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)