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Rebe Taylor is a historian. Her field of study is Tasmanian anthropology and archaeology. She was awarded the inaugural $75,000 Coral Thomas Fellowship for her project: The Wedge Collection: moments of encounter on the Tasmanian and Victorian frontiers by the State Lbrary of New South Wales. In näytä lisää 2018, she was awarded the inaugural Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History, for her book, Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity. (Bowker Author Biography) näytä vähemmän

Tekijän teokset

Merkitty avainsanalla

Yleistieto

Sukupuoli
female
Kansalaisuus
Australia

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It seemed to me as I read the concluding pages of this intriguing book, that it was worth reading for the last chapters alone, where the author Dr Rebe Taylor offers an explanation for the vexed state of enquiry into Indigenous issues in Tasmania. It’s obviously not an easy thing to decide whether and what aspects should be studied, and by whom, and for what purpose, and who needs permission and who gives that permission. More than I knew – though I knew about the unedifying History Wars – the politics of Indigenous identity are especially fraught in our island state. It was a surprise to read that the archaeologist Rhys Jones was not welcome in Tasmania although he was a key figure in dating the arrival of Indigenous Australians, first with radiocarbon dating and later with luminescence techniques. It’s all very complicated, and rather than try to summarise it, I think it’s best left to readers of this fine book to learn about it for themselves.

The main focus of the book, however, is about a different man entirely. Into the Heart of Tasmania is the story of a man called Ernest Westlake, an eccentric English naturalist, anthropologist and amateur geologist who went to Tasmania looking for rocks to prove a theory and unwittingly collected valuable information which proved something else altogether.

To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/04/11/into-the-heart-of-tasmania-by-rebe-taylor/
… (lisätietoja)
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anzlitlovers | 1 muu arvostelu | Apr 11, 2017 |
Book received from NetGalley.

This was a different read. When it started out it read like it was going to be an anthropological or sociological study of the Aborigines of Tasmania. What it actually ended up being was a story of a man who in 1908 came to Tasmania searching for artifacts to study and became an accidental anthropologist, while removing part of the countries ancient heritage. I don't know much about the indigenous people of the Pacific Rim so I enjoyed the book and how the early information on them was cataloged.… (lisätietoja)
 
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Diana_Long_Thomas | 1 muu arvostelu | Apr 7, 2017 |
A new book is on my TBR: it’s called Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity and it’s by historian Rebe Taylor. But as soon as I started reading it, I knew I wanted to read her first book, so I reserved that at the library… and lo! it was available the very next day. This promptness made me think I could read the book at my leisure and renew it if necessary, but no, *pout* somebody else wants it now and I’ve ended up having to dash through the last half of it because it’s due back tomorrow. So Unearthed, the Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island is not going to get the review it deserves from me, because I now don’t have time to read it all.

(But actually what Unearthed really deserves is a proper review from a proper historian and there seems not to be one online, only an archived Hindsight program about it on the ABC, and one lonely 4-line review at Goodreads. How has this happened to a book nominated for the 2003 Dobbie, that tells such an interesting story?)

Maybe it’s because Kangaroo Island doesn’t seem so very important in the national consciousness? Yet it’s our third-largest island (after Tasmania and Melville Island), and it’s a bit bigger than Majorca and Long Island. It’s also the site of first European settlement in South Australia – a settlement which followed an Indigenous settlement that predates the loss of the land bridge about 10,000 years ago when sea levels rose, creating the body of water now known as Backstairs Passage, separating Kangaroo Island from the Fleurieu Peninsula. Its Aboriginal name was Karta, ‘Isle of the Dead’ and there is a Dreaming story which tells the story of the people who did not get away in time from the flooding.

The fascinating aspect of this island’s settlement history is that modern day descendants of the sealers and Aboriginal women who re-settled Kangaroo Island in the early 19th century had – until recently – no idea of their ancestors’ existence. The simplistic explanation for this seems to be that the sealers, their Aboriginal ‘wives’ and their way of life had been given such a bad press that their story was suppressed both by their embarrassed descendants and by the victors in the land-grab.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/03/26/unearthed-the-aboriginal-tasmanians-of-kanga...
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anzlitlovers | Mar 25, 2017 |

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