When a woman named Truganini died in 1876, not a single full-blooded Tasmanian aborigine was In nearby Australia, war, disease and systematic murder by soldiers and bounty hunters wiped out the indigenous Tasmanians. After the British took over the island as a site for penal settlements to supplement those ''English Passengers'' takes place mostly in 19th-century Tasmania, scene of the most complete and perhaps least known of colonial genocides. Surprisingly, however, the book is often hilarious. The horror of slavery, for example, is at the center of novels like Barry Unsworth's ''Sacred Hunger'' orĬharles Johnson's ''Middle Passage.'' At first glance, something similar seems to have impelled the English writer Matthew Kneale to set his ambitious fourth novel, ''English Passengers,'' Our own high-speed time of information overload, consumer culture and the Internet. Hat draws writers to historical settings? Sometimes they offer terrain where great moral issues seem to stand in more stark relief than they do in In a British novel, a ship jammed with contraband sails for Tasmania.
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