Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790–1870(SUNY series, Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building)

A comprehensive history of Australian Aboriginal whaling and sealing.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements 1. Whalers, Sealers and Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Men and Women in the Southern Oceans 1790-1870 2. "They are ... very fond of the flesh of the whale": Aborigines, Whales, Whaling, and Whalers 3. "A New Holland Half-Caste": Tommy Chaseland: Diaspora, Autonomy, and Hybridity 4. "A good man can do anything he makes up his mind to do, no matter what": Tasmanian Aboriginal Men and Whaling 5. "Most of them had native wives": Cross-Cultural Relationships in Southern Australia's Sealing Industry 6. "Those women were free people": Domestic Spaces, Hybridity, and Survival 7. Remnants, Artifacts, and the Doing and Being of History: A Sort of Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Lynette Russell is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and Director of the Monash Indigenous Centre at Monash University. She has written several books, including Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology (with Ian J. McNiven) and Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Constructions of Australian Aboriginalities.

Review :
"Based on solid archival research and the clever joining of fragments, Russell adds literature and photography as well as her own identity and sense of historical curiosity ... The book is challenging, thorough and personal, allowing individuals to emerge and rewriting Aborigines into the early colonial years." - Australian Journal of Politics and History "...[an] impressive work ... Russell succeeds in telling a story beyond the familiar one of Aboriginal dispossession. Her work serves to highlight the way in which nineteenth-century racial categories that can all too often seem fixed and immutable were in some circumstances more slippery and nuanced." - H-Net Reviews (H-Empire) "Russell takes us into a world colonized by white Europeans, where the Aborigines who weren't wiped out by disease found opportunity, freedom and a certain status by joining the whaling fleet. It was a chance for them to rise in a microcosm of the world-a mixture of races all working together. This is an interesting book. It brings to light a part of the world that has largely been ignored or overlooked. Russell does an excellent job showing us that not all Aborigines were exploited." - Portland Book Review "This engaging investigation into the lives of Aboriginal workers adds to our understanding of how labor, gender, and indigeneity interacted in the early decades of settler colonialism. What makes these particular Aboriginal peoples unique and interesting is how they traveled as part of an industrial workforce, not necessarily as slaves or servants to whites, but in a niche economy that gave them unusual opportunities and positioned them in relationships with whites that were different from how we usually conceptualize Indigenous-European relations in the nineteenth century. This is a fine book." - Nancy Shoemaker, author of A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America