Dr Rebe Taylor
ARC Australian Research Fellow
- Telephone:
- (+61 3) 8344 0022
- Email:
- rttaylor@unimelb.edu.au
- Fax:
- (+61 3) 9347 7731
- Location:
- Room 218, 149 Barry St
The Australian Centre, Carlton VIC 3053
Academic Profile (click on the link for more information)
Biography
Rebe Taylor is an ARC Fellow looking at the Tasmanian Aboriginal people in the scientific imagination. This project builds on her research into the history of the Tasmanian Aborigines on Kangaroo Island, South Australia.
Rebe has Honours and Masters Degrees in History from the University of Melbourne and a Doctorate in History from the Australian National University. Her thesis titles are: Island Echoes: Two Tasmanian Aboriginal Histories, 2004, PhD Thesis, Australian National University, Sticking to the Land - A History of Exclusion on Kangaroo Island, 1827-1996, 1996, Masters Thesis, University of Melbourne and White Savages and Black Slaves: Myths of the Maritime Frontier; Bass Strait and Kangaroo Island, 1800-1836, Honours Thesis, 1992, University of Melbourne.
In 2000 Rebe was the Foundation Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London, where, in 2000 she also held the Bicentennial Scholarship. At that time Rebe was a member of both the University of Oxford and St. Cross College, supported by an ANU Vice-Chancellor’s scholarship.
She was a presenter for the ABC television history series 'Rewind' in 2004 (http://www.abc.net.au/tv/rewind/txt/s1162988.htm) and in 1996 worked as historian for Soveriegn Hill Outdoor Museum, in Ballarat, Victoria.
Research
Rebe is currently researching the Tasmanian Aboriginal people in the scientific imagination with particular focus on the the work of two scholars: amateur English geologist and anthropologist Ernest Westlake, and professional Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones.
With Gavan McCarthy, Director of the University of Melbourne e-scholarship Research Centre (www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au), Rebe is creating a digital archive guide of the Westlake Collection. Housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, this collection of over 13,000 Tasmanian Aboriginal stone artefacts was formed in 1908-1910 and includes interviews with 95 Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Tasmanians about the traditional indigenous language, culture and history. Rebe also hopes to write a book on Westlake, which will complement and closely reference the guide.
Rebe aims, in a new book, to explore, detail and document Rhys Jones’s archaeological research in Tasmania from the mid-1960s, including how it was popularly presented, and received, in Tom Haydon’s highly successful 1978 docu-film, The Last Tasmanian. She aims to both acknowledge the enormous contribution of Jones’s Tasmanian work, while taking note of the critical reactions that some of his controversial ideas inspired amongst Aboriginal and academic communities.
Publications
- R. Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2002 (The second edition 2008 has made a significant alteration in the inclusion of most of the original names of the Kangaroo Islanders, absent in the first edition, as well as a new author’s note and epilogue).
(Unearthed won the 2004 Victorian Premier’s Award for a first book of history, the 2004 Canberra Critics Circle Award for Literature, the 2003 South Australian Premier’s Award for non-fiction and was shortlisted for the 2003 Ernest Scott prize for History and the 2003 Nita B. Dobbie prize for Women’s Writing. Nicole Steinke, for ABC Radio National’s ‘Hindsight’, produced a documentary on Unearthed which was most recently broadcast on 29 March 2009: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/stories/2009/2524748.htm)
- R. Taylor, ‘Lubra Creek’, in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (eds), Language and landscape, University of New South Wales Press, 2001, pp. 14-29
- R. Taylor, ‘Savages or Saviours? - the Australian Sealers and Aboriginal Tasmanian Survival’, in Journal of Australian Studies, 66, 2000, pp. 73-84
- R. Taylor, ‘"All I Know Is History": Memory and Land Ownership in the Dudley District, Kangaroo Island', in The UTS Review 5.1, 1999, pp. 6-35
- R. Taylor, ‘Reliable Robinson and the Controversial Dr Jones’, in Friendly Mission: Companion Essays, Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls (eds), Quintus, Hobart, 2007
- R. Taylor, ‘Eating fish’: a polemical aspect of traditional Tasmanian Aboriginal culture revisited with the Westlake Papers’, Aboriginal History, in print
- R. Taylor, ‘Making fire: a polemical aspect of traditional Tasmanian Aboriginal culture revisited with the Westlake Papers’, Aboriginal History, in print
- R. Taylor and G. McCarthy, Westlake, Ernest (1856-1922): Guide to the Westlake Papers held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, The University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre and the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, to be published on-line in 2010.