Negotiated encounters: Native peoples and cross cultural engagements in the early Australian and New Zealand maritime enterprises 1790-1850.

This book length project documents, analyses and theorises the relationships that Aboriginal and Maori people had with sealers and whalers in the period 1790-1850. This will involve identifying the various occupations designated to Indigenous men and women within these colonial industries. This will be followed by an exploration of relationships and cross-cultural encounters through the analytical and theoretical categories of gender-relations, post-colonialism and creolisation theory. This will allow the determining of patterns of acculturation, assimilation and cross cultural negotiation. Finally the project seeks to consider, identify, analyse and theorise the gender specificities of cross-cultural negotiated encounters.