Lachlan Dunjey’s Reflections from Monkey Mia Dec 8, 2008.
A return visit after 29 years to Monkey Mia, famous for some 40 yrs for its daily dolphin visitation. Dolphins are not the only attraction of the Shark Bay area of Western Australia, there is also pristine wilderness beauty, the wonder of Shell Beach and the intrigue of stromatolytes. And for us, grandchildren with an unspoilt interest in living creatures finding hermit crabs in profusion.
Dolphins appeal to everyone with their gracefulness, intelligence, ability to communicate, and apparent sense of family and community. It also seems that they have a natural desire to please, an instinctive trust and, it would seem from the stories that are told, a desire to protect.
Thus it is, in return, that we trust, and want to protect. This is good. There seems to be a natural affinity for our mammalian aquatic creatures.
How tragic it is then when that trust is betrayed.
It seems a strange coincidence that on the day of our leaving for this trip the West Weekend Magazine (6 December) carried the article The Killing Cove in which Gary Adshead writes of the slaughter of dolphins at Taiji in Japan. There, as part of an annual kill between September and April and as part of a 400yr old tradition, 2300 dolphins are herded into a bay and a barrier is then raised across the entrance. The word pictures are enough to convey the gruesome detail: From our eyrie, we could clearly hear the dolphin’s piercing screams. The green sea turned crimson red… the thrashing tails quietened as the mammals lost their fight for life.
The Japanese go to great lengths to hide the slaughter from prying eyes as this article shows. But it may be that once again, despite deceit and opposition, the truth will win out with pictures as it did with the napalm girl and countless other atrocities.
Yes, there are risks in the getting of the story and pictures and sometimes risks of retribution. There are also risks of misplaced censorship – not just in the country that is trying to protect its traditional industry and its autonomy – but also in the country that does not want to offend its neighbour or trading partner, and sometimes news censorship because the facts are considered too gruesome.
So the drama is played out: broken trust; intrigue; deceit; anything but the truth; danger and condemnation for its revealing; opposition from industry; the risk of being misunderstood and dividing friends and family and community. At least here we survived the whaling ban. It seems like a bad memory now. It is true that one generation’s original thought or change in attitude becomes the next generation’s truism. Even attitudes to smoking have changed. Education. Let’s tell the truth.
Except for abortion that is.
How can it be that telling the truth about abortion is considered by many to be a greater felony than the actual killing? Killing by powerful suction or dismemberment or in-utero murder by lethal injection of potassium or puncturing the skull and sucking out the brain. No anaesthetic is provided even in late pregnancy. We can go into greater detail but we take the risk of alienating our friends and dividing the community as in Taiji. But this detail is nothing compared with some of the actual photos of dismemberment.
How can it be that we defend this in the name of autonomy and choice? Not just 2,300 times annually but 80-100,000 times [in Australia alone].
How can it be that we betray the most helpless of humans? Our animal activist friends get really upset when they see a dolphin or whale foetus cut from its mother and rightly so. Yet these are frequently intact and have not been shredded or pulled apart. How can it be that our society is so schizophrenic that we get upset about dolphin slaughter yet rabidly defend our right to kill our unborn babies? How can this be justified by autonomy and choice?
It may be that this battle too may be won with word pictures and photos and a new generation will thank us and wonder why the truth was withheld for so long.
Lachlan Dunjey.
