'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.
'Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness records to write an extraordinary account of this lively, intelligent, sensual young woman’s life. Both inspiring and heart-wrenching, Truganini's story is now told in full for the first time.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Part 1: Friendly Mission 1829-1831
Part 2: Extirpation and Exile 1831-1838
Part 3: In Kulin Country 1839-1841
Part 4: The Way the World Ends 1842-1876
Afterword
Timeline
Biographies
Naming
Sources
Acknowledgements
Epigraph:
Country
You see it
You are going to the country
Go away to it.
-Song of the captive woman in the Bass Strait islands, 1830, transcribed by George Augustus Robinson
'Cassandra Pybus’ biography is a beautifully written attempt to rescue Truganini from the enormous condescension of colonial posterity. Truganini’s life was defined by the tragedy that engulfed her people, but Pybus attempts to restore her agency, rethink the choices that she made and glimpse the world as she might have seen it. For Pybus this exercise is a ‘moral necessity’ because of her own position as a direct beneficiary of the displacement and destruction of Truganini and her community. As she writes, hauntingly, ‘these are people whose lives were extinguished to make way for mine’ (xvii).' (Introduction)
(Introduction)
'When I first encountered the name ‘Truganini’ as a young student of Australian race relations in the 1960s, she was to me, as Cassandra Pybus’s Preface infers, ‘an international icon for extinction’ (xvii). Into the 1970s, she had merely a post-mortem presence in my consciousness. I knew of her by what I then believed was her portentous absence: the supposed ‘last tragic victim of an inexorable historical process’ (xvii), before Lyndall Ryan’s monumental pioneering work of 1981 corrected that mesmerising interpretive slippage in my brain (The Aboriginal Tasmanians).' (Introduction)
'Cassandra Pybus places Truganini centre stage in Tasmania’s history, restoring the truth of what happened to her and her people.'
Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse by Cassandra Pybus
2020
19052493
2020
single work
review
'Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse follows the life of the strong Nuenonne woman who lived through the dramatic upheavals of invasion and dispossession and became known around the world as the so-called ‘last Tasmanian’. But the figure at the heart of this book is George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary and chronicler who was charged with ‘conciliating’ with the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples. It is primarily through his journals that historians are able to glimpse and piece together the world fractured by European arrival.' (Introduction)
'White historian Cassandra Pybus has drawn on her direct links to Truganini, the symbol of indigenous extinction, to make a personal contribution to our conversation about colonial times, writes Lucy Sussex'
'Cassandra Pybus places Truganini centre stage in Tasmania’s history, restoring the truth of what happened to her and her people.'
