sand without beaching. She allows him to suckle from her breast. Calves can easily drink 600 litres of milk a day. Young whales don’t know the way their species has been mistreated. They are naturally curious and will swim right up to boats, whether whaler or researcher. They rely on their mothers to teach them when it’s safe and when it is not. That’s what Hervey Bay is used for. On the wooden decks of the Anna Kristina, Trish is focused and Wally is everywhere. He works with the crew to shift the rigging, getting the boat running at just the right speed to fall in with the whales. Too close, or too fast, and the mother can spook and flee – or slap her great tail, flooding the Kristina instantly. “You’ve got to be really gentle with them," says Trish. “They know what you’re doing. I think they can pick up your energies.” Trish and Wally on Moon Dancer in 2002. In the relationship and on the boat - where they spend 10 weeks every year - Trish is in charge. She hollers course corrections to Wally in the ship’s bridge, having him bring the boat closer for a picture of a whale’s tail as it breaches, or shouting at him when the pod doubles back towards them. But she usually does not need to say much. Wally and Trish have been doing this dance together for so long - 60 years together, 30 on the boat, three children now grown - that the steps are muscle memory. The patterns on a tail, known as a fluke, are unique to each whale. This is what Trish’s camera lens is hunting for. By looking at the bumps and nicks along the fluke’s trailing edge, the width of the notch in the centre, and the pattern of blue-and-white dots and dashes, Trish can identify every individual whale that comes here.


Trish calls the flukes a whale’s fingerprint. I think they look more like Rorschach ink-blots. "Read into us what you like," they seem to be saying, "but our mysteries are our own." The patterns on a tail, known as a fluke, are unique to each whale. Trish Franklin can identify every individual humpback whale that comes to Hervey Bay. Credit:Trish Franklin Trish will snap hundreds of photos of the flukes, 15,000 in the 10 weeks between August and October that she and Wally spend in the bay each year. Volunteers on the boat will record their behaviour using a special code Trish designed herself. BSTR (bubble streaming), they write, or LOG NUR DTC (logging, nurturing, down time with calf). TR and SNG – trumpeting and singing - are my favourites. “Oh, the singing is beautiful. When you’ve got the engines off, you can feel the vibration of the singing through the vessel,” says Trish. In the ship’s bathroom, the sound comes humming up through the pipes and out the toilet bowl. Whales are very sensitive to vibration. That’s how they hear each other’s songs underwater. “They are living in a world of sounds,” says Trish. When one comes close, she leans out over the wooden edges and talks softly, murmuring in her soft Lancashire brogue. She gives each one a name: Little Bear, Salem, Nala, Zipper. “She has watched some of them grow up,” says Wally. “You do get emotionally attached.” Trish and Wally Franklin marry in 1961.

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