In 1908 English gentleman, Ernest Westlake, packed a tent, a bicycle and forty tins of food and sailed to Tasmania. On mountains, beaches and in sheep paddocks he collected over 13,000 Aboriginal stone tools. Westlake believed he had found the remnants of an extinct race whose culture was akin to the most ancient Stone Age Europeans. But in the remotest corners of the island Westlake encountered living Indigenous communities. Into the Heart of Tasmania tells a story of discovery and realisation. One man's ambition to rewrite the history of human culture inspires an exploration of the controversy stirred by Tasmanian Aboriginal history. It brings to life how Australian and British national identities have been fashioned by shame and triumph over the supposed destruction of an entire race. To reveal the beating heart of Aboriginal Tasmania is to be confronted with a history that has never ended.

Volume II documents and analyses genocide and extermination throughout the early modern and modern eras. It tracks their global expansion as European and Asian imperialisms, and Euroamerican settler colonialism, spread across the globe before the Great War, forging new frontiers and impacting Indigenous communities in Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, and Australia. Twenty-five historians with expertise on specific regions explore examples on five continents, providing comparisons of nine cases of conventional imperialism with nineteen of settler colonialism, and offering a substantial basis for assessing the various factors leading to genocide. This volume also considers cases where genocide did not occur, permitting a global consideration of the role of imperialism and settler-Indigenous relations from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It ends with six pre-1918 cases from Australia, China, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe that can be seen as 'premonitions' of the major twentieth-century genocides in Europe and Asia.

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. '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