Kōrero: Whaling

Five generations of Heberleys hunted whales. The last two were Charlie Heberley and his son Joe who worked at the Perano whaling station at the entrance to Tory Channel. In the sound clip they recall the excitement and danger of those days.

The image from June 1952 shows workers at the Perano station cutting up a whale after it has been caught and brought to the factory. The blubber was boiled down and usually produced about 36 44-gallon drums of oil, which was exported to Australia for use in tanning.

Transcript

The conditions of the factory were very bad. You never had the modern machinery that you've got today and you can imagine, a whale weighed 50 ton – a 50 foot whale would weigh 50 tons – and that's an awful lot of material to get rid of, in blood and guts and oil and that laying around. Very slippery and very dirty work and you're working with ropes under strain, you know, pulling great weights and all that sorta thing. You had these vast cookers that had to be emptied out and the residue from them was boiling hot and all that sort of thing. And one chap unfortunately got caught in that and was killed. But you know, it was a dangerous game. There was no doubt about that. But very exciting on the other hand.