Exactly one year after researchers fitted her with a satellite tag while in the waters off Cheyne Beach, near Albany in south west Australia, the adult southern right whale, Nebinyan swam back into those very same waters. In the time between, she had travelled more than 6,000km, south to Antarctica and home again.

It was the first time scientists had tracked the complete migration cycle of an Australian southern right whale in detail, and they were left in awe of what they uncovered.

Nebinyan – the female whale so named by researchers after a well-known Aboriginal whaler of the 1840s – had followed the exact same path south to Antarctica and back again. “It was in a similar way that some migrating birds take the same routes,” Dr Kate Sprogis, a research fellow at the University of Western Australia’s Oceans Institute, explained at the time of the study’s publication.

The whales come to this coast each year between July and October, when thousands migrate to the shallow, protected waters of southern Australia. The sheltered bays and inlets around Albany and the Great Australian Bight are their main breeding and calving grounds, and it’s here the mothers can nurse their calves away from predators such as great white sharks and orcas.

It’s an ancient ritual with which Albany’s First Nation peoples – the Minang People – have, over millennia, developed a deep understanding and long-held relationship. And it’s this history that Nebinyan’s name carries today. A renowned songman of the Minang people – whose country included the shores of Two Peoples Bay on the south coast of Western Australia – Nebinyan (the 19th century whaler) had an aptitude for hunting that, by the turn of the century, brought him great acclaim. Simultaneously, whaling stations had sprung up with ferocity along the southwest coast, including across Albany which, by the early 1900s, had become recognised as Australia’s whaling hub.

Yet, while the Minang people shared a long-held connection with the whales that arrived at their coast each year, European whalers saw the animals differently. Slow moving and with thick blubber filled with valuable oil, southern right whales were so named by whalers of the time for being the ‘right’ whales to hunt. By the early 20th century, relentless hunting had decimated local populations to the brink of extinction.

The whaling industry’s end came without ceremony in the year of 1978, when the prolific whaling vessels Cheynes II, Cheynes III, and Cheynes IV berthed at Albany Town Jetty after their final hunt. That November, Australia’s last shore-based whaling station closed, and 178 years of whaling in Albany waters were over.

For a time, the story that followed looked like one of marine conservation’s happier ones. By the time whaling of the species was banned, only a few hundred animals remained worldwide, but Australia’s southwest coast hosts one of the few populations that appeared to be recovering well. And since 1999, southern right whales have been protected under Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, designating them a species of national environmental significance.