Truganini biography samples

Aboriginal Tasmanian woman (c. –)

Truganini (c. – 8 May ), also known as Lalla Rookh and Lydgugee, was a woman famous for being widely described as the last "full-blooded" Aboriginal Tasmanian to survive British colonisation. Although she was one of the last speakers of the Indigenous Tasmanian languages, Truganini was not the last Aboriginal Tasmanian.

She lived through the devastation of invasion and the Black War in which most of her relatives died, avoiding death herself by being assigned as a guide in expeditions organised to capture and forcibly exile all the remaining Indigenous Tasmanians. Truganini was later taken to the Port Phillip District where she engaged in armed resistance against the colonists. She herself was then exiled, first to the Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island and then to Oyster Cove in southern Tasmania. Truganini died at Hobart in , her skeleton later being placed on public display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery until Her remains were finally cremated and laid to rest in

In being mythologised as "the last of her people", Truganini became the tragic and triumphal symbol of the conquest of British colonists over an "inferior race". In modern times, Truganini's life has become representative of both the dispossession and destruction that was exacted upon Indigenous Australians and also their determination to survive the colonial genocidal policies that were enforced against them.

Name and spelling

Other spellings of her name include Trukanini,Trugernanner, Trugernena, Truganina, Trugannini, Trucanini, Trucaminni, and Trucaninny. Truganini was widely known by the nickname Lalla(h) Rookh, and also called Lydgugee.

In the Indigenous Bruny Island language, truganina was the name of the grey saltbush, Atriplex cinerea.

"Lalla Rookh" was an Orientalist romance by Irish p

The haunting story of an extraordinary Aboriginal woman.

Winner of the National Biography Award

Shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award for Non-fiction

'A compelling story, beautifully told' - JULIA BAIRD, author and broadcaster

'At last, a book to give Truganini the proper attention she deserves.' - GAYE SCULTHORPE, Curator of Oceania, The British Museum

Cassandra Pybus's ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the s and s. As a child, Cassandra didn't know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne.

For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than we can imagine. But her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy. Now Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness accounts to write Truganini's extraordinary story in full.

Hardly more than a child, Truganini managed to survive the devastation of the s, when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but extinguished. She spent five years on a journey around Tasmania, across rugged highlands and through barely penetrable forests, with George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary who was collecting the survivors to send them into exile on Flinders Island. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy - the so-called extinction of the original people of Tasmania.

Truganini's story is inspiring and haunting - a journey through the apocalypse.

'For the first time a biographer who treats her with the insight and empathy she deserves. The result is a book of unquestionable national importance.' - PROFESSOR HENRY REYNOLDS, University of Tasmania

What comes to mind when you look at Trukanini’s face? Do you feel challenged? A sense of sadness and regret? Or are you so empathy-fatigued you make an inward groan? Not again! We know that sad story. We have said sorry. The History Wars have been waged.

Trukanini’s face launches an internal conversation. This conversation has a history, one that unpacks like a matryoshka doll. Trukanini has long been the symbol of a terrible but straightforward story of extinction, what is often popularly concluded to be one of the most clear-cut cases of genocide. This is how Tasmania appears from the outside: the Holocaust of the British Empire, international shorthand for all colonial guilt. But beneath this layer is a nation looking to itself, or rather looking down to its island state, in an effort to understand its history. To white Australians, Tasmania has been the yardstick of ‘our’ brutal past, the worst of what ‘we’ did. It may now seem a kind of convenient truth to view Tasmania this way, but it was real to those caught up in the anti-colonialist politics of the late s, seeking to break the ‘silence’ over Australia’s frontier past.

Looking more closely at Tasmania, you see a small colonial outpost trying to make sense of the inherited (and self-created) guilt of exterminating the island’s indigenous peoples within a generation. The nineteenth-century Tasmanian community was the first to make Trukanini a legend, and its historians were the first to berate the colonial administration for the demise of the Aborigines. There is an archaeology of collective remembering, history writing and creating identities from Tasmania’s Aboriginal past that spans centuries and continents. I look at myself, now in Melbourne, digging into these layers. I wonder: do we still need to look at Trukanini to do that?