About the Event
Women in Whaling is an evocative artist-in-residence project by Jo Wassell that brings 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 unfolds through 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 are not illustrations of history but acts of presence. Each face emerges slowly, carrying the quiet authority of lived experience, where endurance, care, and resilience are etched as deeply as any official record. Working in close collaboration with local archives, the artist interlaces personal memory with historical material, allowing private lives to surface within a broader maritime narrative long dominated by male labour and myth.
The project culminates in an exhibition at the Historic Whaling Station Gallery, where drawings and stories are presented as a collective testament to intergenerational strength and unacknowledged contribution.
Women in Whaling is 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.