Rebe Taylor is no stranger to the complex debate about Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction. In her first book, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (2002), she explored the history of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community on Kangaroo Island and how it was forced to ‘disappear’ into the wider white community. In her latest book, she focuses on two leading British extinction theorists of the Tasmanian Aborigines in the twentieth century, Ernest Westlake (1855–1922) and Rhys Jones (1941–2001). She not only explores their collection of evidence for the antiquity of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, she also shows how they overlooked other aspects of their findings that indicated that far from becoming extinct, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people had survived into the present.
Aboriginal History
