A killer whale of a romance tale
A book about the gruesome practice of whaling may seem like a strange place to introduce readers to a mystical connection with whales, but the new historical novel Rush Oh! manages to do just that.
Australian screenwriter and director Shirley Barrett’s literary debut is a reimagining of a local legend about a killer whale called Old Tom. The story is set in Eden, a tiny town on the coast in New South Wales, Australia, at a ramshackle whaling station that still stands today.
In the 19th century, the town became a centre for the European whaling trade, headed up by George (Fearless) Davidson and his Aboriginal crews. Old records — from newspapers and diaries to police records and court transcripts — document the astonishing tale of their cooperation with orcas.
Every year for more than four decades, they paid a visit to Eden, and herded baleen whales into Twofold Bay. When the pod ensnared a humpback, Old Tom would swim to the coast, flapping the water with his fin to alert the crews. The men would then run toward the boats, shouting their call-to-arms, “Rush Oh!” In return for this assistance, the whalers would leave the baleen’s corpse in the water long enough for the orcas to feast on its lips and tongue. Old Tom has since become so revered that documentaries have been made about him and his bones sit in the Eden Killer Whale Museum. It is against this mythic backdrop that
Rush Oh! unfolds. The novel finds Mary, Fearless’s spinster daughter, looking back on the whaling season of 1908, a time that forever altered the course of her life.
Mary’s mother has died and she’s tasked with cooking for the whaling crew, which includes an Aboriginal, Darcy Madigan, who falls for Mary’s beautiful sister Louisa, and a former Methodist minister who soon becomes Mary’s own suitor.
The romance plot that drives Rush Oh!’ s narrative is compelling (and richly comedic), but it’s the encounters with the otherworldly whales that breathe true life into this charming tale. As Mary recounts the ups and downs of the hunt, she conjures up another time — one in which the fates of the people and the sea’s creatures are intimately connected.