Roving Mariners: Australian Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans 1790–1870 by Lynette Russell, 221 pp, State University of New York Press, Albany USA, 2012, ISBN 9781438444239 (pbk), $43.72.

During the late 18th and early 19th century, small groups of European men from the maritime industry established depots along the remote southern Australian coast to service merchant vessels that infrequently passed through. These were men who shunned mainstream society, running small farms and living seasonally as sealers with their Aboriginal wives, who hunted and laboured for them. For these small communities, outside goods were provided from trade with passing ships, which in turn picked up seal and kangaroo skins, salt, and whale bone. The Aboriginal people living here were an important component in the colonial economic growth of the region. The earliest phase of European settlement in many parts of southern Australia was haphazard, and in terms of colonial government it was unsanctioned. In this environment, few records remain to accurately document its growth, and there are many conflicting accounts concerning the identities of the Europeans and Indigenous people who were involved.

In Roving Mariners, Lynnette Russell uses the tools of an historian/anthropologist by examining captain’s logs, ship’s records, journals of sailors, government records and museum artefacts to produce an in-depth account of the lives and adventures of Indigenous people caught up in the maritime industry of the southern oceans. Russell’s intellectual starting point is the fact that for most Indigenous people in Australia the impact of colonialism was brutal – involving dispossession of land, relocation, devastating diseases, murder and institutionalisation. From here the author considers a major exception in the southern coastal region, and describes just how a select few Aboriginal people in Tasmania managed to survive the harshness of the frontier and become well-established individuals as whalers and sealers.

Chapter 1 commences with a description of the maritime industry, while Chapter 2 concerns the Aboriginal cultural relationships with whales. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with examples of Indigenous people who left a record, such Tommy Chaseland, William Lanné, Henry Whalley, Walter George Arthur, who worked as sealers and whalers. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with cross-cultural relationships and the history of colonial and race relationships. Chapter 6 considers the physical evidence that speaks of Indigenous involvement with the southern maritime industry, from the mementos that whaling ship captains collected and lodged in their homes, to an adze found on Kangaroo Island that had been made from a 19th century telegraph insulator. In the case of the ‘hybrid’ objects, that is hunter-gatherer implements made from European materials, Russell has continued her archaeological work (Russell 2005) and proposed that they are from a ‘hybrid or creolised community’ (p. 139).

The bibliography of Roving Mariners shows that the author has published widely in the areas of social theory, Indigenous histories, post-colonialism and representations of race, museum studies and popular culture (ie Russell 2001, 2005). This eclectic background has her well-equipped for the subject of her book. Russell examines her personal reactions to the power of objects in museums. She describes recently visiting a new Aboriginal display in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, and unexpectedly encountering here William Lanné’s tobacco pipe in a glass case. She explains that she

was overwhelmed by the simplicity, the humanity, and the utter recognisability of the item and, by extension, its owner. With this viewing the personhood of William Lanné, whose body is often described in terms of his being ‘the last Tasmanian “full blood male,” asserted itself into my conscience from where I have been unable to dislodge it (p. 91).

Roving Mariners is no bland academic text. Russell uses the classic fictional book, Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851) to help set the scene for her description of 19th century life in the maritime industry.

Among the main strengths of Roving Mariners is the insight it gives into the backgrounds of the individuals who are caught up in the history being written. While other readers may be struck by the lives of other people she documents, for me it was Whalley that left the greatest impression. From my own research, this man was probably the son of the European sealer known as Whalley (Henry Wallen) and of Aboriginal woman Martha, originally from Port Lincoln in South Australia and living among the sealers based on Kangaroo Island prior to official settlement (Clarke 1998: 46). With money gained from the trade in skins, his father sent the young Henry Wallen junior to Hobart Town, where he received an education. He was later employed as a cabin boy on a brig, where he was called ‘Black-Harry’. Henry eventually became a whaler, taking one of the names of his father, ‘Whalley’. Henry knew William Lanné, and was a pallbearer at his funeral in 1869. Henry Wallen Junior died near Macquarie Island on 6 August 1877 as the result of an accident when the whaling vessel, the Bencleugh was caught in a storm.

Russell’s account of Whalley family history differs slightly from my own, as it has him as the son of a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman known as Betty or Bet. She believes that he was William Lanné’s cousin. Due to the lack of precise records for the sealing period and to the uncertainty of genealogical research based on oral records, we may never know Whalley’s exact parentage. Russell provides an outline of his character, and by drawing heavily upon written records she documents Whalley’s rise to prominence in the maritime world in which he became a respected whaler, harpooner and first-mate. Whalley’s shipmates cared for him when mortally wounded, by getting him off the ship and into one of the huts on Macquarie Island, left vacant during the offseason for sealing. He died here and was then buried between the ribs of a ship wrecked there earlier. As Russell declares ‘Whalley died not a half-caste or descendant of an Aboriginal mother but as he lived, as a whaler and sealer. His obituary stated he was a “mariner.”’ (p. 90).

Another major strength of Roving Mariners is what it adds to Australian history as a whole. By focusing on the ‘mixed’ communities of whalers and sealers, the book challenges assumptions about possible gaps between Aboriginal and European Australian histories. Given the fact that there are thousands of Indigenous people living today between Adelaide and Hobart who can trace their descent to sealers, both European and Aboriginal, the investigation of the history of this period is highly relevant. Russell’s work, which focuses chiefly on Tasmania, adds to the study by Rebe Taylor (2002) of the Indigeneity on Kangaroo Island. The detailed account of the niche economy for Aboriginal people of southern Australia bears some resemblance to what is described in northern Australia, where coastal Aboriginal groups interacted closely with the Macassans who arrived each year with the north-west monsoon to chiefly gather trepang (sea slug) for the Chinese market (Macknight 1976; Mitchell 1996). In both cases, the non-Aboriginal people arrived by sea, worked seasonally, employed Aboriginal people with relevant skills, and did not engage in missionising activities. Many of Russell’s findings may prove to be equally valid in this different landscape.

Roving Mariners is well written and enjoyable to read. The chosen graphics used to illustrate it include those of colonial paintings, historical photographs and maps, all of which are highly relevant. The book will become a classic in the Aboriginal history field.

References

Clarke, PA 1998, ‘The Aboriginal presence on Kangaroo Island, South Australia’, in History in Portraits: Biographies of Nineteenth Century South Australian Aboriginal People, Jane Simpson and Luise Hercus (eds), Aboriginal History Monograph no 6, Australian National University, Canberra: 14–48.

Macknight, CC 1976, The Voyage to Marege: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

Melville, H 1851, Moby-Dick or The Whale, Harper & Brothers, New York.

Mitchell, S 1996, ‘Dugongs and dugouts, sharptacks and shellbacks: Macassan contact and Aboriginal marine hunting on the Cobourg Peninsula, north western Arnhem Land’, Bulletin of the Indo-Pacific Prehistory Association 15: 181–191.

Russell, L 2001, Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Constructions of Australian Aboriginalities, Australian Scholarly Publishers, Melbourne.

— 2005, ‘Kangaroo Island sealers and their descendants: ethnic and gender ambiguities in the archaeology of a creolised community’, Australian Archaeology 60: 1–5.

Taylor, R 2002, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island, Wakefield Press, Adelaide.

Philip A Clarke

Griffith University