William Palmer

William Palmer was the younger brother of Edwin (just to his left on the wall). He was born in Sydney in 1815 to former convicts and left an orphan when the Palmers’ parents died four years later. The older members of the family, like Edwin, were left to stand on their own feet. The younger children ended up in a Sydney orphanage. This was a tough environment which left its mark on William in later years. By the age of 16 he had completed a carpentry apprenticeship and was ready to follow his older brothers to sea. In 1832 he sailed for southern New Zealand on the Caroline and began work at the whaling station at Preservation Inlet on the Fiordland coast. This was the first shore-based whaling station and one of the earliest European settlements in the South Island.

William’s carpentry skills stood him in good stead at the whaling station but he also gained experience of boatbuilding and seamanship. He went on to manage whaling stations at the mouth of the Clutha and at Tautuku before the collapse of the industry in the early 1840s. He had two Māori wives, Titi and then her sister Te Haukawe. After their deaths he was left with four young daughters to look after. In 1853 he married Anne Holmes, the daughter of another whaler and his Māori wife. Though he was already 53 and a grandfather, he had a further 15 children with her. Not surprisingly, William has a host of descendants and the Palmer bloodline criss-crosses through southern Māori families.

In the 1850s William settled at the Māori kaik (settlement) at Henley and worked as a carpenter, fisherman, boatbuilder and farmer. He and a partner at Taieri Mouth built several boats. During the West Coast gold rushes of the 1860s he built a six-ton boat and sailed to Hokitika with supplies to trade with the miners. Even into his 70s, William loved to put out to sea on fishing expeditions. He spent his last years with one of his daughters at Henley. He died there in 1903, aged 88, one of the last survivors of Otago’s rough and rugged early years.