Published on Reviews in History (https://reviews.history.ac.uk ) Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity Review Number: 2181 Publish date: Thursday, 19 October, 2017 Author: Rebe Taylor ISBN: 9780522867961 Date of Publication: 2017 Price: £25.00 Pages: 204pp. Publisher: University of Melbourne Press Publisher url: https://www.mup.com.au/books/9780522867961-into-the-heart-of-tasmania Place of Publication: Melbourne Reviewer: Tom Lawson On the face of it Rebe Taylor’s Into the Heart of Tasmania is an intriguing, but essentially straight forward history of one of the many curious connections that define Britain’s imperial and post imperial history. Taylor’s study focuses on Ernest Westlake, an archaeologist cum anthropologist and his journey to Tasmania in the early 1900s to collect the archaeological remains of the island’s Aboriginal communities. The stone tools that he gathered and then brought back to England were for him, and for the scientific communities of which he was a part, vital evidence in the discourse around human origins that detained scholars in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Westlake, who before Tasmania had collected thousands of pre-historic stone implements in Western Europe, believed that Indigenous Tasmanians were a kind of relic from the Stone Age and as such the material that he gathered there could shed valuable light on European pre-history. In making this judgement, Westlake reflected the assumptions of his age (and indeed the previous century) that Tasmanian Aborigines had been a static and undeveloped community for many generations before colonial settlement. What is more he believed, and in this he again reflected a universal consensus, that the Tasmanian Aborigines had been completely destroyed as a people and were now ‘extinct’. These assumptions, Rebe Taylor argues forcefully, meant that Westlake was unable to fully understand the significance of either the material that he discovered or indeed the people that he met – which included, Aboriginal Tasmanian communities, especially on its outlying islands. Taylor’s study of Westlake is therefore an analysis of imperial collectors and collections and a history of the scientific discourses in which they worked. It is a history in that sense of the development of ‘ethnology into the science of evolutionary anthropology’ and the concept of racial superiority – in which at least the idea (if not the reality) of Tasmanian Aborigines figured prominently (p. 62). From Charles Darwin onwards, indigenous Tasmanians were invariably identified within a racial hierarchy (either in terms of culture or genetics). From the late 1800s, for example, their remains were displayed in British museums as evidence of one of the ‘lower type[s]’ of man. The idea that Tasmanian Aborigines were now ‘extinct’ was central to this formulation, in that their supposed failure to adapt to and survive colonial contact was used as evidence of their apparent inferiority. In the words of the popular late 19th-century scientist John George Wood, they had been victims of the ‘strange but unvariable laws of progression. Wherever a higher race occupies the same ground as a lower, the latter perishes … the new world is always built on the ruins of the old’.(1)