Weller brothers

Members of a wealthy land-owning family from Folkestone, Kent, they moved serially to Australia, partly to alleviate Joseph Brooks Weller's tuberculosis. Joseph Brooks left England on 20 October 1823. He arrived in Hobart on 4 February 1824 and then went to Sydney. After 18 months he returned to England, and left there for good on 1 January 1827 accompanied by Edward. The brothers, Joseph Brooks (1802–1835), George (1805–1875) and Edward (1814–1893), founded their establishment at Otago Heads in 1831, the first enduring European settlement in what is now the City of Dunedin. Coastal whale species, most notably southern right whales (Tohorā), the "right whale to hunt" and the most closely associated whale species with Aotearoa, ==Development of trading==

Joseph Brooks Weller interested himself in flax and timber trading at the Hokianga. In 1831 he called at William Cook's shipbuilding settlement at Stewart Island/Rakiura to commission a vessel before visiting Otago in the Sir George Murray, reaching an agreement with Tahatu and claiming territory for William IV. He returned in the Lucy Ann with goods and gear to establish a whaling station, (it is believed with Edward) in November. George and his wife came too, or arrived soon after. The Wellers continued to trade in flax and spars, maintaining operations at the Hokianga even as they developed Otago. At that time and throughout the decade they were the only merchants regularly trading from one end of New Zealand to the other. A fire soon destroyed the Otago station, but it was rebuilt. Edward was kidnapped by Māori in the far north and ransomed. Whale products started flowing from Otago in 1833 where Joseph Brooks based himself and European women went to settle. At 21 Edward became the resident manager while George maintained the Sydney end of the business. At this time there were 80 Europeans at Otago which had become a trading, transshipment and ship service center as well as a whaling station, the "Otakou" station ranging between Harington Point and Harwood, as well as Taiaroa Head as a whale lookout point. ==Further developments==

whaling ground.Looking from Taiaroa Head toward the three stations operated by the brothers; Pilots Beach, Otakou, and Te Rauone Beach. and became the center of a network of seven stations that formed a highly profitable enterprise for the Wellers, employing as many as 85 people at Otago alone. 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". 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. where they lost the ship Dublin Packet in 1839. Waikouaiti and Karitane by Jones and Charles Bayley, and Tautuku Peninsula. Additional foreign whalers, such as from America and England and Netherlands and Russia, entered into the market, and produced about 400–600 tons of oils within Otago Harbour as late as 1846. By the time, Otago and Akaroa on Banks Peninsula, founded by the brothers, became major shore-based whaling regions along with Foveaux Strait, Kaikoura, Port Underwood, Tory Channel, Kāpiti, and Hawke's Bay. and especially southern right whales (Tohorā) became commercially extinct and were at one point thought being completely lost from Aotearoa, until the opportunistic detection of a breeding ground at the subantarctic Auckland Islands in 1980. Still, Otakou was the most notable station for being the earliest in the region, the longest-operating in southern South Island, the biggest and the most productive in the nation, and its social and economic impacts on local communities. The last station in Otago was closed in around 1848, and the whalers ventured to the West Coast and the Fiordland to seek after the remnants of the whales. The station at Pātītī Point in Timaru may have lasted into 1860s. Joseph Brooks was the first of the three to die from tuberculosis (1835 in Otago), and Edward shipped his remains to Sydney in a puncheon of rum. George and Edward eventually settled at Maitland, New South Wales, and died there in 1849 and 1893 respectively due to a stroke and a flood. == Relationship with Māori ==

The whalers depended on good relations with the local Māori people and the whaling industry integrated Māori into the global economy, despite Māori lacking historical engagements in active whaling activities prior to the arrival of Europeans. thus linking the Wellers to one of the most prominent local Māori families, the Ellisons. Edward's first wife was Tahatu's daughter Paparu, and he later married to Nikuru, the daughter of chief Taiaroa, following the death of Paparu. There were daughters, Fanny (Pane Wera in Te Reo Māori) and Nani Weller, by each alliance. Meanwhile, relations with Maori were often tense and became strained at times; the establishment being ransacked and the Wellers keeping Māori hostages in Sydney, reverberations from earlier conflicts, so called "Sealers' War", with occasions the brothers themselves being kidnapped and attacked. ==Legacy==

(Te Umu Kuri) Weller Brothers' whaling activity and its association with local Māori were noteworthy in early history of European settlers in the southeastern region of the South Island, and "Otakou" consequently became the name origin of Otago. "Wellerman" is a ballad (often erroneously referred to as a sea shanty) that refers to the wellermen, the supply ships owned by the trading company set up by the Weller Brothers. The song was originally collected around 1966 by the New Zealand-based music teacher and folk song compiler, Neil Colquhoun. ==Notes==