Rebe Taylor's book is a fascinating work, but sadly falls a little short perhaps in what it tries to achieve, in part because it attempts to achieve so much.

The book's focal points centre on archaeology and anthropology, Tasmanian aboriginies, and being an autobiographical account of Ernest Westlake. In and of themselves, these are certainly three very interesting fields, and three which I felt I had learned more about for having read the book.

The book follows the path of Victorian/Edwardian archaeologist Ernest Westlake, an amateur archaeologist and anthropologist who seeks to link together thought at the time on prehistoric man and the Tasmanian Aboriginal population. His journeys - both temporal and physical - see him travel to France and Australia to research this field, and contribute to some of the wider discussions relating to the academic debate.

In exploring this, Taylor brings together a range of issues from that period to the reader: academic politics; archaeological techniques, practices, and ethics; ethnography; and even personal history in the form of her interviews with modern day archaeologists and surviving Tasmanian Aboriginies.

So, be prepared to learn a lot! There's plenty in there, ranging from the first settlement of Van Diemens Land, to present day interpretations of history. For me, I was happy to learn a lot, but felt that perhaps improving focus by shedding one or two of the strands of the story could have made it a bit more readable.

That said, highly recommended!

In 1908 it was widely accepted that the last Aboriginal in Tasmania was dead. Enter Englishman Ernest Westlake, who planned to write about Stone Age implements and tools. Instead he wound up in the middle of a controversy he did not appreciate as he found living history all around him.

I have to admit that I really struggled with this book at first. If I hadn't agreed to read it for Net Galley, I would have given it up. But I stuck with it, and somewhere around 10% I found it getting interesting. Westlake is not a sympathetic character. He struck me as a rather typical stuffy, pigheaded Victorian gentleman of the time. But the author, Rebe Taylor, was much more engaging when she allowed her personality to come through.

I think this could have been a more interesting book, but as it was I found it difficult to follow and rather dull. I'm not sure who the was intended for, but I doubt it was for average readers like myself. Thanks for the chance to read it.

4★
This is a work of non-fiction, but it would make a great basis for a work of historical fiction and/or a documentary or mini-series. It’s an academic work, and there were times when I certainly got lost amongst the names of the different historians and researchers. But I am pleased to have learned more about Aboriginal Australia and the culture that generations of Europeans have tried unsuccessfully to eradicate.

The focus is on Ernest Westlake, who takes himself to Tasmania in 1908, leaving his motherless children in boarding schools in England. He needs to discover for himself the artefacts left by the Tasmanian Aboriginals, who are extinct . . or so he thinks.

It suited the British to consider them extinct.

“. . . it was Darwin who observed that the demise of the Tasmanians was a ‘natural’ consequence of ‘when civilised nations come into contact with barbarians’. The idea not only vindicated colonisation, it celebrated the superiority of British civilisation.”

Today in Australia, there’s a kind of cognitive dissonance or ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too’ attitude towards Aboriginality. For Aborigines, it’s a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

First: If you have some Aboriginal blood and look sort of indigenous, mainstream society will consider you Aboriginal, with all the stereotypes that may entail.

Second: If you aren’t a full-blood Aborigine, then you aren’t ‘really’ Aboriginal, so your connection with country and your claim to land rights is likely to be questioned. And if you don’t look noticeably Aboriginal, you’ll face the criticism that Anita Heiss, author of Am I Black Enough For You? and others have to put up with.

Meanwhile, back to Taylor’s book. Westlake had read the research available at the time, and Taylor recounts a lot of it here with footnotes and references. He seems to have been a strange, driven fellow who pedalled all over the state, collecting rocks, fossils and stone tools, carrying them all on his bike. He often slept rough and seems to have been a bit of an awkward chap.

“Riding through the bush, over rocks and ruts, with more than 15 kilograms of stones upon his bicycle, had been almost comical. Picking up the stone tools from the dried paddocks, though, had been wonderful: ‘they lay about on the surface of the dried pastures,’ he wrote to his children, ‘as I have seen them in my dreams.’ He hauled another thousand stones in four days.”

Westlake had intended to compare Aboriginal artefacts with those found in France, and I admit to getting confused about all the theories, but the upshot is that by concentrating so much on rocks, he overlooked the living culture he was walking through. But, he was a geologist, not an anthropologist, so I guess it’s understandable.

And to his credit, he went to Tasmania himself and spent several years trekking around, meeting and interviewing people. Others just wrote letters and stayed in their offices, including people living in Hobart. And he did learn, once he paid attention.

“What Westlake took away from Tasmania was more than stone tools, but a sense of how the culture of the Aborigines could address the ‘disease’ of ‘civilisation’. ‘[T]he sooner we go back to the ways of the aborigines the better,’ he wrote to his children.”

Taylor seems to have found every scrap of paper about the subject and especially appreciated Westlake’s notebooks.

One of the most interesting to me were the notes about Reverend Henry Dresser Atkinson, who befriended Truganini, at the time, generally accepted as the last full-blood Tasmanian Aborigine. I am going to share her story, although it’s not the focus of Taylor’s work, but it shows what Europeans thought of Aborigines.

“The violence of the past is more successfully concealed on the published page. In Westlake’s handwritten, messy archive it is revealed afresh . . .

Atkinson repeated his candid racism to Westlake, telling him that Truganini ‘looked like an ape, the most repulsive object I had ever seen’. . .

‘that feeling soon wore away when I got to know her better.’ Or, as Atkinson put it in his earlier writing, ‘There was never any sign of frost during the years that she and I were friends … learned more from her than I could have learned from any one else, and in some respects, I enjoyed her society more.’
. . .
One day Truganini asked Atkinson to take her out fishing in a boat, to the ‘Shepherds’, a spot in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel just past the North Point. But they ‘never put down a line’. Truganini ‘was in very low spirits’:
‘the tears were rolling down her black cheeks and for some time she never spoke a word … Then she broke down and sobbed afresh. She told me they were all dead now excepting herself, and the people in Hobart had got all their skulls, and they would get her skull. And then, it appeared, she had got me to come with her in order to extract a promise from me that, when she died, I would see that nobody should get her skull. And then after a lot of weeping and sobbing, she suddenly came and knelt before me, and, clasping me round the knees, exclaimed, ‘Oh! Father, father, bury me here, it’s the deepest place. Promise me! Promise me!’

Atkinson told Westlake how he ‘promised faithfully’ that he ‘would certainly’ have carried this out ‘to the letter’ if the ‘fates had not been dead against’ him.
. . .
Atkinson gave instructions to his colleagues to follow Truganini’s last wishes, but the Church had by then transferred him to Stanley on Tasmania’s northern coast.
. . .
In 1904 the Society sent Truganini’s skeleton to Melbourne to be articulated by anatomist RJA Berry. When she returned, she was displayed in the Museum in Hobart. Atkinson was said to be unaware her wishes had not been followed until he saw Truganini’s remains at the Tasmanian Exhibit of the Melbourne Exhibition in 1888, although in another account he saw Truganini’s skeleton in Hobart and ‘never again entered the Museum’.
. . .
A hundred years after her death she was cremated and buried, finally, in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.”

It took until 1976, only 40 years ago, for her to be returned. How would you feel if that had happened to your grandmother?

There is a good deal of discussion about Westlake’s later life and family in England which has nothing to do with his Tasmanian activities but does illustrate the kind of alternative character he was.

Thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Press for the review copy from which I’ve quoted so extensively. This will be a wonderful addition to the literature on the subject.

About Truganini: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini

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.

‘Ernest Westlake had spent his life dedicated to stones. He grew up and lived in Victorian rural England, but he occupied a more ancient world.’

In 1908 Ernest Westlake packed a tent, a bicycle, multiple notebooks, plenty of pairs of socks and forty tins of food. Ernest Westlake then travelled to Australia by ship, on the White Star Line. He was 56, widowed and left his two children Margaret and Aubrey behind while he spent 18 months travelling around Tasmania.

Why? Ernest Westlake wanted to study the flint tools used by the Australian Aborigines. Years earlier, he had found chipped stones in the Auvergne region of central France. He believed that these stones had been deliberately fashioned as tools and thought it likely that the tools used by Australian Aborigines were fashioned in the same way.

In this book, Dr Taylor describes Ernest Westlake’s journey of discovery. While he used his notebooks, much of what he discovered comes out in his letters to his children. Ernest Westlake spoke to more than 95 Tasmanian Aboriginal people and their descendants, asking them what they knew of Aboriginal culture. He thought he was gaining ‘secondhand’ insights into the past, without realising that at least some of the culture being described to him was still extant.

‘Westlake was blinded by what he wanted to see. The Aboriginal people of Tasmania were not missing.’

Reading about Ernest Westlake’s experiences, and Dr Taylor’s observations of the present, provides an uncomfortable reminder of how incomplete and how inaccurate our retelling of history has become. In 1908, Ernest Westlake thought Tasmanian Aboriginal people were extinct. In the 1960s, when I attended school in Tasmania, we were taught that there were no Aboriginal people left in Tasmania. Wrong. And in the present day, as Dr Taylor shows (in her writing about the Brighton Bypass) our ability to ignore the significance of Aboriginal heritage continues.

I knew nothing about Ernest Westlake and his journey before reading this book. I found this an interesting, and at times uncomfortable, book to read. Interesting because although Ernest Westlake collected a large amount of information he seemed unaware of the significance of at least some of it. Uncomfortable because we are still not treating Aboriginal culture with respect.

‘His search for an Eolithic anachronism meant he could not see what he had unwittingly found: both the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples’ deep past and their continued endurance.’

Ernest Westlake’s entire archive was digitally published in 2013, thanks to the efforts of Dr Taylor and archivists Michael Jones and Gavan McCarthy. Hopefully, this will encourage others to look into Ernest Westlake’s life and work. And, perhaps, to question some of the assumptions we’ve made about the past.

Note: My thanks to Melbourne University Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I received a free electronic copy of this history from Netgalley, Rebe Taylor, and Melbourne University Press in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all, for sharing your work with me.

And this is an interesting history of the mission of discovery cobbled together by Ernest Westlake, a grieving London widower and father who choses to take a break from his life and travel to New South Wales to study the flint tools of the native and now most likely extinct Aboriginal locals to prove to himself and others that the chipped stones he had found years ago in the Auvergne region of central France were in fact tools fashioned at the same level of evolutionary progression as those flint tools being found in NSW, and that both were fashioned by primitive natives, not chance. The year is 1908.

Westlake, not a wealthy man, takes with him on his slow White Star line boat to Australia lots of socks, many notebooks that would fit in a pocket, and his bicycle. He made much use of all of these tools, but for the most part his explorations are defined and detailed by his letters home to his children, Margaret and Aubrey.

He followed in the footsteps of several other anthropologists, both professional and amateur as was he. And like them, he approached the problem from a preconceived 'fact' that he wanted to prove. Unlike others, he managed to actually discover many many facts about the NSW natives, as soon as he was able to look over the half-caste problem that sandbagged his predecessors.

I love the way Rebe Taylor brought this all together, and the little inserts from the present that occasionally bring us back to the world. This is a book I would highly recommend to anyone interested in archeology, Darwinism, and just plain folks. This is a book that will go on my research shelf, to be read again.