tasmania: aborgines down and under

The final solution down under in Tasmania drew to its grim conclusion. All that was left was some bleached bones of a vanished people…

Truganini was the very last. Her life had spanned to the year the association between Europeans and Tasmanians. In her own lifetime her people, confronted by the white newcomers from over the sea, had been humiliated, degraded, and eventually extinguished. They buried her privately within the prison compound; but before very long she was dug up anyway, and her skeleton, strung upon wires and placed upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum.

---Truganini, part of the Prosopa series by Giannis "Gigas" Thomas Truganini was a famous Tasmanian Aboriginal.  She lived between 1812-1876. In her lifetime, she saw her people decimated by murder and disease but refused to be a passive victim. Her strength and determination persist today within the Palawah people who have lived in the region for over thirty thousand years. In 1803, the first white settlers arrived in Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land as it was known then, and began clearing and farming the land. Over four thousand Aborigines lived in Tasmania too. Fighting began and continued for many years and hundreds of Aborigines and Europeans were killed. It was during this turmoil that Truganini was born, around 1812, in the Brundy Island area of Tasmania. She was a vibrant and beautiful girl whose father was an elder of the south-east tribe. By the time Truganini was aged seventeen, her mother was murdered by whalers, her sister abducted and shot by sealers and her husband-to-be murdered by timber fellers. Truganini was raped. By 1830, the fighting was so widespread it was known as the 'Black War' and something had to be done to stop the killing. So colonial authorities appointed George Augustus Robinson, a builder and untrained preacher to mount a 'Friendly Mission' ....clink image for source and text...

—Truganini, part of the Prosopa series by Giannis “Gigas” Thomas
Truganini was a famous Tasmanian Aboriginal. She lived between 1812-1876. In her lifetime, she saw her people decimated by murder and disease but refused to be a passive victim. Her strength and determination persist today within the Palawah people who have lived in the region for over thirty thousand years.
In 1803, the first white settlers arrived in Tasmania, or Van Diemen’s Land as it was known then, and began clearing and farming the land. Over four thousand Aborigines lived in Tasmania too. Fighting began and continued for many years and hundreds of Aborigines and Europeans were killed.
It was during this turmoil that Truganini was born, around 1812, in the Brundy Island area of Tasmania. She was a vibrant and beautiful girl whose father was an elder of the south-east tribe. By the time Truganini was aged seventeen, her mother was murdered by whalers, her sister abducted and shot by sealers and her husband-to-be murdered by timber fellers. Truganini was raped.
By 1830, the fighting was so widespread it was known as the ‘Black War’ and something had to be done to stop the killing. So colonial authorities appointed George Augustus Robinson, a builder and untrained preacher to mount a ‘Friendly Mission’ ….clink image for source and text…

Once the aborigines were safely gone, the settlers looked back on the story with remorse, albeit of a romanticized nature, inflected with the vision of Rousseau’s noble savage, when in truth most were happy they were no longer killing off women and children that they had done so effectively. Truganini has been iconized; her wrinkled quizzical face glares back from old photographs, a coral necklace around her neck and her curly hair cut short- not at all seemingly embittered, by all she had seen of history, but perhaps a little puzzled.

---This photograph (below) is one of two large prints of Aboriginal Tasmanians held at the National Library of Australia, which are now on display in the Cooee! exhibition. The prints bear the imprint of Tasmanian photographer John Watt Beattie. The Archives Office of Tasmania also holds a copy of this photograph. AOT Reference:30/3645 Title: Tasmanian Aboriginals TRUCANNINI, LANNE, William, CLARKE, Bessy Clarke Date: ca 1868---Read More:http://pinnacletimes.wordpress.com/2007/06/

—This photograph (below) is one of two large prints of Aboriginal Tasmanians held at the National Library of Australia, which are now on display in the Cooee! exhibition.
The prints bear the imprint of Tasmanian photographer John Watt Beattie.
The Archives Office of Tasmania also holds a copy of this photograph.
AOT Reference:30/3645
Title: Tasmanian Aboriginals TRUCANNINI, LANNE, William, CLARKE, Bessy Clarke
Date: ca 1868—Read More:http://pinnacletimes.wordpress.com/2007/06/

ADDENDUM:


(see link at end)…In 1830, George Augustus Robinson, “Protector of Aborigines”, moved Truganini and her husband Woorrady to Flinders Island with about one hundred other surviving Tasmanian aborigines. The stated aim of isolation was to save the aborigines from the violence of the settlers and their diseases. However, many of the moved aborigines died soon from influenza and other diseases. Truganini helped Robinson with a settlement for mainland aborigines at Port Phillip (south of modern Melbourne) in 1838. Soon after she joined the aboriginal rebellion and was sent back to Flinders Island. In 1847, the 47 surviving Tasmanian aborigines on Flinders Island, including Truganini, were moved to a new aboriginal settlement at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart.

In 1873, when Truganini was the last living survivor of the Oyster Cove group, she was again moved to Hobart where she died three years later, having requested that her ashes be scattered in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel.

Although the colonial administration at the time stated that she was the last surviving full-blood Tasmanian aborigine, several other individuals are known to have out-lived Truganini and produced descendants. The most convincing “last full-blooded Tasmanian” is Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834-1905).

In complete disregard of her wishes, Trucanini was first buried at the former “Female Factory” in a suburb of Hobart


876. Within two years, her skeleton was exhumed by the Royal Society of Tasmania and put on display in the Hobart Museum but later put into storage.

Only in April 1976, approaching the centenary of her death, were her remains finally cremated and scattered according to her wishes. Read More:http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter52/text52.htm

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