CASSANDRA PYBUS Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse. Reviewed by Suzanne Marks

Cassandra Pybus places Truganini centre stage in Tasmania’s history, restoring the truth of what happened to her and her people.

The subtitle Cassandra Pybus has chosen is a powerful pointer to how she sees Truganini:  not as the ‘last of the Tasmanian Aborigines’ of popular myth, but as a strong Nuenonne woman, a proud member of one of the clans of First Nation Tasmanians. Through her detailed research, Pybus establishes the truth of Truganini as the extraordinary woman she was:

Her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy. For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than most human imaginations could conjure; she is a hugely significant figure in Australian history.

In unfolding her story, she puts paid to Truganini as the last Tasmanian Aborigine, doomed to extinction by the misfortune of belonging to a primitive race left behind in the great story of human evolutionary advancement. Pybus contends that this story was never anything more than a justification for the brutal genocide and dispossession perpetrated by colonial and subsequent governments against Truganini and her people.

Using extensive documentation, including eyewitness accounts, artworks, personal letters and official correspondence, Pybus challenges and ultimately dispels white Australia’s amnesia regarding its genocidal past by bringing Truganini back to life and restoring her as a ‘lively, intelligent and sensual woman’.

Hardly more than a child when driven from her traditional community and land, Truganini managed to survive the devastation of the 1820s, when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but destroyed. For five years she journeyed around Tasmania, crossing rugged highlands and barely penetrable forests with George Augustus Robinson, self-styled missionary and preeminent expert on the control and management of the original inhabitants. As such he was tasked by the Tasmanian Governor, after the failure of the ridiculous ‘black line’, intended to contain Aboriginal people behind an arbitrary line on a map, to do a final sweep through the island to round up Aboriginal survivors and send them into exile on Flinders Island.

Pybus owes much of her material to Robinson’s diaries, in which he recorded his close observations of Truganini and her companions rather as one would observe bugs under a microscope. His entries reveal him as a man focussed on his own advancement in wealth, reputation and social standing. There is little evidence that he ever genuinely cared about his Aboriginal charges or acted in their best interests. On the contrary, at no time in Pybus’s account do we see Robinson demonstrating real compassion for the depth of physical, emotional and psychological trauma his charges were suffering. He deals with their discontent when caught breaking promises by lying. He never deviates from his egocentric belief in his own moral and racial superiority and the consequent inferiority of Truganini and her people, nor from doing the bidding of his colonial superiors by removing the last of the Indigenous Tasmanians from the mainland. His central motivations are converting them to his puritanical brand of Christianity and financial reward. In this he was, according to his own lights, serving both God and Mammon.

In Pybus’s hands, Truganini emerges as physically and spiritually complete, highly knowledgeable of her natural world and how to survive in it. She remains stalwart in her rejection of Christianity, despite Robinson’s efforts to convert her.

She was highly skilled in traditional hunting techniques. Of Truganini’s possum trapping, Pybus writes:

She deftly wove a rope from the long wiry grass and hooked it around the trunk of a tree to pull herself up, cutting notches in the bark for her feet as she ascended. Once in the canopy, she would grab at the possum to knock it to the ground.

We learn that she is a fantastic swimmer who loved diving for crayfish, and even on one occasion encountered a shark. We see a woman who loved children, and was a mutually desirous lover who exercised sexual agency with her husband Wooredy when she could. She was an artful and skilled negotiator with Robinson, fully aware of the part he was playing in the destruction of her people.

Pybus’s story differs from other historians’ accounts in that it brings a female perspective to white colonisation. She addresses the sexual violence perpetrated against Tasmanian Aboriginal women by white colonists, and in particular she exposes how Robinson overlooked abductions carried out by sealers and whalers. Raiding parties attacked Aboriginal communities, murdering the men and abducting the women and young girls, who they beat and raped into submission, exploiting them as slave labour in their sealing and whaling industries. Many became infected with venereal disease –  previously unknown in their communities – condemning them to debilitating health as the disease progressed, and bearing children born with foetal syphilis. (Shamefully this is still suffered in some Aboriginal communities in Australia today.)

There is poignancy for Pybus in writing this story because of its connection to her own life. She herself is a beneficiary of Truganini’s dispossession. In 1829, newly arrived with his family, her great-great-grandfather Richard Pybus was:

… handed a massive swathe of North Bruny Island … even while Truganini and her family were still living there … For no payment whatsoever, he received well over 2000 hectares of Nuenonne hunting grounds, while the original owners of the island, of whom Truganini was the last, were paid with anguish and exile.

The story passed down to Pybus through her family told of an old Aboriginal woman who roamed across their farm in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Pybus did not know this woman was Truganini, or that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, known to the Nuenonne as Lunawanna.

In her closing pages, Pybus acknowledges what she and her ancestors owe Truganini:

For the past thirty-four years the place I call home has been that cottage on the old station road in the country of the Nuenonne. I lead a charmed life in this paradise of hills and water, and barely a day goes by that I don’t reflect on what has been extinguished in order for me to experience such grace … The expropriation of a generous people, and the devastating frontier war and dispersal that followed, is Australia’s true foundation story, not the voyage of Captain Cook or the arrival of the First Fleet.

In restoring the truth of Truganini and her people, Pybus has made an important contribution to acknowledging what is owed to the people who possessed this country for 60,000 years, and never ceded their sovereignty to the Crown or the Commonwealth of Australia.

Cassandra Pybus Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse Allen and Unwin 2020 PB 336pp $32.99

Suzanne Marks is a member of the Board of the Jessie Street National Women’s Library and the Sydney University Chancellor’s Committee. Her professional life has been in equity, human rights, teaching and conflict resolution.

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Tags: Australian history, Cassandra | Pybus, colonisation, George Augustus Robinson, Indigenous history, Lunawanna, Nuenonne people, Truganini, Wooredy