So much detail, and the documented evidence of massacres of Indigenous people makes very uncomfortable reading.

This is the history of Van Diemen’s Land, a penal settlement from 1802. It covers the first arrival of Europeans and the subsequent construction of a society primarily by convicts, and including the encounters with Indigenous people. The author describes it as an “environmental history”.

“Tasmania” represented the new society the free immigrants sought to superimpose on the convict homeland of Van Diemen’s Land.”

“Stored in the vaults of the Bird Collection of the British Natural History Museum since 1838 have been two Tasmanian emus, the only complete specimens of what was the island’s largest land animal. Like the distinct King Island and Kangaroo Island subspecies, the Tasmanian emu fell victim to a predator unknown before British settlement: the dog. The eggs, chicks and adult birds provided food for the human invaders and their canine companions who settled Van Diemen’s Land and it’s offshore islands from 1798. Few Tasmanian’s now know there was a Tasmanian emu.”

“It was not the environment that the free immigrants of the 1820s had trouble accepting, but the convicts. The beauty of the land was widely contrasted with the ugliness of its humanity.”

~Quotes from Van Diemen’s Land by James Boyce

• The Age: “Van Diemen’s Land is a fresh and sparkling account of the first generation of British settlement in Tasmania that also makes an important contribution to Australian colonial historiography. The product of seven years’ research and writing, and a longer time talking about and walking across the island, it focuses attention and admiration on the convicts and their children – Tasmania’s founding mothers and fathers.”
• Sydney Morning Herald: “absorbing, strikingly revisionist history” … “Invigorated alike by passion, scholarship, skill at storytelling and bringing a not-altogether-lost world alive, Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land is a triumph.”