The history of whaling in New Zealand stretches from the late eighteenth century to 1965. In 1831, the British-born Weller brothers Edward, George and Joseph, who had immigrated to Sydney in 1829, founded a whaling station at Otakou near modern Dunedin in the South Island of New Zealand, seventeen years before Dunedin was established.[6] Speaking at centennial celebrations in 1931, New Zealand’s Governor General Lord Bledisloe recalled how the Weller brothers had on their voyage to New Zealand “brought in the ‘Lucy Ann’ (the Weller brothers’ barque) a good deal of rum and a good deal of gunpowder…and some at least were rum characters”.[6] From 1833, the Weller brothers sold provisions to whalers in New Zealand from their base at Otakou, which they had named “Otago” in approximation of the local Māori pronunciation.[6] Their employees became known as “wellermen”.[7][6] Unlike whaling in the Atlantic and northern Pacific, whalers in New Zealand practised shore-based whaling which required them to process the whale carcasses on land.[8] The industry drew whalers to New Zealand from a diverse range of backgrounds encompassing not just the British Isles but also Indigenous peoples of the Americas, Pacific Islanders and Indigenous Australians.[8] The whalers depended on good relations with the local Māori people and the whaling industry integrated Māori into the global economy and produced hundreds of intermarriages between whalers and local Māori, including Edward Weller himself, who was twice married to Māori women,[8] thus linking the Wellers to one of the most prominent local Māori families, the Ellisons.
At its peak in 1834, the Otakou station was producing 310 tons of whale oil a year[6] and became the centre of a network of seven stations that formed a highly profitable enterprise for the Wellers, employing as many as 85 people at Otago alone.[9] From the Otakou base the Wellers branched out into industries as diverse as “timber, spars, flax, potatoes, dried fish, Māori artefacts, and even tattooed Māori heads which were in keen demand in Sydney”.[10] However, given that the Colony of New Zealand would not be declared until 1840, the Wellers were treated as foreign traders and were affected by protectionist British import tariffs on whale oil.[9] By 1835, the year that Joseph Weller died in Otago, the brothers became convinced of the need to abandon the station even as they branched out into massive land purchases in New Zealand, which amounted to nearly 3 million acres (12,000 km2) by 1840.[10] The Weller brothers’ success in the whaling industry was fleeting, and they were declared bankrupt in 1840 after failed attempts at large-scale land purchase in New South Wales.[9] The Otakou station closed in 1841.[6] In 1841, the Court of Claims in New South Wales ruled that the Weller brothers’ purchases of land in New Zealand were legally invalid, after which the Wellers “slipped unobtrusively out of the pages of New Zealand history”.[10] Commercial whaling in New Zealand continued until the 1960s.