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.
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.
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