Character Catalog

Truganini was the indispensable guide, interpreter, and diplomat for Robinson during five expeditions across Tasmania. Her knowledge of languages and clans made it possible to locate and contact the last surviving groups, making her a central — and tragically ambiguous — figure in this chapter of colonial history.

At Wybalenna and Oyster Cove, Truganini was one of the last custodians of the languages, songs, techniques, and stories of the Palawa people. She passed on what she could to the few remaining survivors and to the observers who listened to her, becoming an irreplaceable source for 19th-century ethnography.

Truganini's entire life was an act of resistance against erasure: physical resistance during the conflicts of the 1820s, cultural resistance at Wybalenna, and symbolic resistance in refusing to be reduced to the passive role of 'last survivor' that others sought to impose on her.

After her death, Truganini became an international figure in the condemnation of genocidal colonialism, cited by civil rights movements, Indigenous organizations, and international bodies as a paradigmatic example of the destruction wrought by European colonial expansion.

The scandal of her skeleton being put on public display — finally withdrawn from the museum in 1947 after decades of protest — fueled a worldwide movement for the repatriation of Indigenous human remains held in European and Australian museums, ultimately leading to her cremation in 1976.

Truganini… she is a most determined and resolute woman, and has rendered me more essential service than any other native. Without her assistance I should not have been able to accomplish what I have done.

Trucanini, or Lallah Rookh as she was sometimes called, was the last of her race to survive in the island. She died May 8, 1876, in Hobart Town, aged about 73 years. She was a woman of considerable intelligence and great personal courage.

We are dying. No more of us will be left. We were promised to be taken care of… We have been good and obedient. Why are we made to suffer?

The last of the Tasmanian aborigines died yesterday. Truganini, whose age was estimated at about seventy, breathed her last at five o'clock in the morning. She was the sole survivor of a race that once inhabited this island.

Truganini's birthplace and ancestral territory of the Nuenonne clan. It was here that she spent her childhood and where her family was decimated by the violence of early settlers and seal hunters in the 1820s.

The settlement where the last 135 Tasmanian Aboriginals were deported from 1834 onwards. Truganini lived there for over ten years, powerlessly witnessing the gradual death of her community in this forced isolation.

The station to which the 47 survivors of Wybalenna were transferred in 1847. Conditions there were wretched — unsanitary housing, alcohol, lack of medical care — and Truganini watched the last members of her people die one by one.

Truganini spent the last years of her life in Hobart, under the watch of colonial authorities. She died there on 8 May 1876 and was buried there, before her skeleton was exhumed and displayed at the Tasmanian Museum for decades.

The stretch of water separating Bruny Island from the Tasmanian mainland, the ancestral maritime territory of the Nuenonne. It was here that Truganini's ashes were scattered in 1976, in accordance with her last wishes, one hundred years after her death.