whalern.

1684 in Roxburghe Ballads (1885) V. 457 Without you do now imploy the Wheelers to do 't, Ye ne'r will be able to bring all about.

1775 B. Romans Conc. Nat. Hist. E. & W. Florida App. 79 The North, or Grand Bahama bank, is little frequented but by whalers and turtlers.

1843 Penny Cycl. XXVII. 752/1 The whalers kill the calves in order to capture the mother.

1895 H. W. Gore-Booth in ‘J. Bickerdyke’ et al. Sea Fishing xvi. 476 Two bollard heads (pronounced ‘bullet heads’ by the Scotch whalers).

a1860 Georgia Scenes 184 ‘He's a whaler!’ said Rory; ‘but his face is mighty little for his body and legs.’

1873 C. G. Leland Egyptian Sketch-bk. 25 I shared..a cabin with a captain who had been a whaler for forty years; and he was a whaler! and great at ‘whalers’.

1883 R. E. N. Twopeny Town Life in Austral. 244 A ‘waler’ is a bushman who is ‘on the loaf’. He ‘humps his drum’, or ‘swag’, and ‘starts on the wallaby track’.

1886 F. Cowan Australia 31 The Whaler: of the Murrumbidgee and the Darling; when it suits his pleasure and convenience, a dolce-far-niente outcast in the fertile valleys of the rivers named, beyond the running of a warrant or a writ.

1903 ‘T. Collins’ Such is Life 4 Willoughby, who was travelling loose with Thompson and Cooper, was a whaler.

1945 S. J. Baker Austral. Lang. v. 102 According to an old-timer correspondent: ‘They were so apt to lie about the size of the ‘whales’ they caught that a generic name for this class of unemployable traveller came into being.’ This explanation is open to some doubt... In our early days New South Welsh horses exported to India for army use were known as walers. The original Murrumbidgee whalers may therefore have been N.S.W. tramps... Blood brethren of the whaler (this spelling is retained because tradition holds mainly to the ‘whale’ theory)..are the Domain dosser, [etc.].

1963 A. Marshall In Mine Own Heart (1964) xx. 164 The whaler, a term that had originated from the name given to those swagmen who in the early days spent their time moving up and down the Murrumbidgee River..now applied to those who walked from town to town in preference to jumping trains.

1965 B. Wannan Fair Go, Spinner ii. 53 After drinking some Wilcannia beer, a whaler I once saw got up and started to fight with himself.

a1894 R. L. Stevenson In South Seas (1896) i. xiii. 122 Captain Chase, they called him, an old whaler-man.

1963 Times 18 May 9/7 The first big bang was at night and the Norwegian whalermen heard it six miles away.

1974 G. Jenkins Bridge of Magpies ii. 33 Old whaler~men's graves in New England.

1882 J. E. Tenison-Woods Fish & Fisheries New S. Wales iv. 92 The following list [of sharks] includes all that are known to occur in our seas:..the Whaler, [etc.].]

1937 Z. Grey Amer. Angler in Austral. vii. 70 Among the trawlers it was not unusual to see a dozen whaler sharks all in a bunch.

1972 Islander (Victoria, Brit. Columbia) 9 Apr. 7/1 A whaler shark darting over the reef flat with a sudden burst of speed.