A Very Secret Trade: The dark story of gentlemen collectors in Tasmania

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Shortlisted for the 2025 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards
Longlisted for the 2025 Tasmanian Literary Awards Premier's Prize
Longlisted for the 2024 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award

In the nineteenth century, collectors and museum curators in Europe were fascinated by the antipodean colony of Tasmania. They cultivated contacts in the colony who could supply them with exotic specimens, including skeletons of the thylacine and the platypus. But they were not just interested in animals and plants. The belief that the original people of the colony were an utterly unique race and facing possible extinction had the European scientific community scrambling for human exhibits.

Many eminent colonial figures were involved in this clandestine trade, among them four colonial governors, several key politicians and even Lady Jane Franklin. In Britain, Sir Joseph Banks, the Duke of Newcastle and Professor Thomas Huxley were among many eminent men who solicited human specimens from the colony. Worse still, the men responsible for the care and protection of the few original people who had survived the ravages of disease and the infamous Black Wars were prominent in the trade.

Cassandra Pybus has uncovered one of the darkest and most carefully hidden secrets in Australia's colonial history. It is time we all knew the truth.

'Truth-telling is every Australian's responsibility. Reading this book will help you to walk with us.' - Thomas Mayo

'A deeply ethical, and deeply disturbing, historical reckoning - a model of truth-telling for white Australians. In spell-binding prose, Cassandra Pybus reveals the continuing legacies of colonial dispossession ...' - Professor Warwick Anderson

'Exhaustively researched and arrestingly told' - Professor Mark McKenna

Reviews

'Pybus is a brilliant storyteller - this is a book for history buffs as well as anyone who wants to better understand the darkest sides of Australia's past' - The Guardian

'Pybus has managed to lift the veil from an extremely dark chapter in Australia's colonial history...an important book that deserves to be widely read' - Sydney Morning Herald

'In her vivid and ethical capturing of the Tasmanian apocalypse, Pybus smashes the fiction of contemporary imaginings and repopulates the canvas with undeniable truths.' - The Saturday Paper

'The sweep of her research is breathtaking, her findings even more so.' - Judges' comments, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards

'A meticulously researched, beautifully written and deeply moving account of the shadow market in the skeletal remains of Tasmania's first people' - Inside Story

'In her captivating book and a piece of truth-telling par excellence, Pybus uncovers the network of colonial men in Tasmania who used their status and laced it with deception and trickery to obtain the Ancestral remains of Palawa men, women and children, and ship them off to Europe...' - Professional Historians Association of Australia

Author Bio

Cassandra Pybus is an award-winning author and a distinguished historian. She is the author of thirteen books including the bestselling biography, Truganini and has held research professorships at the University of Sydney, Georgetown University in Washington DC, the University of Texas and King's College London. She is descended from a colonist who received the largest free land grant on Truganini's traditional country of Bruny Island.