Finlaysons launch ‘Gibraltar – Geography, Nature, History, Heritage’

A new book by Clive, Geraldine, and Stewart Finlayson was officially launched by the Chief Minster, Fabian Picardo, at the Gibraltar National Museum.

‘Gibraltar – Geography, Nature, History, Heritage’ delves into the trio’s years of research into the Rock’s history and geography as well as using their own experiences to comment on more recent local history.

Mr Picardo said it was a real pleasure to launch the book.

“I think I am holding the first edition of the definitive anthropological history of Gibraltar as it is today, and that is really quite a feat to have established,” he said.

Professor Clive Finlayson told the Chronicle that readers can expect “a bit of everything” from the book.

“The title tells you, it's a bit of geography history,” he said.

“The way we work, the boundaries between these subjects fuse and merge into one another.”

“You can't understand history if you don't understand geography, and so on. And therefore, what you can find is certainly most elements of the history of Gibraltar, but not necessarily in chronological order.”

“We choose themes, and we talk about different themes.”

“So, one might be fishing, and the way people are fished in the rock and in the straits. And it might start with prehistory, and it might end up with Catalan Bay, and so on.”

Professor Geraldine Finlayson added that they wanted to give the book a personal touch.

“We tried to give it a sort of personal touch because at the end of the day, a lot of these stories are about people, and we like to make it as multi-dimensional as possible,” she said.

“We've dedicated it to the people of Gibraltar because we feel that there are some very unique things about us that sometimes get maybe glossed over or not noticed, and we feel strongly about that too.”

“At the end, we put a timeline and we haven't invented anything. But what we're doing is we've got the top half of the timeline is about Gibraltar and the events in the book and what we've been talking about in the book.”

“Then in the bottom part of the same page, you get a little bit of what's going on at the same time in the rest of the world. And that's, I think, sometimes it's forgotten, and puts things into perspective.”

Prof Clive Finlayson added that with much of their research being on the past, the trio felt they needed to acknowledge the present day and have done so by talking about themselves.

“We've lived through the closed frontier, our parents lived through the evacuation, so we turned it that way and ended up as actors or players in the play rather than looking at it from the outside,” he added.

Their son, Dr Stewart Finlayson, said the book is “like a life history of the research that the family’s produced”.

“I remember a lot of these studies that were being done in the 80s,” he said.

“I was a young boy, some of the excavations I used to take part in when I was young.”

“It's almost like the journey that we've been through researching and working on a lot of these things to do with Gibraltar's past and natural history.”

They all added that it is always exciting to work on projects together as a family.

The book can be purchased from the Gibraltar National Museum.