William Haberfield was born at Bristol, England in 1815. His father was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy who brought him up to a seafaring life. He was educated at Greenwich and apprenticed as a naval seaman at a young age. He later came to Australia as a crewman on a ship bringing convicts to the penal colony in Tasmania, left the ship at Sydney and remained in the colonies ever after. He landed in Otago from the Mediterranean Packet on St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1836, to work for the Weller brothers in the whaling operations then being carried out along the southern coast. He then went into a rival whaling operation at Moeraki and had a successful few seasons before the whale stocks gave out.
Haberfield returned to the sea, working on trading vessels up and down the coast. Moeraki remained his home, however, and he lived there for the rest of his long life. The twenty-five acre freehold property where he lived was known as ‘Clifton’. Like many of the early whalers, Haberfield married into the Māori community. His first wife was Meriana Teitei, daughter of the leading fighting chief Pāhi and his wife Piki, sister of Te Maiharanui the last acknowledged upoko ariki (paramount chief) of all Kāi Tahu. Teitei was one of five children and probably born at Pāhia in Southland where her father had his kāika (settlement). After her death Haberfield married Kararaina Kiti Hākiri, a sister of Taare Wetere Te Kahu, in 1852. Haberfield died in the Oamaru hospital in 1906 aged 91. He was one of the last of those hard men who had pioneered a European presence on the Otago coast in the 1830s.
William Isaac Haberfield