This book brings together essays from leading Australian and international historians, in an analysis of the monumental Friendly Mission: the Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829-1834, edited by NJB Plomley and republished in 2008. Until this book, Friendly Mission has rarely been considered in a context beyond the immediacy of Van Diemen s Land. Yet George Augustus Robinson s diverse writings constitute a body of work that typically has one set of meanings for local readers, and another for those outside its sphere of production. Robinson s texts are exemplary of the ways in which colonial texts circulated around what Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex, has called imperial networks.