Cirrus@Austlit

'Author of the bestselling Truganini, Cassandra Pybus has uncovered one of the darkest and best kept secrets in Australian colonial history.

'In the nineteenth century, collectors and museum curators in Europe were fascinated by the antipodean colony of Tasmania. They cultivated contacts in the colony who could supply them with exotic specimens, including skeletons of the thylacine and the platypus. But they were not just interested in animals and plants. The belief that the original people of the colony were an utterly unique race and facing possible extinction had the European scientific community scrambling for human exhibits.

'Many eminent colonial figures were involved in this clandestine trade, among them four colonial governors, several key politicians and even Lady Jane Franklin. In Britain, Sir Joseph Banks, the Duke of Newcastle and Professor Thomas Huxley were among many eminent men who solicited human specimens from the colony. Worse still, the men responsible for the care and protection of the few original people who had survived the ravages of disease and the infamous Black Wars were prominent in the trade.

'Cassandra Pybus has uncovered one of the darkest and most carefully hidden secrets in Australia's colonial history. It is time we all knew the truth.' (Publication summary)

'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.

'When I was in my middle thirties, I abruptly abandoned a long-term relationship and impulsively moved from Sydney to Melbourne, having accepted a job as a senior policy advisor on affirmative action for which I was manifestly unfit.'  (Publication abstract)

'The island of Tasmania lies suspended beneath Australia like a heart-shaped pendant of sapphire, emerald and tourmaline. Here is where the world runs out, crumbling into the vast expanse of the Southern Ocean.'  (Introduction)

Editor's note: In this extract from her manuscript Lessons in Landscape, former Island editor Cassandra Pybus walks in the steps of the forebears of her fifth-generation Tasmanian family through the land of Truganini.'

'Alf Conlon (1908–61) was a visionary. He would not have known it, but his ideology had similarities with the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Conlon had a belief that the ideas that shape society come from a fairly small elite united by shared intellectual premises, and he sought to use the chaos of the war to establish a new kind of elite in Australia. What Gramsci termed ‘organic intellectuals’ Conlon thought of as his intellectual underground. When the war had begun to pose a direct threat to Australia, he could see that the fallout was going to destroy the credibility of the existing elites and undermine the derived power of the conventional establishment. He recognised the possibility of using the chaos to build a new power group with progressive ideas, organic to Australian society and based on intellect. No Marxist, Conlon insisted his ‘New Men’ would be a classless elite, yet those he had in mind were lower-middle-class boys like himself who had come to university through the selective State school system. The poet James McAuley was typical of Conlon’s incipient elite: brainy, ambitious, contemptuous and, most importantly, a product of Conlon’s alma mater, Fort Street Boys High, Sydney, as were Hal Stewart, Ian Hogbin, Jim Plimsoll and a brilliant law graduate named John Kerr.' (Introduction)