Perano Whaling Station

Though most New Zealanders consider their country firmly anti-whaling, the Perano family hunted Whales in Cook Strait using Chaser boats and processed them here at Fisherman's Bay, Arapawa Island, Tory Channel right up until 1964. Joe Perano was the son of an Italian fishing family and fished the Channel with his father even before commencing whaling in 1911. The legend goes that sometime in 1904, Joe was out fishing when a pair of humpback whales rose on each side of his boat and knocked the oars from his hands. He decided there and then to get even and began planning his enterprise. The success of the business, which involved Joe's brother and friends, was partly due to the use of motorised chaser boats, which did chase all theremaining rowboat whalers from the Strait.

The Peranos are still landowners in Tory Channel and fiercely protective of their history as a whaling family. Surviving patriarch Peter Perano reports that in their record year they took 226 humpback whales, while Russian whalers took 42,000 in Antarctica. Foreign whaling was always the problem, he told Radio New Zealand. Their station has been restored for visitors and there are accommodation options in the vicinity of this water-access only location. The station can also be spotted from the Cook Strait Ferry.

**Last Gasp of the 'robber economy'
** By Gavin McLean

Whaling off the New Zealand coast did not die with the sacking of Kororareka or the departure of the last Nantucket ship. In Cook Strait and around the East Coast the ‘robber economy’ lingered on well into the 20th century. Tory Channel in the Marlborough Sounds book-ended the era of New Zealand shore whaling.

At Te Awaiti, established by the legendary John Guard fleetingly in 1827 and permanently from 1830-31, you can still see trypots, the terraces of European huts and historic graves. But we are more interested here in an operation of a different sort. In 1911 at nearby Fisherman’s Bay the Perano family, Genoese-New Zealand fishermen who drifted into whaling just after the turn of the century, started killing humpbacks. In their peak years they built high-speed whale chasers and hunted with bomb lances, and they finished up with the big steam chaser Orca and a spotter aircraft. By the early 1960s, however, both economics and public sentiment were running against whaling. Four days before Christmas 1964, gunner Trevor Norton caught the last whale in New Zealand waters and brought to an end the working life of the country’s last big shore-whaling station.

You can still see an impressive wharf and the skeletal remains of the processing complex, complete with the slipway once used to haul up the whales for processing. The Department of Conservation completed restoration work in 2010. And as for the whalers? When the season is right a few of these ageing hunters still climb to the top of Arapawa Island to scan the sea for migrating humpbacks, but strictly to monitor and count them for conservation reasons.

Image Credit: Whaling in the South Island side view of a Right Whale recently caught by Messrs. J Perano and Party, Auckland Weekly News 1915 Image courtesy Auckland Libraries Sir George Grey Collection. & NZPlaces