News / Whaling history and photos celebrated in new memory bank project
A MEMORY bank bringing together new and lost stories from Scottish whalers and their adventures to South Georgia Island is set to be unveiled next week.
The South Georgia Heritage Trust and South Georgia Museum have collaborated with former whaling communities, like those in Shetland, over the last two years on the project.
Launching on 27 June in Dundee, the Whalers’ Memory Bank is described as a “living, growing digital time capsule”, sharing memories and stories from the whaling with a wider audience.
Visitors to the memory bank will be able to find out more about the whaling community’s lives as well as taking a 3D tour of a whaling station on South Georgia where a staggering 176,000 whales were processed island-wide.
It charts the history of modern whaling from 1904 to 1965, allowing visitors to better understand how whale products were such a vital resource during the 20th century.
Since the project launched in June 2023 the South Georgia Museum has run a number of workshops with whaling veterans, allowing them to share their stories, knowledge and personal collections.
It has also worked with other Scottish museums and has received several hundred items that also now form part of the memory bank.
This provides an insight into what life was like for the whalers who sometimes travelled up to 8,000 miles from home in Scotland to South Georgia in search of work.
These real-life experiences are told through film, oral histories, photographs and more.
Shetland ex-Whalers Association chairman Gibbie Fraser said they were delighted to help shape the memory bank.
“We have an extensive collection of photos from the whaling years, which we were at a loss as to what to do with until the memory bank came along and will save them for future generations to see,” he said.
“For many of us the whaling was a great adventure as well as a hard life and we really wanted to share this with the wider world.
“We hope people will get a better understanding of what life was like for us, our families and communities 8,000 miles away back home in Shetland.”
Fellow Shetlander Helen Balfour is assistant curator at South Georgia Museum, and said that working on the project had been a “real privilege”.
“It’s been fascinating to learn more about my fellow Shetlanders’ roles within the industry but also because of my family connections to South Georgia.
“Both my grandfathers and great-grandfather were whalers on South Georgia in the 1950s and 1930s, so to understand more about what they saw, what they experienced and how they, their colleagues and families back home must have felt, is incredibly special.
“It is amazing that over 60 years on from the whaling the camaraderie that exists between the whalers is just as strong and I hope you can see it reflected in the Whalers’ Memory Bank.”
The memory bank will be unveiled at Discovery Point in Dundee on Friday 27 June.
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