Roving Mariners

"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