Author of the bestselling Truganini, Cassandra Pybus has uncovered one of the darkest and best kept secrets in Australian colonial history.

Collectors and museum curators in Europe were fascinated by the antipodean colony of Tasmania in the nineteenth
century. 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.