Island: No. 96: Feature article: ANDRYS ONSMAn: TRUGANINI’S FUNERAL

ANDRYS ONSMAN

TRUGANINI’S FUNERAL

Death is a moment of complete simplicity
T S Eliot

She had the longest funeral in the history of the world. From the time of her physical death in 1876 to her cremation in 1976, it took a hundred years. Not that she wished it that way, but others thought her to be so important that they could not let her depart this life until they had finished with her. It is hard to reconcile the memory of the pinned-up skeleton in the glass case in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery with the intense woman in the photograph, but they are the same person: Truganini1 of the Nuenone people from the island of Alonna-Lunawanna.

When Truganini died, the Tasmanian Government declared the island’s Aborigines to be extinct. Its intention was to make everyone understand that the native problem was over, but the government was wrong on both counts. Other Aboriginal women born from tribal parents outlived her.2 And the community on the Furneaux group of islands would continue to constitute a native problem until the present day. Nonetheless her passing was used to suggest that it was so, and it was taught as fact in schools around the world. And for a long time, even in Tasmania, it was accepted as so.

Despite the best efforts of the extant Tasmanian Aborigines, the belief that Tasmanian Aborigines became extinct when Truganini died persists. The Encyclopaedia Britannica states on several occasions: ‘The people and cultures of present-day Oceania differ greatly from those of the days when the areal classification into Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Australia was devised. The Aborigines of Australia are few in number, and many are of mixed race. The Tasmanian Aborigines fared even worse and became extinct in the late nineteenth century.’3 It seems strange that a major encyclopedia states definitively that the Tasmanian Aborigines are extinct, while also acknowledging that Aborigines can be of mixed descent. One might wonder why that possibility isn’t afforded the Tasmanians. Just as curious is the notion that if the people had become extinct their language should also be considered extinct:

‘Tasmanian languages are extinct languages spoken before 1877 by the indigenous people of Tasmania, who are also now extinct. No relationship between the Tasmanian languages and any other languages of the world has been discovered’.4

Regarding the second sentence, it has been well established that the Tasmanian languages are closely related to the languages of the southeastern Australian peoples5. The first sentence is also quite wrong. Several speakers survived Truganini, and fragments, usually hidden in the communities, remain in use today. Britannica is merely following the standard, unexamined line that has suited both anthropologists and activists: the moral high ground is much more readily achieved through martyrdom, even if the body it’s standing on isn’t your own. Renowned author and journalist Martin Flanagan makes an interesting point: by accepting that the Tasmanians exterminated ‘their’ Aborigines, the rest of Australia can heap its collective guilt upon the island state, secure in the knowledge that they, at least, weren’t as bad as that.6

Truganini’s Death

Just as her funeral took an unforgivably long time to happen, so her death began long before her final breath. For most of the survivors of any major war, life cannot ever be same afterwards, and the Black War came close to extirpating the Tasmanian Aborigines. One key event in the war was the often ridiculed Black Line. But it needs to be borne in mind that although it failed in its primary purpose of herding the natives onto the Tasman and Forestier Peninsulas, it did achieve two major victories. First, the unity in which the event was run galvanised the settler Tasmanians into a collective, a social whole. Second, it sent an unequivocal message to the remaining Aborigines: the force against which they were fighting was relentless, unethical and growing in size. Their time was fast running out.

Arthur’s decision in 1830 to form a human chain to round up the remaining natives was principally a response to the British government’s realisation that the extermination of a whole race of people because of its colonial policy would bring accusations of genocide upon its head. Sir George Murray, Secretary of State for the Colonies, noted that:

‘... the whole race ... may, at no distant period, become extinct. ...(A)ny line of conduct, having for its avowed, or for its secret object, the extinction of the Native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government.’7

Shortly after the event, George Augustus Robinson’s offer to round up the remaining Aborigines and relocate them on the Furneaux Islands was accepted.8 Robinson became the Aborigines’ so-called Chief Protector. It seems unlikely that the intention was to let them die at Wybalenna, but as history has recorded they nonetheless steadily declined in number. By 1835 there were only 150 Aborigines left of the group and by 1843 that number had been reduced to fifty-four. In 1846 the remnant group was transported to Oyster Cove, a basic camp south of Hobart. There they were to be supplied with food and rum for the rest of their lives. Not that that would be a burden to the government’s coffers for long: by 1855 there were just sixteen survivors.

It’s interesting to note that those few people had still been considered a threat to the settlers when it was initially announced that they were to be relocated to Oyster Cove. In 1846 Oyster Cove was a difficult place to get to. Between it and Hobart lie twenty-three kilometres of hilly, dense bush. The most ready way of reaching it was via boat. The white people who would have come into contact with the Tasmanians were mostly tree-fellers or hunters. Their impact on the decent folk of Hobart would have been minimal. Nonetheless dire warnings of bloodshed were issued at the time.

A few years later the reality captured by early photographs – of a group of placid, defeated and compliant people – contrasted strongly not only with the descriptions of them as bloodthirsty warriors but also with Robert Dowling’s contemporary painting. Whereas the newspaper descriptions were entirely politically motivated, the painting was impossibly romantic. The photos were taken exclusively as records; photography was yet to develop into an art form.

The contrast between these three descriptions of the remaining Aborigines is phenomenal. Dowling, in 1850, paints them very much in the John Glover tradition, as contented indigenes peopling a benign environment. From the position of Mount Wellington’s Organ Pipes in the painting, he has located them somewhere in the vicinity of Oyster Cove. They are clothed in animal skins and the men have ochred and greased their hair. The women are wearing their shell necklaces. The idyllic scene bears no resemblance to the contemporaneous photographs of the dispirited people in front of their sheds, and neither does it show any trace of the bloodthirsty savages described in the newspaper reports.

For the last three or so years of her life, Truganini lived in Hobart, with the Dandridge family. The governor of the time, Sir Charles Du Cane, described her as:

‘A very quaint looking little old lady of over seventy years, under four feet in height, and of much the same measure in breadth. She was well-cared for by the colonial government and every now and then paid us a visit of ceremony at Government House where she would laugh and chuckle like a child over a piece of cake and a glass of wine and occasionally favour us with a few words of English... At my farewell levee she sat in great state and, dressed in very gaudy coloured raiment, felt and looked no doubt every inch a queen, in her own estimation.’9

In 1869 the last surviving male of the group, William Lanne, died. While that in itself was tragic enough, what followed must have had a great impact upon Truganini. A conflict ensued between the Royal College of Surgeons in England and the Royal Society in Tasmania over who should possess his remains. William Crowther, on behalf of the former, gained entry into the morgue where the cadaver was kept and decapitated the corpse, removed the skin and inserted a skull from a white body into the black skin. When this subterfuge was discovered, piqued officials decided to thwart the Royal College of Surgeons’ plans by lopping off his hands and feet and throwing them away. In that state he was buried.

But the desecration didn’t end there. The following night the body was exhumed and dissected for its skeleton by members of the Royal Society. Making the whole episode even more despicable is the fact that the skeleton was never seen again and the skull never reached England. The whole macabre affair had been for nothing.

Numerous accounts of Truganini’s death have been written with varying degrees of pathos, indignation and literary licence. It seems reasonably certain that just before she died, having lain in a stroke-induced coma for five days, she asked the Reverend Nixon to ensure that she wouldn’t be cut up after she died, as William Lanne had been. She knew full well that the Tasmanian Museum was after her bones. Her last request was reported to have been to be buried behind the mountains. Earlier she was reported to have asked to be wrapped in a rock-weighted bag and dropped into the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. While both of these reports may reveal a romanticism on the part of the reporters rather than Truganini herself, there is little doubt that the old and frail woman was terrified of what would become of her when she did finally die. And she was right to have been concerned.

After a short period of mourning the Tasmanian Government seized upon Truganini’s death as an opportunity to announce the official extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal race. On May 11, 1876, it organised a funeral procession. According to contemporary newspaper reports, many lined the streets to watch her tiny coffin roll past and many more watched solemnly as it was lowered into a grave in the town’s cemetery. Few would have realised that the coffin was empty. Afraid of a scene, the government had arranged for Truganini to be interred the night before, in a vault of the Protestant Chapel that was part of the Hobart Penitentiary. Her first ‘final’ resting-place was, again, a jail.

But as was the case with William Lanne, she wasn’t allowed to remain undisturbed for long. In 1878 she was exhumed and what was left of the flesh on her bones was removed, so that they could be boiled clean. They were then crated and stored in the Museum. Some time later the bones were strung together and mounted in a glass case and put on display. In 1947 public sentiment caused the Museum to take her skeleton down and store it in the basement, where it stayed until 1976, a century after her death. The Royal Society may have missed out on the last male Aborigine, but they had made sure of the last female.

Truganini’s Life

Truganini ’s life was the yardstick of the white invasion. The atrocities committed against her and her family are well documented, and since her teens she had been subjected to the sort of post-hoc scrutiny nowadays associated with movie stars and pop sensations. She has been both vilified and adored, not only during her lifetime but right to the present. Most remarkable is the fact that she died an old woman. It might be surmised from the great ages reached by Fanny Cochrane and Suke that such longevity could have been genetic, and maybe it was, but that Truganini survived at all was little short of a miracle.

She was said to have been born in 1803 or in 1812, making her either seventy-three or sixty-five when she died. The photos from which the most common image of her is formed depict a frightened old woman with a small nose, tightly curled hair and intense eyes. But as a young woman she had been bright and pretty. Even those historians who find it difficult to countenance someone from another race as beautiful, agree – albeit with the usual racist proviso. For example, Keith Windschuttle refers to her as ‘a particularly beautiful native girl’. Robert Hughes, less guarded, sees her as ‘remarkably attractive – for an Aborigine’. She was, by all accounts, as intelligent as she was pretty, but despite that Hughes suggests that she deliberately chose her life to be the way it was:

‘Trucanini, one would presume, had every reason to hate the whites. In fact she sought their company thereafter and was busy becoming a sealers’ moll, sterile from gonorrhea, hanging around the camps and selling herself for a handful of tea and sugar...’10 Windschuttle echoes this:

‘[Robinson] initially found her living with a group of convict woodcutters at Birch’s Bay across the channel. However she and her female friends then began visiting the island’s seasonal whaling camp, selling themselves for provisions to the eighty or ninety convicts and free men at Adventure Bay.’11

This representation of Truganini as a slatternly moll originated with Robinson’s diary and is not – as far as is known – corroborated by any other contemporaneous reports. Of course, such lack of corroboration doesn’t make it untrue, but there are some reasons to be wary of claiming it as indisputable.

Robinson had an unshakeable faith that he would save the natives and, more importantly, that he would be recognised for their salvation. Truganini was young and pretty. Robinson, on the other hand, was approaching forty, becoming overweight and covering his baldness with a brown wig. His saving of her would be much more dramatic if he were to rescue the pretty little dusky maiden from a life of sin and debauchery. It’s curious that after she joined his group, he made no further mention of any tendency towards promiscuity. He does, however, use cryptic allusions to their physical relationship. One diary entry tells of a ‘pargener at lygudge’s’. Lygudge is Truganini and Plomley, overly modest, translates pargener as kiss.12

She seems to have had a mesmerising effect on most people she met, including one white woman whose description of her was used by historian James Bonwick. He wrote that Truganini was: ‘exquisitely formed, with small and beautifully rounded breasts. The little dress she wore was loosely thrown around her person, but always with a grace and a coquettish love of display’.13

Unfortunately there seems to be no record kept of the breasts of the woman who made the comment. But even in the bitchy world of gossip a ‘coquettish love of display’ is a long way removed from selling yourself for a cup of tea.

When Truganini died in 1876 the government used her passing as a signal that the descent of a race from hunter-gatherers to extinction happened in the space of one person’s life. And although that wasn’t true, Truganini herself believed that it was; that she was the last of her race. With no children of her own to provide the rituals that might have made her death bearable, with no kinfolk to provide succour, and with no one left alive who could possibly relate to her as an empathetic equal, her death is unimaginably horrifying.

Truganini’s Resurrection: the icon of the new consciousness Truganini, the petite daughter of Mungana, has in death become a symbol for the attempted genocide of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. In the 1980 Boyer Lectures, Bernard Smith opened his series of speeches with the assertion that when Truganini died in 1876, the last of the original Tasmanian Aborigines died, and with that the Black War finally ended. He added that it was the only war that Australia ever won unaided. It seems a sad indictment on intellectual life in this country that prominent figures could still make such assertions in 1980, when so much evidence to the contrary had already been made available to the public by then. But it ought to come as no surprise that Smith’s acceptance of the ‘Truganini as the last Tasmanian Aborigine’ myth is no more than a convenience for his thesis. He suggested that Australia has purposely avoided the tragic in its composition of the country’s history. He referred to this as ‘The Spectre of Truganini’ that hangs over us:

The tragic muse was an old Aboriginal woman, surviving precariously as a fringe dweller in some unknown country town.14

In light of the current debate about the accuracy of history, Smith may well wish to revise his position, but that isn’t the point here.

Apart from the fact that he was factually wrong, he is also philosophically wrong. By no stretch of the imagination was Truganini the muse for the unwritten Tragedy in this country’s psyche. There are two very obvious reasons for that. First she was never a part of this country. She was an Aborigine, and at the time of her death not even remotely a constituent of Australia. In fact Australia didn’t really exist until after she died. Second, she was never a tragic figure to her own people. One can’t simply transpose a figure from another culture, readjust her way of seeing the world, and adopt her for one’s own purposes, no matter how often it is attempted. White Australia’s access to her for such a purpose is denied.

She has the distinction of being the only Tasmanian Aboriginal to have featured on an Australian stamp.15 The irony of her image being featured in a series called Six Famous Australian Women is that she wasn’t Australian. She simply wasn’t allowed to be Australian. Perhaps she was famous for not being Australian, because if she was, then the only war Australia ever won unaided was the one it fought against itself.

She has been referred to in popular music, even if the reference was wrong.16 She has acquired descendants even though there is no record of her ever bearing children. She has been fictionalised in book and film.17 But for the most part her fame was acquired because she was anointed as the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines.

In 1978 filmmaker Tom Haydon enlisted anthropologist Rhys Jones to lend credibility to his documentary The Last Tasmanian. The promotional material featured a portrait of Truganini, identifying her as the last Tasmanian Aborigine. The 109-minute-long film was a strongly argued thesis that the Tasmanian Aborigines were in fact extinct, and it trumpeted that their extermination was ‘the swiftest and most complete genocide on record.’ Furthermore it supported the notion that the genocide was little more than a hastening of a process that was inevitable because the Tasmanians were already degenerating.

The notion that there are no Tasmanian Aborigines still in existence today found support from an unlikely source in the documentary. Annette Mansell, a Furneaux Islander, stated directly that she wasn’t Aboriginal. Although she later recanted and proclaimed her Aboriginality, it was at the time a damning indictment of those in her community. It allowed Haydon to present his theory of complete genocide with a seemingly unbiased perspective. It allowed him to use Truganini as an almost iconic representation of this hideous accomplishment. But most importantly it allowed him to place it in the past. It was a deed conceived and completed in colonial times: it has no direct reference to today.

Coincidentally the assignment of a separate existence for Tasmanian Aborigines, one that was only in the past, played directly into the hands of a state government that had grave concerns about the explosion of demands for land rights. If the Tasmanians had indeed been exterminated then no land claim could hope to succeed. Although the film, almost begrudgingly, acknowledges the existence of descendants, they are in no way allowed to detract from the genocide theory.

In some ways public reaction to The Last Tasmanian was quite similar to that to Truganini’s funeral. Both events allowed for public sympathy, and even a measure of public grief. But mostly it allowed people closure.

Many acknowledged that the extermination of an entire race was a shameful, horrifying occurrence and through watching the film they could acknowledge that; even their complicity, real or vicarious, in it. Then, through some kind of hubris, they could be assuaged of their guilt. That chapter of History could be closed. On both occasions they were wrong: there was no body in the coffin. In the first instance literally and in the second figuratively.

Tom Haydon’s insistence that he was dealing with the facts proved his undoing. It has been convincingly established that Tasmanian Aborigines lived well beyond Truganini’s death. And as importantly it is generally accepted that the Furneaux Island community is included under the umbrella of Aboriginality in Australia. Once again, Truganini had been appropriated in support of a European idea, and once again it hadn’t worked.

Tom O’Regan notes that the role of anthropologists has become politicised because they have to justify their take on indigenous issues. In the case of The Last Tasmanian, according to O’Regan, such justification became belittlement. An interesting tangent comes from his observation that in trying to discover the ‘story and fate of the Tasmanians, [Jones] takes the film-makers to many different locations, archives and museums in France, Britain and Tasmania’.18 Years later, delegations from the Tasmanian Aboriginal community of today would retrace Jones’s footsteps to also visit those archives and museums. But unlike the anthropologist turned media-persona, the delegations weren’t interested in gaining any insights into the colonial mindset or the circumstances of History. They were demanding the return of the human remains that had been taken from them a century before. And most of all, they wanted Truganini back: all of her.

The Repatriation of Human Remains

For most Indigenous peoples, ancestors are afforded the same amount of respect. No one is singled out as being somehow a better ancestor. All are equally revered. To say that living Aborigines afford Truganini no more respect and reverence than any other ancestor is no belittlement of her. Rather it serves as an indication that both Aboriginal culture and Australian culture, while having some connecting points, are formed in response to independent and, at times, exclusive realities. The impetus to reclaim her in her entirety has as much to do with reclaiming her from the iconic role Australia has bestowed upon her as it has with the task of finally affording her peace.

The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre has been actively pursuing the remains of Tasmanian Aborigines for more than a decade. In 1976 the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery returned Truganini’s skeleton to the Aboriginal community. It had earlier taken it down from the glass case in which it was displayed and stored it. When the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre asked for it, the Museum had little hesitation in handing it over unconditionally, despite knowing full well what the Community had decided to do with it. Later in the year, with due ceremony and properly mourned by her people, her bones were cremated and scattered on the waters of D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Finally she was afforded a fitting funeral.

But the repatriation of Truganini didn’t stop there. Parts of her were scattered all over the world, particularly in the United Kingdom. Early in 2002, on her second trip overseas for that purpose, Caroline Spotswood19, along with other members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, brought back hair and skin samples taken from Truganini shortly after she died. They had been in storage at the Royal College of Surgeons in Oxford until the president, Sir Peter Morris, announced a policy of returning all indigenous remains to where they came from:

‘We are conducting archival research to identify the museum’s holdings so that we can return remains to their rightful place of rest. It is very important to an Australian Aborigine that their body, and their ancestors’ bodies, are returned to the land from which they arose.’20

That it was the same august body in whose name the atrocities on William Lanne and Truganini had been committed was a point hopefully not lost on Sir Peter.

None of the people who brought the remains back are descendents of Truganini: she died without issue. Caroline Spotswood and Elliott Maynard are Bass Strait Island people and Rosie Smith is descendent from Fanny Cochrane. In fact, none of them are descendent from the Nuenone people. As descendants of Mannerlargenna and Nicernenic and their respective wives, their ancestors are unlikely to have ever met Truganini ’s people: at least not before they were incarcerated on Flinders Island. So, their shared sense of Aboriginality is relatively recent, even if their individual sense of who they are as Aborigines is rooted in a far longer past. In that sense Truganini is an ancestor of all Tasmanian Aborigines.

John Cove21, a Canadian author, uses the intrusion of western science into Indigenous spirituality to raise the wider issue of the protocols of contemporary anthropological research. The basic question of who has what right to do what with Indigenous culture or people is by now a familiar one. Whereas Aboriginal activists argue that contemporary indigenes have inherited the obligation to prevent cultural intrusion in any form whatsoever, Cove takes the line that research on Aboriginal remains benefits all humankind, including the indigenes. He contends that the ‘informed relative neutrality’ that he deems necessary for intellectual inquiry forms the basis of ethical anthropological research. What he fails to adequately show is that the struggle over Truganini’s bones is a political event as much as a cultural/scientific clash and as such a position of neutrality is an impossibility.

It has been estimated that the remains of some 50,000 Aborigines are housed in medical and scientific institutions abroad. The Tasmanian Aboriginal remains in particular are there for two reasons. First, at the time of collection they were considered to be the most primitive link in the evolutionary chain, and therefore worthy of scientific consideration. Second, each skull fetched between five and ten shillings. There are two reasons why they are wanted back. First, in spiritual terms, until their remains have been laid to rest in the proper manner, Aboriginal souls can have no rest. Second, in anthropological terms, while the remains maintain currency as a museum item, the notion that they are a scientific curiosity remains. Put simply, if it is now accepted that Tasmanian Aborigines are not the weakest evolutionary link, that they are simply another group of people with attendant rights to dignity and respect, there is no longer any reason to keep their remains for study. Institutions should acknowledge that by returning the remains.

There are two reasons why this is not as straightforward as it appears. First, the British Museum Act of 1962 did not allow British government institutions to deaccess stored material. Second, a number of scientists haven’t accepted that Tasmanian Aborigines are not on the bottom of Social Darwinist scales, and until they do, feet are being dragged. Patricia Morrison, who has written extensively in the area of twentiethcentury social values, calls for restraint:

‘Compromises must be made on this poignant and sensitive issue, but they must not be rushed.’22

One might wonder how much slower the decision making process can be: it’s been over a hundred years so far.

An interesting aspect of Morrison’s comment is her notion of compromise. The situation seems to be that the institutions have Tasmanian Aboriginal remains. The Tasmanian Aboriginal community (through the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and ATSIC) wants them all repatriated. Where are the areas for compromise? Either the institutions agree or they don’t. Perhaps Morrison means that the remains may be returned once the scientists have finished with them. This approach takes Raymond Firth’s23 insistence on empirical research in the field of cultural anthropology to new heights by denying Tasmanian Aborigines the right to say that western scientific thought isn’t their reality. Their reality is writ large in Truganini’s eyes.

Truganini’s Eyes

According to Vivienne Rae Ellis, shortly before she died, Truganini was invited aboard the visiting American ship Alden Besse where she was entertained by Captain Noyes:

‘The Americans were fascinated by her, and like all who met her in her last years, were entranced by her beautiful eyes which retained their keen sight until her death.’ 24

In one of her last portraits, her intense, unflinching, challenging gaze demands a response from the viewer: no one is allowed to remain neutral. Even the empty space around her head is charged with energy, like a bed of silence, loud with nervous thought about what will become of her. Although her face is deeply etched, she wears the lines without regret, without disdain for those who had intruded on her being. Her eyes manage to be soft enough to reflect the grace and charm of a long life.

But unlike the early portraits, where there is room to move and to grow, these demanding old eyes transmit an essential truth: everyone has the right to know the truth. She may have hoped that her wishes for a dignified funeral be respected, but she probably knew they wouldn’t be. She must have known that she would not be put in a sack weighted with rocks and dropped into the deep d’Entrecasteaux Channel, nor would she be buried in the mountains that run behind Oyster Cove. That there would be no songs, no fire, no keening. But she would never go to the dissection table voluntarily, no matter how much she had been abused in her life.

Her piercing gaze challenges everyone who looks at the photo to understand that the men of science would have to cut out her eyes before they could to get to her bones.

NOTES

1 Having decided on this variation of her name for linguistic reasons as well as the fact that this spelling is by far the most familiar, it must be noted that she is also referred to as Truggernanna, which was how Robinson recorded it. Calder, 1875, in Some Accounts of the wars, extirpation, habits, &c of the Native Tribes of Tasmania, writes that a Mr Graves, who had paid particular attention to Trugernanner ’s own pronunciation of her name, suggested that it ought to be written Trucanini. Trucanini, in the language of the Nuenone, refers to a seaside plant (p. 108). Vivienne Rae Ellis uses that spelling in her books, such as Trucanini, Queen or Traitor? Taylor (undated, see below) suggests the name translates as toolmaker rather than basketmaker. Her English name was Lalla Rookh.

2 Both these women were born from two Aboriginal parents and both outlived Truganini. Suke died towards the end of the nineteenth century on Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia where she had lived most of her life in the forced company of sealers. Fanny Cochrane survived into the twentieth century.

3 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1999, Standard Edition, CD Rom.

4 ibid.

5 Taylor, J, undated, Tasmanian Place Names – The Aboriginal Connection, published by the author. Further, Taylor is currently completing a Doctoral dissertation on this issue at Riawunna, Centre for Aboriginal Education, University of Tasmania.

6 Flanagan, Martin, In Sunshine or in Shadow, Melbourne, Picador, 2002.

7 Murray to Arthur 5 November 1830. Correspondence and Papers Relating to the Government and Affairs of the Australian Colonies, 1830-1836, Volume 4, Dublin, Irish University Press, p. 228.

8 Whether or not he was successful in gathering all the Aboriginal people remaining at large is still in some dispute. The Liapootah group is claiming Aboriginality on the (unsubstantiated at this stage) claim that some Aboriginal people avoided the roundup, and that they are their descendents.

9 Du Cane, Sir Charles, Tasmania Past and Present, public lecture given 3 January, 1877, cited in Ellis V. R., Trucanini, Queen or Traitor? Hobart, OBM, 1976, pp. 126-7.

10 Hughes, R, The Fatal Shore, London, Pan, 1987, p. 422.

11 Windschuttle, Keith, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Sydney, Macleay Press, 2002, p. 203, citing Robinson’s Friendly Mission pp. 55, 71-2.

12 Plomley, N J B, Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834, Hobart, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966, p. 30.

13 Bonwick J, The Last of the Tasmanians, London, Sampson, Low, Son & Marston,1870, p. 51.

14 Smith B, The Spectre of Truganini, Sydney, ABC, 1980, p.16.

15 Truganini was depicted on the ten-cent stamp in 1975 as part of Australia Post’s series of stamps featuring famous Australian women.

Last modified 22 June, 2004