TRUGANINI
aka: Lalla Rookh
Truganini was a Nuenonne woman born around 1812 on Bruny Island, and her life was shaped almost entirely by the violence colonists brought to her homeland. By her teens, British colonists and the colonial government under Lieutenant Governor George Arthur were waging what became known as the Black War - a campaign of massacre, land theft and forced removal that killed the vast majority of Tasmania's Aboriginal population within a generation, including members of Truganini's own family, murdered or abducted by sealers and settlers. In the early 1830s she was enlisted by George Augustus Robinson's so-called "Friendly Mission" to help track down and persuade the last surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians to surrender and relocate - a mission colonists later mythologised as peaceful conciliation but which delivered survivors into the neglect and disease of the Wybalanna settlement on Flinders Island, where most of them died. Even after her own death in 1876, colonial institutions refused her explicit wish to be cremated: the Royal Society of Tasmania exhumed her skeleton and displayed it in a museum for nearly a century, only returning her remains for cremation and burial in 1976. The colonial narrative that later crowned her "the last Tasmanian Aboriginal" was itself self-serving - it cast the near-total destruction of her people as a natural ending rather than what it was, and it erased the Palawa people who survived and still live in Tasmania today.