Good Reading Review
Do we have, at last, the definitive story of Truganini, who found fame as the ‘last of the Tasmanian Aborigines’ when she died in 1876?
Pybus, a distinguished historian and author of 12 books, is descended from the colonist who in 1829 received the largest free land grant on Truganini’s traditional country of Bruny Island, Tasmania. She admits that much written and said about Truganini is myth and fabrication. Pybus believes that Australians should know how this Aboriginal woman lived, not simply that she died.
In writing this biography, Pybus wanted to show that Truganini lived through almost seven decades of the most profound psychological and cultural changes. Pybus does not believe this lively, intelligent, sensual woman was a helpless, tragic victim of relentless historical change, seeing that opinion as just another thoughtless act of dispossession.
So Pybus has not written a fictionalised account of Truganini’s life, instead using first-person written accounts by others and the journals of George Augustus Robinson, self-styled missionary and emissary of government, who spent five years traipsing around Tasmania with Truganini, collecting remnants of the Aboriginal population on Flinders Island.
Robinson wrote in his journal daily, and for 13 years in Tasmania and the burgeoning settlement of Victoria, referred to Truganini’s activities and proclivities while she was a member of his party.
Truganini, a small woman with a large personality, was able to trudge right around Tasmania during Robinson’s mission to round up her countrymen. She joined the other Aboriginal women to swim rafts holding Robinson and the Aboriginal men, all non-swimmers, across rivers. The women dived for abalone and shellfish while the men hunted for kangaroo and other marsupials.
Pybus finds that Robinson’s account of his travels is problematic, with blinkered Christian intransigence and high self-regard. Yet he enjoyed his Aboriginal travelling companions’ evening songs and dances and was happy to join in with his flute.
Truganini, youngest daughter of a senior member of the Nuenonne clan from Bruny Island, had travelled with them regularly to the main island of Tasmania, particularly Recherche Bay in the south-east, to meet clans from the same language group, gathering food and engaging in ceremonies. She survived women-hunting raids by sealers and whalers, venereal infection, and even suspicion of murder in Victoria to die in Hobart in her early 60s.
In her old age, when she and the remnant of the exiles were relocated from Flinders Island to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart, she continued to visit Bruny Island. She had seen what happened to skeletons and skulls of men and women who had been in exile with her, with scientists in Tasmania and England keen to study them, so beseeched an Anglican minister who used to take her fishing to bury her in the deepest section of D’Entrecasteaux Channel after her death.
Sadly, it took almost 100 years from her death for her bones, which had been on show at the Tasmanian Museum until 1947, then forgotten in a dusty box, to be cremated and her ashes finally scattered in the channel.
Even the claim that Truganini was the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines at the time of her death can be disputed. Those Tasmanians claiming Aboriginal ancestry today are descended from Aboriginal or part-Aboriginal women who had children fathered by former convicts or settlers.
Truganini had no children, despite liaisons with many sealers and four marriages with Aboriginal men. Maybe this was a result of the syphilis she contracted when very young.
Pybus acknowledges that, while her own family history shows that she was the beneficiary of stolen land and genocide, she maintains the deeper truth is that every Australian who is not a member of the First Nations is a beneficiary of stolen country, brutal dispossession, institutionalised racial discrimination and callous indifference.
‘The expropriation of the territory of a generous people, and the devastating frontier war and dispersal that followed is Australia’s true foundation story, not the voyage of Captain Cook or the arrival of the First Fleet,’ she writes.
5 Stars
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
