A blank month, August as a symbol of summer and also of routine in the air and the novelty of the unforeseen, although later everything is plans and naps, backpacks and beach lunch boxes. It will be later. Nowwhen you have not yet plunged into the holidays, they are a white promise, like a blank sheet of paper to fill out, a questionnaire to complete, the mental blank left by the missing pieces of a puzzle. They are also a bit of vertigo: we reinvent ourselves in leisure and go through a different life than the one we are used to. Time is precious and we don’t want to waste it, what we want is to be able to say, when this bright window closes, how well we did, how many things, it was great. How can we not also fear this whiteness ahead, so full of possibilities?
At this time of year, decades ago, a white whale sails the waters of the Pacific and on his visits to the Australian east coast he raises expectations. In reality, she is not white, but albino, the first in the world known with these characteristics. She has a name, Migaloo, which in the aboriginal language means “white friend”, which would seem the opposite of what is expected of a white whale, there is the reference of Moby Dick and his physical and metaphorical destructive power.
Migaloo is such a “friend” that every sighting of her is highly celebrated. She was first sighted in 1991 off the coast of Byron Bay, and her itinerary is known: for two or three months she travels to the Great Barrier Reef in the north. As if it were a cycling tour, its different stages are followed by social networks. then it disappears. They look for Migaloo like the whale that obsessed Captain Ahab, and already in 2003 Australia had to declare it a special protection, establishing million-dollar fines for those who approach more than 500 meters of the animal by sea or air, and guarantee by law even police escort.
The whiteness of Migaloo, its anomaly in pigmentation makes it especially vulnerable for being different, striking for its difference from the rest of the animals, there are hardly any others like it: small white whale calves are often seen, because they are born with very pale skin, but they darken with age, and only three other whales like it have been identified, one called Migaloo junior, of the that there are even fewer sightings.
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The fever for the search for the Australian white whale has subsided because since 2020 it has not been seen. It disappeared before the pandemic, curiously. The discovery of the carcass of a fair-skinned whale off the country’s coast triggered all alarms and citizen consternation, although experts immediately ruled out that it was Migaloo. Scientists point out that the climate crisis may have led the fabulous animal to other more convenient waters for temperature or food, but it will return. They calculate that the whalea 35-year-old male, already reaches 14 meters in length, and with age he will become more and more elusive.
But as if the promise of that mystery were an incentive that we need, scientists insist that this year may be the one that re-emerges from the waters so that we know that it is still there, despite this global warming that upsets everything and limits hopes. that whiteness that makes its exceptionality a reason to believe that everything is possible even now, in these dates when everything begins, at least for a while, again.