Dr Rebe Taylor

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, and the history of sealing industry.

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 became the Bicentennial Scholar at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London, and 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 and in 1996 worked as historian for Soveriegn Hill Outdoor Museum, in Ballarat, Victoria.

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Research

Rebe is currently researching the Tasmanian Aboriginal people in the scientific imagination with particular focus on the early 20th to 21st centuries. This period includes some of the most exciting developments in the history of the human sciences - the dismantling of the notion of race and the discovery of the genome.

This project will explore these developments through various case studies, including the Westlake Collection, the work of archaeologist Rhys Jones and how current biogenetic theories may potentially influence legal definitions of an Aboriginal person.

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.

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Publications

• R. Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island, Wakefield Press, Adelaide, 2002 (second edition in print)
  (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.)
• 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, ‘The Westlake Collection’, in Stories in Stone: A History of the Stone Tool Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Sarah Milliken and Laura Phillips (eds), Berg, Oxford, in print
• 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

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