Anthropologists have speculated that the man was put inside the whale to call on powers remedying an illness; the interior of the whale, a place of healing. Professor of Indigenous Research, Dennis Foley, posits the man may not be in the whale but riding it, surfing the immense animal to shore for a feast, at a time when Eora tribes had begun to starve. In both interpretations—whale as hospital, whale as reprieve from hunger—the animal brings the possibility of renewal.
