Ernest Westlake was a British geologist with an interest in cultural evolution and anthropology. By the time he travelled to Tasmania in 1908 to further his search for eoliths (shaped rocks), which he had mistakenly identified as a form of ancient stone tools, he had already collected several tonnes from France. He continued his obsession in Tasmania, collecting more than 13,000 Aboriginal stone tools and he amassed a rich history of Tasmania and its Aboriginal people along the way. The breadth of his collecting was staggering.

In addition, he was a prolific letter writer to his family in Britain, creating an extensive record of the man and his times. Westlake was a Quaker, pacifist, evolutionist, and progressive. The First World War prompted him to fundamentally question humanity and the value of his work and he stopped collecting. Instead, with his son, Aubrey, he established the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry for both boys and girls, a Scout-like movement with a Native American semblance.

After his death in 1922 his family continued their interest in his work. In 2000 Rebe Taylor interviewed and spent time with his descendants and learnt that Westlake's eolith collection was now part of a gravel path at the Sandy Balls Caravan Park in Britain's New Forest - complete with catalogue numbers! Westlake never published his findings and Taylor has recovered his work, one man's obsession to collect and put it to use in a broader historical context.

She writes that when Westlake left Tasmania in June 1910, he took more than just stone tools, he took a sense of Aboriginal culture.

Into the Heart of Tasmania is the latest entry in the history wars. Taylor's aim is to unearth proof of the antiquity of Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Her book follows on from Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu in challenging our understanding of precolonial Aboriginal histories.

Taylor's work is extensively researched, of the highest scholarship, accessible and very readable. It is a tribute to the value of archives in recording Australia's long and rich Aboriginal culture and heritage and will shape the way future scholars and academics proceed. They can now put to rest the myths of the colonial era perpetrated by those in power who wanted to advance "with a cleaner rendition of the colonial past. But most of all, they wanted that past to have decisively and irrevocably ended".

Taylor highlights the extensive knowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people possessed of their culture, language, customs and practices, including hunting techniques - knowledge widely assumed to have died out. Westlake's decision to record Aboriginal language and histories provides a rich source of information for Tasmanian people today.

Westlake created language lists from his interviews and conversations with more than 95 people. For example, on Cape Barren Island, he gathered information on customs and language from John Maynard, the son of Wyerlooberer and Richard Maynard who had settled in 1824, each word and phrase carefully pronounced and recorded. He recorded Aborigines' belief that stars were of spiritual significance and described their use of astronomy to navigate, predict weather and mark seasonal change. He found that the families descended from Fanny Smith, who claimed to be the last surviving Tasmanian Aboriginal, were conveying knowledge of traditional foods, bush medicines, basket weaving, hunting and fishing and the seasonal practices based on their knowledge of astronomy.

Westlake was fascinated by the way Aboriginal people had seemingly telepathic abilities and were closely in touch with the natural world. He observed that the eyesight and hearing of the children were more accurate than that of Europeans and that Tasmanian Aborigines were, "like fishes ??? and could pick up anything from the bottom of the sea".

Westlake's legacy of rich first-hand material should be widely known and incorporated in the Australian curriculum on the history of Tasmania for children of today.

Taylor beautifully navigates the fraught politics of history and archaeology in Tasmania, exploring the work of Tasmanian historian N. J. B. Plomley who extracted language word lists from Westlake archives and explored this rich source of information in the 1970s.

She advances a new narrative in the culture wars of Tasmania in the final chapters, and an unknown and unintended story emerges from the archives. Taylor dances with the devil, explaining the players in the history wars training a new lens on the important work of the late archaeologist Rhys Jones in Tasmania. Her conclusion is that the search for human antiquity in Tasmania has long been about discovering the European self, looking inwards and downwards for elsewhere from Britain and mainland Australia and back to Tasmania driven by the desire to understand their own culture.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker is a Melbourne Early Career Academic Fellow with the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, The University of Melbourne.