Whale season — the humpback highway

Of all the wildlife the Sunshine Coast can promise a visitor, the humpbacks are the surest. Pick a headland on any morning from about June, settle in, and give the swell your unhurried attention; sooner or later the sea keeps its side of the bargain. First the blow, a puff of vapour standing over the water, there and gone. Then a long dark back unrolling at the surface. And, when the animal decides to go deep, the flukes swinging up and sliding under.

There are two shows, running opposite ways. Through the cold months the traffic heads north: the eastern-Australian humpbacks streaming up the coast to the warm, sheltered water off the tropics where they breed and calve, the run past Point Cartwright and the Noosa headlands close and dependable all winter. Then, from about October, it reverses. The whales come back south, this time with calves tucked in against their flanks, and often pass closer inshore, so the spring procession can be the more intimate of the two: a mother and a small, tired newcomer working their way home within easy reach of a clifftop. (For the animal itself, see the humpback whale guide; for the cold-season picture, see winter whales and cold-season blossom.)

That you can count on this at all is the improbable part. Within living memory these same whales were hunted out of this very water almost to nothing, and the crowded highway you now watch is a comeback rather than a constant. The sea refilled because, sixty-odd years ago, the killing was finally made to stop. The full arc of that collapse and return belongs to the humpback whale guide; what the season hands you is the dividend, paid out on schedule every winter and spring. Every spout you raise from a headland is one animal’s worth of that turnaround.

The whales are the largest travellers using this water as a road, but not everything worth minding out there is on the move. Off Double Island Point, at the seaward end of the Cooloola sand mass, a cluster of volcanic pinnacles called Wolf Rock holds one of eastern Australia’s most important shark sites, among the very few places the grey nurse shark gathers, and gathers all year round. It looks like everyone’s nightmare of a shark, heavy-bodied, its mouth fixed in a grin of needle teeth. It is in fact almost absurdly placid — and that fearsome face is what nearly finished it, speared for decades as a “man-eater” until the east-coast population collapsed to critically endangered. The whales you watch came back; the grey nurse at Wolf Rock is the same kind of story still waiting for its turn.

The spectacle runs on the weather, not the date. The migration keeps its own broad calendar, north through winter and south through spring, but any single day belongs to the wind, the swell and the light, and the whales run a little early some years and a little late in others. So pick a clear, calm morning, take binoculars, find a headland, and go still. The few minutes you spend scanning an empty horizon are the price of the moment it stops being empty.