Paul Tapp

The Aborigines of Tasmania's Furneaux Group Paul Tapp

A composite of accounts of whaling and sealing, including the A. L. Meston essay on 'Half-castes of the Furneaux Group'. They came from across the globe in tall ships, in billowing sails, iconic of an era hell-bent on supplying the colonies and the giant cities of the northern hemisphere with their insatiable industrial needs. The many out of print publications to which I have referred, are conservative in their appraisal of the sealing and whaling hey-day of Tasmania, particularly the expansive bays and estuaries of the south and the islands of Bass Strait, the Furneaux Group. But it was the universal expression of the day of those authors, not to paraphrase in any emotional terms, the end result of that period of exploitation. They came, they slaughtered and regarded their new-found paradise as no more than their 'happy hunting-grounds' & moved on...for no other reason than that of the industrial pragmatic...there was nothing left. This publication salvages works otherwise lost to posterity.