Jacky Guard’s whaling station at Te Awaiti

By the late 1820s several changes had made it worth hunting whales from land. Britain cut its duty on colonial whale oil in 1823 and again in 1825. Sealers were running out of seals and looking for a new use for their boats and money. Falling numbers of sperm whales raised demand for the cheaper oil of right whales, which came close inshore. A shore station also cost less than a ship and was safer to work. Each early winter, female right whales moved north along the South Island's east coast; some went on through Cook Strait, and others put into harbours to calve. They were big and fairly placid, and usually floated once killed, which made them easy to catch. Cook Strait, and Tory Channel in particular, became a main centre of the trade.

John (Jacky) Guard reached Sydney in 1815 as a transported convict, and after his sentence ended in 1820 he worked as a sealer, ship's captain and trader. He later said he had begun whaling in 1827 at Te Awaiti, on the Arapawa Island side of Tory Channel, taking whales for their baleen rather than their oil. That date is disputed. Peter Williams appears to have set up a station at Preservation Inlet in 1828, and by 1829 both men were taking right whales for oil. Te Awaiti, which the whalers called Tar'white, was long believed to be the country's first shore station. In 1830 Guard brought his young wife, Elizabeth (Betty) Parker, then 15, from Sydney on the schooner Waterloo. Their son John, born on 1 October 1831, is recorded as the South Island's first Pākehā child. A story that Betty first came with Guard in 1827, aged 12, is often repeated but unproven.

The stations in the strait worked inside territory that Ngāti Toa had recently won. Ships had traded at Kāpiti since 1827, Te Rauparaha invited whalers and traders to settle with his people, and the whaling stations were under his patronage. Shore whalers relied on Māori for food and for wives, and many, such as Dicky Barrett, married into Māori families. Men were paid a 'lay', a share of the catch, often eaten away by debts for clothes, tobacco and spirits. Guard soon shifted his base to Kākāpō Bay in Port Underwood; sources date the move anywhere from 1828 to 1836. By 1836 Port Underwood had six shore stations, with 18 whaling ships anchored there, and in 1839 Barrett, Joseph Toms and Jimmy Jackson each ran a station at Te Awaiti.

The industry grew quickly and wore itself out. By 1840 as many as 1,000 men were whaling in New Zealand, and the industry led the economy; in all more than 100 stations were set up. But shore whalers took right whales in the calving season, in the sheltered waters where mothers nursed their young. The naturalist Ernst Dieffenbach wrote that they had 'felled the tree to obtain the fruit'. By the 1850s and 1860s the great days of shore whaling were over, and by 1900 right whales were nearly gone from New Zealand waters. Tory Channel later had a second whaling era: from 1911 to 1964 the Perano family hunted humpbacks from Whekenui Bay, about a kilometre from Te Awaiti. Betty Guard died in 1870 and was buried at Kākāpō Bay, close to her husband's grave.