About the Event
Women in Whaling was an evocative artist-in-residence project by Jo Wassell that brought into focus the often-overlooked lives of the wives and daughters who shaped Australia's whaling communities from the margins. Developed at Albany's Historic Whaling Station, the project unfolded over a sustained three-month period of intimate sittings, photography and archival research, weaving together drawing and story as parallel acts of witnessing.
Wassell's finely rendered portraits were not illustrations of history but acts of presence. Each face emerged slowly, carrying the quiet authority of lived experience, where endurance, care and resilience were etched as deeply as any official record. Working in close collaboration with local archives, the artist interlaced personal memory with historical material, allowing private lives to surface within a broader maritime narrative long dominated by male labour and myth.
The project culminated in an exhibition at the Historic Whaling Station Gallery, where drawings and stories were presented as a collective testament to intergenerational strength and unacknowledged contribution.
Women in Whaling was both an act of recovery and a gesture of respect, making visible those whose lives sustained an industry, a community and a history, yet were rarely invited into its telling.
