Skeleton of famous whale-hunting Orca "Old Tom" reassembled
May 1, 2024 8:19 PM Subscribe
Skeleton of famous whale-hunting Orca "Old Tom" reassembled for new museum display. The orca known for working alongside human whalers has been given a new exhibit that museum curators hope pays better homage to its legacy.
Wait, what??? THERE WAS AN ORCA WHO TEAMED UP WITH HUMANS TO KILL WHALES???
They say the past is a foreign country. Increasingly it seems the past is a weird YA speculative fiction novel.
posted by hippybear at 8:45 PM on May 1 [7 favorites]
They say the past is a foreign country. Increasingly it seems the past is a weird YA speculative fiction novel.
posted by hippybear at 8:45 PM on May 1 [7 favorites]
Wait, what??? THERE WAS AN ORCA WHO TEAMED UP WITH HUMANS TO KILL WHALES???
Honestly, it seems not totally different from how wolves turned into dogs. Hang around near people, benefit from the scraps of human hunting, start cooperating with the hunting... pretty soon there you are as a domesticated lapdog.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:59 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]
Honestly, it seems not totally different from how wolves turned into dogs. Hang around near people, benefit from the scraps of human hunting, start cooperating with the hunting... pretty soon there you are as a domesticated lapdog.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:59 PM on May 1 [1 favorite]
It's been documented in a few indigenous communities, actually. Eden's traditional owners, the Thua people, have a really strong cultural connection to the whales and an oral tradition that speaks of their hunters working with the orca the same way the white whalers did later. Many of the original whalers were Indigenous - there's a great piece on it here.
I recall reading of similar acts of co-operation in the Pacific Northwest and among Inuit settlements, with similar requirements - hunt the baleen whales together, with both species of hunter getting their cut. I'm having trouble finding a cite, however.
posted by Jilder at 9:20 PM on May 1 [2 favorites]
I recall reading of similar acts of co-operation in the Pacific Northwest and among Inuit settlements, with similar requirements - hunt the baleen whales together, with both species of hunter getting their cut. I'm having trouble finding a cite, however.
posted by Jilder at 9:20 PM on May 1 [2 favorites]
It's an extraordinarily eerie museum, by the way. I'm a huge fan of nautical and maritime museums wherever I go---my partner despairs at my keenness to go and look at lobster pots and lamps and ship models and paintings of wrecks---but this one is honestly like nothing else I've seen anywhere.
It bills itself as a killer whale museum, and the Old Tom skeleton (with the story of the combined human-orca hunting) is the outstanding highlight of the collection, but overall it's far less a museum of whales than of whaling, as well as timber-getting, and the rest of the exhibits and the interpretation reflect that. It's not for the faint-hearted or faint-stomached and a lot of the exhibits are not really suitable for children. There are whaling boats, whaling equipment, harpoons and harpoon-guns, all the whaling and flesh-flaying weapons and try-pots and barrels that Moby Dick readers will recognise, and then there are the two-person felling saws, chainsaws, axes, bullock dray rigging, and all kinds of exhibits of the two big extractive industries of the 19th/20thC NSW coast. There's a lot of exhibits of nautical disasters and wrecks, and of industrial accidents.
Because the museum is so relatively old (IIRC it was established as a local historical society in the 1930s?) you can almost read the progression in its interpretation from uncritically colonialist 'Our Pioneer Stories' to a mid-20thC preservationist sense of community heritage, to a more contemporary 21stC engagement with what extractive colonialism was and is. And its approach to Aboriginal history and presence is similarly, I guess you'd call it, ambiguous and evolving. If you're on the NSW South Coast and in Eden it's worth visiting.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:50 PM on May 1 [9 favorites]
It bills itself as a killer whale museum, and the Old Tom skeleton (with the story of the combined human-orca hunting) is the outstanding highlight of the collection, but overall it's far less a museum of whales than of whaling, as well as timber-getting, and the rest of the exhibits and the interpretation reflect that. It's not for the faint-hearted or faint-stomached and a lot of the exhibits are not really suitable for children. There are whaling boats, whaling equipment, harpoons and harpoon-guns, all the whaling and flesh-flaying weapons and try-pots and barrels that Moby Dick readers will recognise, and then there are the two-person felling saws, chainsaws, axes, bullock dray rigging, and all kinds of exhibits of the two big extractive industries of the 19th/20thC NSW coast. There's a lot of exhibits of nautical disasters and wrecks, and of industrial accidents.
Because the museum is so relatively old (IIRC it was established as a local historical society in the 1930s?) you can almost read the progression in its interpretation from uncritically colonialist 'Our Pioneer Stories' to a mid-20thC preservationist sense of community heritage, to a more contemporary 21stC engagement with what extractive colonialism was and is. And its approach to Aboriginal history and presence is similarly, I guess you'd call it, ambiguous and evolving. If you're on the NSW South Coast and in Eden it's worth visiting.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:50 PM on May 1 [9 favorites]
I eagerly await having my bones displayed by my employer years after my death.
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:40 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
posted by GenjiandProust at 3:40 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
Honestly, it seems not totally different from how wolves turned into dogs.
How long until we have tiny, purse-sized orcas that fancy ladies can carry around in little fish tanks?
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 8:11 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
How long until we have tiny, purse-sized orcas that fancy ladies can carry around in little fish tanks?
posted by The 10th Regiment of Foot at 8:11 AM on May 2 [2 favorites]
I eagerly await having my bones displayed by my employer years after my death.
As long as they don't ship my job to India, they can have my skeleton in the lobby. After I die of natural causes, please.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:10 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
As long as they don't ship my job to India, they can have my skeleton in the lobby. After I die of natural causes, please.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:10 AM on May 2 [1 favorite]
Orca skeletons look as frightening as Orcas. Good to know.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:11 AM on May 2
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 9:11 AM on May 2
Narc.
posted by brundlefly at 4:41 PM on May 2
posted by brundlefly at 4:41 PM on May 2
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