Australia Trip / March 29, 2022

Albany & Wave Rock

Albany is the oldest town in Western Australia. It was originally established as a military outpost for New South Wales and a port for British ships. It later became a strategic gateway to the goldfields and also became an important whaling town (more on that later). It has a lot of beautiful scenery being on the coast but also having the Stirling mountain range just an hour to the north.

It was nice to be in a city again with access to supermarkets, Kmart and other shops, but this must be the worst city for its layout! All roads lead into a central roundabout which is really dangerous and we nearly had (and saw several) accidents.

The Whaling Museum

We spent an entire day at this fascinating although somewhat gruesome museum. This was the largest whaling station in Australia for several years, but in 1978 when whaling ceased, the workers just set down their tools and walked away leaving the entire station intact as is.

Strangely, the museum starts with a great shell display:

The museum includes their last whaling ship (at its height there were 4 ships) complete with harpoon:

And then continues on to the Flensing deck and then Cutting Up deck. They attached metal cables to the whale and pulled them out of the sea onto the Flensing deck. Flensing is when they slice off the blubber of the side of the whale.

Once they’ve sliced off the blubber and cut off the lower jaw (of the sperm whale), the whale then gets tugged over to the Cutting deck where they lop off its head and cut it into various pieces. Just imagine – more than 1,000 whales were slaughtered here!

As they cut the pieces off, they drop them into these holes in the ground which lead to big pressure cookers to cook the bits and extract the oil.

Can you believe that this used to be a tourist attraction and school trips used to come and watch the workers cutting up whales!??

After they were boiled in the tanks and the oil extracted, they used the other bits of the whale for various products, including fertilizer.

The old oil drums were converted into movie theatres where they showed various movies on whales and sharks. And they had an interesting room with a bunch of whale and dolphin skeletons.

The museum was full of gross photos and videos and I felt somewhat nauseous the whole time. But, we all learned a lot.

Another strange thing was that the ticket to the whaling museum also included entry to the wildlife park next door. It was actually kind of nice to see some cute, living animals after all that gross death.

Beaches

There were some really beautiful beaches near the Whaling museum. The second photo below is Misery Beach which was named the best beach in Australia in 2021. (It gets its name from all the blood that used to wash up on the beach when they slaughtered whales – yuck!)

The Gap and Natural Bridge

These two natural features are also near the whaling museum but on the other side of the peninsula. The Gap was particularly cool. There is a suspension overhanging platform over this gap where the ocean comes pounding in.

Castle Rock and the Granite Walkway

One day, the kids and I decided to do the Castle Rock walk. This consisted of a 2.5 km walk up to the top of a hill (rock) to the lower platform.

Then, we had to climb up and over (and under) the boulders, then climb a metal ladder to get to the upper platform.

Bluff Knoll – Stirling Range

After our walk up Castle Rock, we drove further north to see the Stirling Range and Bluff Knoll – the highest mountain in the south-west.

Wave Rock

After we left Albany, we headed east towards Esperance (our next stop). On the way, we stopped at the town of Ravensthorpe and spent two nights there so that we could do a day trip to Wave Rock -one of the iconic ‘must see’ rocks in Australia.

Wave rock was formed over 2,700 million years. We walked along the wave,