AustLit

'The symposium ‘The Nightingale: Gender, Race and Troubled Histories on Screen’ opened with a discussion between Jim Everett, the film’s associate producer and Aboriginal consultant, and Associate Professor Rebe Taylor, Senior Research Fellow in the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania. Rebe and Jim have known each other since 1999, when they met at a history conference: as Rebe noted, ‘we’ve never really stopped talking since then.’ Jim is a Senior Indigenous scholar at the University of Tasmania and he is currently working on a Master’s thesis with Rebe. In this (edited) transcript of their conversation, Rebe and Jim discuss the way he came to be involved with the film, the casting and production process, and his reaction to the finished film.' (Publication abstract)

'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.' (Publication summary)

In this essay Rebe Taylor brings forth underlying perspectives that have created historical discourse that created identities from Tasmanian's Aboriginal past. She focuses on the provocative and painful question of Truganini's status as the 'last' Indigenous Tasmanian.