Woodside spent decades on Indigenous relations. Then a whale arrived

The first time executives at Woodside Energy Group – a company that has worked with Indigenous communities for decades – heard about mystical mother whales who live hundreds of kilometres off the North West Cape, nurturing animals down the food chain, was two days after the company was cleared to begin surveying the ocean floor for the $16 billion Scarborough gas project.

Jessica Border, a young lawyer at the Environmental Defenders Office in Perth, said in an emergency court filing in September that her client, Indigenous leader Raelene Cooper, was a custodian of the Whale Dreaming, an Aboriginal story sung or chanted and known as a songline.