What if Whales Could Communicate with Us?

It’s 10 years in the future and I am down at Sullivan Cove, Hobart’s port area, and it is bustling. 

You probably all remember the huge roofed stadium that was going to built at MacQuarie Point. For thousands of years this area of nipaluna was a grassy slope with the rivulet running through to a sandy beach, a source of fresh water for the muwinina people. With colonisation and establishment of the town of Hobart,  materials and rubbish were used to create land for ports, rail yards, and industry, blocking the rivulet entrance.  In 2026 trucks started taking the toxic waste away in preparation for the stadium build when a major breakthrough came with AI analysis of whale song. Suddenly we could communicate with whales and hear their stories and concerns. They became a people with a voice. One we wanted to hear.

Do you remember the Antarctic icebreaker and research ship RSV Nuyina? In autumn of 26, coming back from Antarctica a pod of whales came up and started singing. The AI enabled the scientists and whales to share information and concerns and the whales followed the ship into the port of Hobart. 

What a reception! Parliament came down to meet them, a flotilla of boats, people with flags and pictures of welcome. The whales had an ancestral memory of blood and killings in this area and asked for healing ceremonies. After the grieving and sharing of stories a dream was seeded, of deliberative cooperative ways of being between humans and whales. 

That’s when a healing and education centre was proposed for MacQuarie Point. The trucks took more and more of the reclaimed land away, opening up the Hobart rivulet once more as a living estuary,  a conduit from kunanyi to sea. Here the healing and education centre was created. Whales worked with human healers, parliament was conducted here, including voices of whale, mountain, forest, humans. With the Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, whales worked as scientists, bringing nuanced understandings of ocean currents, food chains, weather patterns, energy grids, helping develop models and understandings. The deep sea trawler fleet changed fishing practices, caring for the sea beds and using more sustainable approaches.

That’s when we knew we had a chance to change the future of our world.