A historical recovery of the Aboriginal Tasmanian women taken to Kangaroo Island in the early nineteenth century, and of the lives, families, violences and survival stories that were later buried under colonial naming, myth-making and silence.

Rebe Taylor follows traces left in archives, settler records, geography, oral history and family memory to reconstruct a history that had been made deliberately difficult to see.

This is a piece of Australian history; local, archival, politically charged, and attentive to the way official records distort the people they claim to document. It sits well with Indigenous history, colonial history, Tasmanian history, women’s history, and the broader shelf of books about how land, kinship, law, violence and memory are written over one another. For readers interested in Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds, Inga Clendinnen, Maria Tumarkin, or history that understands the archive as both evidence and wound.

Wakefield Press paperback, first published 2002. Good second-hand condition, with visible cover rubbing, edgewear, corner wear and light page handling. Includes bibliography and index.