CONTESTED PLACES: Tasmania's Northern Districts from ancient times to 1900 (2001) Shayne Breen Out of Print Contested Places is a regional history of the former municipalities of Deloraine, Westbury, Evandale and Longford, collectively known in the nineteenth century as Tasmania's Northern Districts. Before British occupation, the region had been home to local Aborigines for at least 4,000 years. For much of the nineteenth century, the Northern Districts was Tasmania's major agricultural region, producing large quantities of wool, wheat and meat. Contested Places makes a significant and original contribution to understanding the nature of agricultural society in the Northern Districts. The book argues that competing social groups engaged in protracted contests to exercise power in local places. These groups included a small elite of large landholders, local Aborigines, convicts, landless labourers and tenant farmers. Major themes in the book include Aboriginal dispossession, the survival struggles of landless labourers and tenant farmers, the development of rural politics, measures to eradicate agricultural pests and diseases, the role and philosophy of social law, and interactions between colonial society and the bush. Shayne Breen has a PhD in History and currently is a lecturer in Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania. Contested Places is his first book.