Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans, 1790-1870

by Lynette Russell

Overview

A comprehensive history of Australian Aboriginal whaling and sealing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438444239
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	12/01/2012
Series:	SUNY series, Tribal Worlds: Critical Studies in American Indian Nation Building
Pages:	235
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.80(d)

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Chapter 1 Whalers, Sealers, and Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Men and Women in the Southern Oceans 1790-1870 1

Chapter 2 "They are…very fond of the flesh of the whale": Aborigines, Whales, Whaling, and Whalers 23

Chapter 3 "A New Holland Half-Caste": Tommy Chaseland: Diaspora, Autonomy, and Hybridity 47

Chapter 4 "A good man can do anything he makes up his mind to do, no matter what": Tasmanian Aboriginal Men and Whaling 65

Chapter 5 "Most of them had native wives": Cross-Cultural Relationships in Southern Australia's Sealing Industry 93

Chapter 6 "Those women were free people": Domestic Spaces, Hybridity, and Survival 117

Chapter 7 Remnants, Artifacts, and the Doing and Being of History: A Sort of Epilogue 135

Notes 141

Bibliography 183

Index 209

Editorial Reviews

"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

From the Publisher