Review: Under the Whale with The Lost Quays at Hackett Hall

Under the Whale with The Lost Quays at Hackett Hall
Friday, January 31, 2025

Otto the blue whale casts an eerie spell over the historic Battye Library reading room (AKA Hackett Hall of the WA Museum). Amid the towering wooden bookcases and cast-iron balconies of that cavernous atrium, his surreal, incongruous skeleton brings the room into focus. Together, the space, with its resonant acoustics, and Otto, with his link to the once-thriving WA whaling industry, made the perfect setting for a set of sea shanties recounting the international history of whaling.

The Lost Quays are an eight-man choir. For a solid hour, their deeply rumbling voices, bass to tenor, resonated through that yawning space, bringing, by turns, a smile to the lips and a tear to the eyes of the audience.

At different times, five of the ensemble played instruments. There were two acoustic guitarists, John Battista and Clive Lacey, playing three acoustic guitars. Battista’s second guitar was tuned down to pitch in with Bill Brennan-Jones’ shruti box, a traditional Indian drone instrument, derived from the harmonium, that uses bellows to make its sound. The percussion was provided primarily by James Culverhouse’s bodhrán, a traditional, Irish, hand-held drum played with a double-headed stick, though on one tune the wooden back of Brennan-Jones’s mandolin carried the beat. Turned the right way round, the mandolin featured on one song, while Jeff Swain’s solo penny whistle carried another.

The other three singers—Max McKenzie and Gerry Pore (mid-range) and Nick Eustance (bass)—doubled as the show’s shifting narrators. Each introduced different songs and filled in another chapter of the evolving history of whaling.

Although the shruti box only recently made its way into Irish and Scottish folk music, it sounds like it should always have been there and added a note of authenticity to The Lost Quays’ mix. You could just imagine a wily old whaler soothing his crewmates with a melancholy drone after a long day’s rowing over a rough sea.

It was a solid repertoire, a mix of traditional and original whaling songs.

The show was divided and shaped by the repetition of Terry Fielding and Ted Dyer’s The Whale. A short intro version, little more than a chorus, began as a shruti-guitar duet to shepherd the men onto the stage. A longer, tragic version, with its account of a crew crushed by a dying whale’s tail, broke the show in two, while a melancholy reprise, bodhrán, shruti, and guitar, led into the finale of Bill Meek’s Time Ashore.

The two original songs, Jeff Swain’s Tall Tales and former member Tim Darby’s Herman the Impaler, sat at the comic end of the set. The latter, sung by James Culverhouse, was a lament about a vegan press-ganged by his father into whaling. This added a woke touch to the evening—the poor fella was overwhelmed by beefy meat-eaters. He got his payback, though, being the only member of his crew to survive a typhoon.

Another comic highlight was the French shanty Pique la Baleine (‘Harpoon the Whale’) sung in broken French with inauthentic accents.

These light moments were balanced out with more serious shanties about the hardship of life at sea (Go to Sea No More), the whims of the weather (Frobisher Bay), the fierceness of the whales (The Whale), and the long stretches away from family and loved ones (Old Maui).

The standout moments were the haunting a cappella of Frobisher Bay and the comic Herman the Impaler.

The Lost Quays are a democracy. Not only does every member have a shot at leading a song, but they all bring their favourite shanties to the repertoire. Often, but not always, the one who nominates the song sings it, but they allow for changes if one of the others wants to have a crack at it.

And they certainly looked the part. In their flannel and blue-striped shirts, whalers waistcoats, and seaman’s caps (one bandanna), only one was clean-shaven (the vegan). The rest had beards ranging from the full, chest-brushing Methuselah to a Frenchman’s trim goatee.

For the first half of the show, the sound was fairly straight—a clean mix of the eight voices and instruments. In the second half, though, and particularly on the rollicking Tall Tales, reverb was added. This injected some colour and gave the show a haunting, spacey edge.

Breaking the songs with an account of the history of whaling was another fine touch.

Today, whaling is regarded as a rogue industry, inhumane for its relentless pursuit of those most magnificent sea creatures, pushing them to the verge of extinction. But until the discovery of petrol in 1859, whale oil was one of humankind’s most precious commodities. Odourless, it was the key ingredient in oil lamps, the main source of light before gas took over. As such, it was central to the western lifestyle—without whaling, the world would have been lit only by fire.

Moreover, the hunt for whales led to the exploration of the globe and the discovery of different lands. The activity spread across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, ranging from the Arctic, during the northern summer, to the Antarctic, in the winter. Maui, one of the Hawaiian islands, slap bang in the middle, became an important resting place between seasons.

It was interesting to hear the facts and place whaling in its proper context while the repertoire took in many of the key places: Frobisher Bay in Canada, where whaling boats were sometimes caught in the freezing, ice-bound sea; Newfoundland off the Canadian coast; and Albany in WA, where whaling remained a key industry until the 1970s.

Sea shanty singing has a solid following in WA and is increasingly gaining exposure through specialist events. There are a number of shanty groups, including the Albany Shanty Men and the Men of the West. There is even the choral equivalent of the AFLW, the She Shantys.

The Lost Quays have been playing together since 2015. In that time they have recorded and released four CDs, all of which can be found on Bandcamp and Spotify.

Based in Fremantle, they have performed at the historic Samson House and the new Maritime Museum. Their main home, though, is Clancy’s Fish Pub on Cantonment Street, where they have a regular session on the second Monday of every month. They have appeared at the Fairbridge Festival and the Denmark Festival of Voice, both the Albany Folk’n’Shanty Festival and the newly established Bunbury Shanty Festival, and featured in Matt Clements’ Song Fests, a series of mini festivals for all kinds of choral music that have been presented in towns across the state over the past ten years.

Beyond WA, the Australian Wooden Boat Festival in Hobart has twice hosted The Lost Quays, and most notably, in 2018, the ensemble undertook a European tour. On invitation, they performed at the Bie Dap shanty festival in Appingedam in the Netherlands and the Papenburg Shanty Festival in Germany. In between these two prestigious appearances, they teamed up with various English shanty groups to play in ports and shanty clubs along the Dorset-Devon coast. It was pure chance that all nine members of the touring party were able to get the time off work concurrently to undertake this tour. Poseidon must have been on their side!

Under the Whale was originally developed on invitation from the WA Museum to accompany an exhibition about the Moon. Before that could happen, though, it became clear that Hackett Hall was a far more appropriate setting—especially as the room has gained a strong reputation as a music venue. The Lost Quay’s two Fringe World shows there were both sold out. Otto would have been impressed.

You can next see The Lost Quays performing either at a fundraiser for the HMAS Leeuwin on February 15 or at their monthly Clancy’s gig.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Linda Dunjey