Winner, Festival Award for Non-fiction, 2004 Festival Awards for Literature

Winner, 2004 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for a First Book of History

Unearthed

The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island

Rebe Taylor

230 x 150 PB 385 PP ILLUS 1862545529 $29.95 History / True Stories APN 9781862545526 Wakefield Press

'This is a powerful and passionate exploration of cross-cultural history, and it is also an intriguing detective story. Taylor skilfully interweaves experience and memory, narrative and genealogy, politics and place so that this island saga becomes a history of the national psyche.' – Tom Griffiths, Australian National University

It is relatively well known that the Palawa community of Tasmania is mostly descended from the Aboriginal Tasmanian women who sealers took to the Bass Strait Islands in the early nineteenth century. But few people know that sealers also took Tasmanian women to Kangaroo Island, establishing a cross-cultural community before the settlement of South Australia. Aboriginal Tasmanian descendants are still living on Kangaroo Island today and this book is their story. Beginning in the sealing days, it tells how they became successful farmers, but how many grew up unaware of their Aboriginal ancestry, and are still struggling to face questions of identity today.

‘Unearthed is of major significance to the field of Australian cross-cultural history, especially in the current climate of contested Aboriginallity.’ – Victoria Haskins, Flinders University, Australian Historical Studies

‘Unearthed is a wonderful piece of scholarship by a first-time writer, warm, humane and deserving of a wide and intelligent readership.’ – Bernard Whimpress, JAS Review of Books