Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. (Aus.) a vandal.

[1934		F. Maurice ‘Memory’ in Melbourne Odes 14: Whelan wrecked the years of strange content / When old Miss Burton’s blue-stone cottage went].
1936		Sunshine Advocate (Vic.) 17 Jan. 1/4: He realized that ‘Whelan the Wrecker’ was only a novice alongside the persons who could cause an article like that to be published.
1940		in Word from John letter 19 July in J. & R. Ackland (1944) 32: Whelan the Wrecker would have been a great success in the old world as they apparently built cities to see how fast they could knock them down [GAW4].
1949		Frankston Standard (Vic.) 15 Dec. 5/4: The noise behind the stage whilst unfortunate performers were trying to make themselves heard [...] led one to believe Whelan the Wrecker had arrived.
1950		Argus (Mlebourne) 25 Apr. 1/1: he referred to Mr Holloway as a ‘bigger wrecker than Whelan’.
1955		Argus (Melbourne) 25 May 1/5: Organized disrupters attempting to break up a Labor Party meeting [with] cries of ‘Whelan the Wrecker’ is here again.
1963		Bulletin 26 Jan. 10: As for the famous sign, that started in 1914. They were pulling down a building in Swanston Street. They came across a black-walled photographer’s darkroom. Just for fun during the lunch hour one of the workmen hacked the immortal words into the wall with a tomahawk. The sign stayed put and ever since they have needed no other advertising beyond those words: whelan the wrecker was here.
1976		W.K. Hancock Professing Hist. 124: The government might cut its losses and call in Whelan the Wrecker to clear away the mess on Black Mountain [GAW4].
1982		NT News (Darwin) 10 Aug. 3: John Holland (Constructions) won the $172050 contract and sub-contracted it to Whelan the Wrecker [GAW4].
1990		Parliamentary Debates House of Representatives 4 Dec. 4308: Mr Reith – He [Mr Keating] is the Whelan the Wrecker of Australian industry and the Australian economy [GAW4].
1999		S. Maloney Stiff 213: Talk about Whelan the Wrecker. A trained chimpanzee could have done a better job.
2001		Age (Melbourne) 11 May 🌐 Don’t try and work out what’s going on in a movie nominally set in 1933, where the banter is strictly 1990s sitcom, archaeologists behave like Whelan the Wrecker, Egypt looks like the Las Vegas Luxor, [etc.].

2. attrib. use of sense 1.

1941		Frankston Standard (Vic.) 26 Feb. 2/1: The whole idea of A.R.P. is to protect the civil population, not to act as mass undertakers with Whelan the Wrecker stuff thrown in.
1975		J.M. McAuley Map of Aus. Verse 128: The very energy and egoism of the experimentalists goaded Professor Hope into his famous Whelan-the-Wrecker job on myself in Meanjin.