Cirrus@Austlit

'Entering a crowded and contested field of history requires the type of pluck and vision demonstrated by Leonie Stevens in Me Write Myself. This compelling intervention in Indigenous Australian history recounts the exile experience of Van Diemen’s Land First Nations Peoples at Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island in Bass Strait, 1832–47. Focusing upon the years immediately after the frontier wars, Stevens brings voice to ‘documents and perspectives which were previously all but silenced’ (xxxiv). This approach revises a canonical historical narrative characterised by ‘Eurocentrism and hierarchical thinking’ (252). Stevens illuminates the writings, world views and hopes of the exiles. In doing so, she critiques and corrects a historiographical record that has focused on the actions and accounts of Europeans from James Bonwick’s (1870) The Last of the Tasmanians through to Brian Plomley’s (1987) Weep in Silence and beyond.' (Introduction)