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NONFICTION Island Story: Tasmania in Object and Text Edited by Ralph Crane and Danielle Wood Text Publishing, $34.99

Tasmanians are fortunate to have a treasure store full of remarkable artefacts so rich in meaning that they set imaginations racing.

Yet many of these wonderful things in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery are underappreciated. Much of its collection is in storage and several of its most precious items are too fragile to be on display for long. Besides, it can be a struggle to find time to explore the museum in depth.

Here is a book that overcomes these barriers and allows us to look at some of Tasmania’s most significant objects in a new way. It is like a carefully curated exhibition, designed to stimulate and provoke.

Island Story is a large, attractive paperback full of pictures of almost 60 treasures from the museum, from indigenous baskets and necklaces to significant paintings and drawings, historic photographs, poignant clothing and furniture, household items and rare plant and animal specimens. Each item is accompanied by a text that relates either directly or obliquely to the object.

The book is edited by Professor of English Ralph Crane and writer Danielle Wood, the pair who produced that popular collection of Tasmanian stories, Deep South.

This time they have attempted something more ambitious.

The artefacts on display in this book are fascinating but marrying each one to a text adds a new dimension. The texts are as varied as the objects — old and new, poetry and prose, some taken from works of fiction, some from historical documents.

For example, explorer James Cook’s careful report on Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, written in 1777, goes with a silver banksia specimen collected at the time.

Other pairings are more daring. Jim Everett’s larrikin tale of a flag-burning protest by a group of Aborigines outside Parliament House in Canberra accompanies one of Governor George Arthur’s famous pictorial proclamation boards declaring equal treatment of the races under British law. These boards, nailed to trees around the island at the height of the Black War in 1829 and 1830, are among the most arresting images of the British Empire.

The choice of objects and texts has to be a matter of personal taste and each reader will have their favourites. For this reviewer, one of the most moving texts, beside a collection of finely woven baskets from the early to mid 19th century, is a list of the Tasmanian Aboriginal women who are likely to have made them. Each woman’s name is followed by the date of her death. It is striking how many died young, almost all of them during those few decades of the 19th century when the indigenous population was decimated. The list of 70 names is haunting. It looks like a war memorial and says so much about the disastrous impact of European settlement.

Another striking image is of a convict hood or cowl worn by prisoners in solitary confinement in the Separate Prison at Port Arthur. Its matching text is an account of a visit to Port Arthur in its last days as a prison, written by the renowned English novelist Anthony Trollope.

Not all the artefacts are from the distant past. ABC reporter Helene Chung’s bicycle is there, along with her description of the matter-offact sexism of the 1960s workplace, which seems shocking 50 years later.

There’s a clump of coins, melted and fused by the heat of the 1967 bushfires that caused death and destruction. With it comes a touching story of a young teacher trying to save her class from the inferno as it engulfs her school house. The editors appear to have had great fun matching texts and objects and it is intriguing to see the connections they have made. Not all the texts will be to every reader’s taste but there is so much of interest here that the whole is a satisfying feast of Tasmaniana.

PHILIP HEYWARD