Cirrus@Austlit

'It can take an enormous intellectual effort for non-Indigenous people (such as this reviewer) to grasp Indigenous concepts of time. This is partially due to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has described as the incommensurability of Indigenous and Western epistemological approaches. In settler-colonial terms, land is a resource to be appropriated, surveyed, and exploited. Temporality is generally used to situate the colonisation event, the before and after, from a perspective where time is linear and forward-looking. By contrast, in Indigenous cosmological approaches, land, culture, and time are co-dependent and in perpetual conversation. Country and time are indivisible.' (Introduction)

Exiles, lost souls, remnants of a dying race. The fate of the First Nations peoples of Van Diemen's Land is one of the most infamous chapters in Australian, and world, history. The men, women, and children exiled to Flinders Island in the 1830s and 40s have often been written about, but never allowed to speak for themselves. This book aims to change that. Penned by the exiles during their fifteen years at the settlement called Wybalenna, items in the Flinders Island Chronicle, sermons, letters, and petitions offer a compelling corrective to traditional portrayals of a hopeless, dispossessed, illiterate people's final days. 

The exiles did not see themselves as prisoners, but as a Free People. Seen through their own writing, the community at Wybalenna was vibrant, complex, and evolving. Rather than a depressed people simply waiting for death, their own words reveal a politically astute community engaged in a fifteen year campaign for their own freedom: one which was ultimately successful. This is a compelling story that will profoundly affect understandings of Tasmanian and Australian history.' (Publication summary)

"Life on the dole was easy that summer, and the dealers made housecalls. Doomsday had passed for Caitlin, or so it seemed, until her friends in the backstreets started dropping like flies. Leonie Stevens was born in 1962. At the age of eleven, frustrated by the plot limitations of Lost in Space, she wrote her first story. This was her first mature novel, published in 1994. Since then she has written two more novels. Her stories have appeared in magazines, anthologies, on the radio and the Net. She loves Martin Scorsese films and currently lives in Melbourne with her family. Inscription in the first page." Source: Book Description.