Robinson Crusoe’s call to adventure and do-it-yourself settlement resonated with British explorers. In tracing the links in a discursive chain through which a particular male subjectivity was forged, Karen Downing’s Restless Men: Masculinity and Robinson Crusoe, 1788-1840 reveals how such men took their tensions with them to Australia, so that the colonies never were a solution to restless men’s anxieties.