Description

Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse

Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse is the haunting story of the extraordinary Aboriginal woman behind the myth of ‘the last Tasmanian.’

Cassandra Pybus’ ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, just off the coast of south-east Tasmania, throughout the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn’t know this woman was
Truganini, and that she was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne, of whom she was the last.

The name of Truganini is vaguely familiar to most Australians as ‘the last of her race’. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy: the extinction of the original people of Tasmania within her lifetime. For nearly seven decades, she lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than most human imaginations could conjure.

She is a hugely significant figure in Australian history and we should know about how she lived, not simply that she died. Her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy.