AustLit

'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)

'How much do we know about Gypsy – or Roma – peoples in Australia and the making of a specifically Roma Australian culture? It turns out, very little before Mandy Sayer’s Australian Gypsies: Their Secret History which offers a unique insight into an uncharted area of Australian social and cultural history. An intriguing example of how history can be approached by an historically inquisitive non-academic writer, Sayer brings previously untold stories to the page in an affecting and sincere way. In her mission to uncover the lived experience of Roma in Australia she introduces us to an underexamined historical topic that engages with both Australian and Romani histories. Her contribution sets out to ‘discover the true history of the Gypsies’ and to address how and why they were marginalised by Australian mainstream society (x). The book attempts to break down remarkably durable stereotypes, populate the historical imagination with significant Roma individuals, families, and communities, and give voice to a self-identifying Romani Australian population. The book will interest informed specialists – including Australian folklorists, migration historians, oral historians, and memory studies scholars – as well as the broader public.'  (Introduction)