Kaikopere (I presume J.A.):

Thanks for the added ideas!

Were you the author of the circa 2002 (?) page about "Wellerman" on folksong.org.nz? If so: What a revision! Good on you.

Also: Can you say anything about where the Tommy Wood quotation, via Mike Harding, comes from? It's similar, but not the same as what Mike Harding posted in this thread. Did re-tell the story from Tommy Wood to you or somewhere?

Mike Harding, from this thread (paraphrased from remembered speech, or copied from text/email?):

In response to the world-wide interest and in preparation for a radio programme on New Zealand folk I contacted Tommy. From the source... 'From memory I came across the poem in a book on NZ sailors and as a folk singer in those days was collecting songs to sing at the clubs. I had mentioned it to Neil Colquhoun, then a fellow club member, who knew about it and hummed a rough guide to the tune. It became my song at the time, singing it at various clubs around until finally singing it on the album 'Songs of a Young Country'...unfortunately I have not got the book anymore. All I can remember was stories connected to whaling, exploring NZ and immigration ships, containing personal letters of life on board these ships, including poems...black and white sketches of ships, sailors etc...it was fairly old then [late 1960s?]! My late wife Margaret was a librarian and she brought it home after it had been removed off the shelves...The Wellerman was an actual poem in the book but not quite in rhyme I had to adjust some of the words to fit the tune that Neil and I managed to put together..'.

Mike Harding, from from webpage on _New Zealand Folk Songs?_:

...Mike Harding later spoke to him about it. He told Mike...

"I came across the poem in a book on NZ sailors. Unfortunately I have not got the book anymore. All I can remember was stories connected to whaling, exploring NZ and immigration ships, containing personal letters of life on board these ships, including poems... black and white sketches of ships, sailors etc. The Wellerman was an actual poem in the book but not quite in rhyme so I had to adjust some of the words."

I'm particularly fascinated by the part in the first quote that says, "I had mentioned it [i.e. the poem I/Tommy found in a book] to Neil Colquhoun, then a fellow club member, who knew about it and hummed a rough guide to the tune." So, Colquhoun knew about this poem, too? Sounds strange if Tommy came across it by chance in a book his wife brought home. And: Who hummed a rough guide to the tune? Neil or Tommy? Without a comma in the sentence, the grammar implies Neil hummed the tune, but commas are pesky things. I guess it was Tommy who hummed a rough tune. Is it the tune Tommy recorded in 1971 on the album? If so, why did Neil sing a different tune in 1969?

***
I just edited Wikipedia, incidentally. Someone had recently added to the article the "information" that the song was written "circa 1870." Their cited source was some article in a law journal about whether "viral shanties" can be copyrighted and in which the authors stated, without any source given, that "Wellerman" was "understood" to be 1870. Evidently they thought the facts didn't matter, as they wanted to just make their point about the legal status of hypothetical "shanties" composed in the 1870s.

Such articles as this one by the legal scholars were surely part of the fallout after 2021 #shantytok when journalists were jumping to write about the song and simply repeating non-reviewed statements that probably had their ultimate origin in the OLD old folksong.org.nz page.

Everyone reading here should note that Kaikopere's page on the site also includes audio of the 1969 NZBC broadcast. Fascinatingly, Colquhoun sings "Wellers' men." (I think that bit was omitted, for understandable reasons, from this Mudcat posting.)

Please forgive any mistakes I've made—it's getting hard to keep track of everything at this point!