A comprehensive history of Australian
Aboriginal whaling and sealing. For most
Australian Aboriginal people, the impact of colonialism
was blunt—dispossession, dislocation, disease, murder,
and missionization. Yet there is another story of
Australian history that has remained untold, a story of
enterprise and entrepreneurship, of Aboriginal people
seizing the opportunity to profit from life at sea as
whalers and sealers. In some cases participation was
voluntary; in others it was more invidious and involved
kidnapping and trade in women. In many cases, the
individuals maintained and exercised a degree of
personal autonomy and agency within their new
circumstances. This book explores some of their lives
and adventures by analyzing archival records of maritime
industry, captains’ logs, ships’ records, and the
journals of the sailors themselves, among other
artifacts. Much of what is known about this period comes
from the writings of Herman Melville, and in this book
Melville’s whaling novels act as a prism through which
relations aboard ships are understood. Drawing on both
history and literature, Roving Mariners
provides a comprehensive history of Australian
Aboriginal whaling and sealing. “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
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