'In 1908 English gentleman, Ernest Westlake, packed a tent, a bicycle and forty tins of food and sailed to Tasmania. On mountains, beaches and in sheep paddocks he collected over 13,000 Aboriginal stone tools. Westlake believed he had found the remnants of an extinct race whose culture was akin to the most ancient Stone Age Europeans. But in the remotest corners of the island Westlake encountered living Indigenous communities. Into the Heart of Tasmania tells a story of discovery and realisation. One man's ambition to rewrite the history of human culture inspires an exploration of the controversy stirred by Tasmanian Aboriginal history. It brings to life how Australian and British national identities have been fashioned by shame and triumph over the supposed destruction of an entire race. To reveal the beating heart of Aboriginal Tasmania is to be confronted with a history that has never ended.' (Publication summary)
'In Hunters and Collectors (1996), his classic study of antiquarianism in Australia, Tom Griffiths captured something of the Victorian zeitgeist, especially its attitude to the first Australians. The book is populated with an extraordinary array of fanatical collectors, hellbent on acquiring every stone and bone they could lay their hands on. Some gathered artefacts by the cartload. The museums that would in time acquire many such collections were enriched by these labours. But Aboriginal people knew the violence of extracting patrimony from its place of belonging. The acquisition of material culture, nominally in the service of science, marked a tertiary phase in the process of colonisation.' (Introduction)
'Rebe Taylor’s Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity both begins and ends in the very recent past in Kutalayna, Tasmania. Known to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community as a seasonal meeting place of the mumirimina people, archaeological evidence has dated human occupation of the site at 41000 years, making it the oldest known site in Tasmania and one of the oldest in Australia. In 2009 the Tasmanian State Government chose it as the site for a bypass bridge that would divert traffic from Hobart suburbs, which led to the Aboriginal community launching a campaign to try and reroute the bypass and save this special place. It is there that we meet Jim Everett, a Tasmanian Aboriginal who Taylor has known for over fifteen years. At the beginning of the book Taylor writes that Everett has inspired and assisted her writing, guided her understanding of history, and been a key part of her ‘education’, and that this book is written in the ‘spirit of reciprocity’ for what he and other Tasmanian Aboriginal people have given her (p. 3). Beginning and ending her history with Jim in the here-and-now, situates Taylor’s book in a body of historical scholarship that ‘privileges the necessity of responding to the voices of the present as the starting point for studying the past’. 1 Thus, Into the Heart of Tasmania is both an excavation of Tasmania’s colonial past and an exploration of the ways in which that past, and Tasmania’s much deeper human history, continues to resonate in the present for Tasmanian Aboriginal people.' (Introduction)
[Review] Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity
2017
21779404
2017
single work
review
[Review] Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity
2017
21779404
2017
single work
review
'The intriguing image of an early twentieth-century English gentleman bicycling around Tasmania with his tent to collect Aboriginal stone tools and interview descendants of the island’s first people will likely capture readers’ imaginations. The man was Ernest Westlake, a learned and eccentric Quaker who travelled extensively in pursuit of his intellectual goals.' (Introduction)
'In Hunters and Collectors (1996), his classic study of antiquarianism in Australia, Tom Griffiths captured something of the Victorian zeitgeist, especially its attitude to the first Australians. The book is populated with an extraordinary array of fanatical collectors, hellbent on acquiring every stone and bone they could lay their hands on. Some gathered artefacts by the cartload. The museums that would in time acquire many such collections were enriched by these labours. But Aboriginal people knew the violence of extracting patrimony from its place of belonging. The acquisition of material culture, nominally in the service of science, marked a tertiary phase in the process of colonisation.' (Introduction)
[Review] Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity
2017
21779404
2017
single work
review
'The intriguing image of an early twentieth-century English gentleman bicycling around Tasmania with his tent to collect Aboriginal stone tools and interview descendants of the island’s first people will likely capture readers’ imaginations. The man was Ernest Westlake, a learned and eccentric Quaker who travelled extensively in pursuit of his intellectual goals.' (Introduction)
'Rebe Taylor’s Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity both begins and ends in the very recent past in Kutalayna, Tasmania. Known to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community as a seasonal meeting place of the mumirimina people, archaeological evidence has dated human occupation of the site at 41000 years, making it the oldest known site in Tasmania and one of the oldest in Australia. In 2009 the Tasmanian State Government chose it as the site for a bypass bridge that would divert traffic from Hobart suburbs, which led to the Aboriginal community launching a campaign to try and reroute the bypass and save this special place. It is there that we meet Jim Everett, a Tasmanian Aboriginal who Taylor has known for over fifteen years. At the beginning of the book Taylor writes that Everett has inspired and assisted her writing, guided her understanding of history, and been a key part of her ‘education’, and that this book is written in the ‘spirit of reciprocity’ for what he and other Tasmanian Aboriginal people have given her (p. 3). Beginning and ending her history with Jim in the here-and-now, situates Taylor’s book in a body of historical scholarship that ‘privileges the necessity of responding to the voices of the present as the starting point for studying the past’. 1 Thus, Into the Heart of Tasmania is both an excavation of Tasmania’s colonial past and an exploration of the ways in which that past, and Tasmania’s much deeper human history, continues to resonate in the present for Tasmanian Aboriginal people.' (Introduction)
[Review] Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity
2017
21779404
2017
single work
review
