Albany’s Historic Whaling Station

Albany's Historic Whaling Station stands as the most comprehensively preserved former whaling station in the world, offering visitors a deeply confronting and historically illuminating encounter with Australia's whaling past. Located at Frenchman Bay on Albany's Torndirrup Peninsula, the station operated from 1952 until 1978 — the last operating whaling station in Australia.

The station has been preserved largely intact and now operates as Cheynes Beach Whaling Station, part of Discovery Bay — a major heritage tourism precinct. At its centrepiece sits the Cheynes IV, an actual whale chaser vessel that has been restored and is open for self-guided tours, allowing visitors to stand on the very deck from which whales were hunted across the Southern Ocean.

The station's processing facilities — the flensing deck, pressure cookers, oil storage tanks, and bone meal plant — are preserved in remarkable condition, conveying the industrial scale and brutal efficiency of modern whaling operations. Interpretive displays provide sobering context about the global whale population decline that drove the eventual closure of the world's whaling industries.

A giant Omura whale skeleton on display offers a visceral sense of scale, while multimedia exhibits explore both the human stories of Albany's whalers and the marine biology of the whales they hunted. Albany is today a hub for whale watching, with southern right whales and humpbacks returning to the Southern Ocean in significant numbers following decades of protection. The station is a profoundly thought-provoking heritage experience.