Into the Heart of Tasmania

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.