Broad-backed, slow moving and easy to tell apart from anything else on the coast. The southern right whale is the whale most likely to be mistaken for a humpback off New South Wales, and the easiest to identify once you know what to look for.
The southern right whale (Eubalaena australis) is a baleen whale, part of the same order as the other whales, dolphins and porpoises. It is one of the easier large whales to identify, because almost everything about its outline is different from a humpback.
It has a broad back with no dorsal fin at all, wide paddle-shaped flippers, and a long arching mouthline that curves up behind the eye. On the head are callosities, rough patches of thickened skin that form a pattern unique to each animal, the way a fingerprint is. Researchers use exactly that to tell individuals apart.
The name is the ugliest fact about them. Whalers called them the "right" whale to hunt, because they swim slowly, come close to shore and float when killed.
For an animal that size, the food is remarkably small. Southern rights live on copepods, krill and other tiny crustaceans. Like all baleen whales they have no teeth. Instead they carry long baleen plates that hang from the upper jaw and work as a sieve.
Their method is different from the humpback's lunge. A southern right skims along with its mouth open, letting water pass continuously through the baleen and trapping everything small enough to be caught, which is why that long arching mouthline is shaped the way it is.
Southern right whales feed in the Southern Ocean and come north to the Australian coast in the colder months to calve and breed. Along the southern New South Wales coast they turn up between about May and September, usually as mothers with calves resting up in sheltered bays, often very close in and sometimes visible from a headland rather than a boat.
They are far less numerous here than the humpbacks, and the difference is not small. Australia has two populations and the eastern one, the one that visits New South Wales, numbers in the hundreds rather than the thousands. A southern right off Jervis Bay is a genuinely good sighting rather than a routine one, and the whales on our whale watching cruise are humpbacks. If you are planning when to come, our guide to the best time of day to see whales in Jervis Bay is the practical version of all of this.
A mother and calf may stay in one bay for hours or days at a time. That is not idleness. The calf is building the strength and the skills it needs before it heads back south, and the mother is protective while it does.
This is why the approach distances exist and why they are larger for a cow and calf than for other whales. On the water it is simple enough: let the whales decide how close the encounter gets. We cover how we work around them on our FAQs page.
Southern right whales were hunted to the edge of extinction and are listed as endangered under the EPBC Act, Australia's national environment law. The Australian population is still well under a fifth of what it was before whaling, and the eastern group is recovering far more slowly than the one in the west.
Recovery is also no longer a straight line. Numbers here climbed for decades, but recent surveys suggest that recovery has stalled, with calving rates falling. The National Recovery Plan for the Southern Right Whale, which took effect in 2024, is the current instrument setting out what is being done about it.
Humpbacks pass the bay from mid-May to mid-November. Watch them from the water, alongside the sea cliffs and caves.
