Into the Heart of Tasmania

In 1908 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 Westlake encountered living Indigenous communities and unwittingly documented what he could not perceive: an Aboriginal people with a complex culture and a deep past.