Truganini – Journey through the apocalypse by
Cassandra Pybus. Allen & Unwin, 2020.
Reviewed by
Frank McKone
Maps by
Guy Holt
By permission of the publishers.
“Cassandra
Pybus is an award-winning author and a distinguished historian. She is
the author of twelve books and has held research professorships at the
University of Sydney, Georgetown University in Washington DC, the
University of Texas and Kings College, London. She is descended from
the colonist who received the largest free land grant on Truganini’s
traditional country of Bruny Island.” (Title Page)
 |
Tasmania: South-east Nation - Nuenonne Clan on Bruny Island
Map: Guy Holt |
“Staring
out over the mudflats [from near Oyster Cove] to the D’Entrecasteaux
Channel at what had once been my family’s land on North Bruny Island, my
emotions were in havoc…. I opened the gate [of the faded turquoise
cottage, where] my uncle Ken welcomed me as if I had never been away.
Over a cup of tea, he told me that the place was getting too much for
him, so I arranged to buy it from him, then and there.
"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." Page 268.
______________________________________________
Reading
between the time in 1828 when Richard Pybus was settled on his 500
acres land grant, when Truganini was probably about 16, to the time she
died on 4 May 1876, Cassandra Pybus’ story-telling gave me that feeling –
as if I had never been away. Knowing, too, that her research is
absolutely meticulous left me also with my emotions ‘in havoc’ as she
goes on to describe them – “nothing as intimate and corrosive as guilt,
just a powerful sense of complicity in the dispossession, destruction
and denial that this dismal place represented”.
Truganini – Journey through the apocalypse is essential reading for all Australians; indeed for all people the world over. I should start with my own experience.
My
English parents migrated to Australia in 1955, when I was 14. My
Geography text book had taught me, in one distant black and white photo,
that Australian Aborigines lived in a desert and wore almost no
clothes. Big city newspapers I read at Australia House in London
headlined murders seemingly every day. Dangerous? Well…my father had
taught me how to avoid the Teddy Boys in London, population 10 million -
equal to that of the whole of Australia at that time.
If
Aboriginal people appeared, they were cartoon characters who apparently
lived in deserts with few clothes on. In other words my understanding
on arrival was no different from that of James Cook on his third voyage,
except that he actually met the people at Adventure Bay, on the seaward
side of Bruny Island, 29 January 1777. Truganini’s father, Manganerer,
was there.
The Captain Cook Society website at
https://www.captaincooksociety.com/home/detail/225-years-ago-january-march-1777
records
that John Henry Martin, seaman on the Discovery, described the natives.
"They have few, or no wants, & seemed perfectly Happy, if one might
judge from their behaviour, for they frequently wou'd burst out, into
the most immoderate fits of Laughter & when one Laughed every one
followed his example Emediately."
But, as Pybus explains,
“Cook was unaware that these people believed they were meeting their
own dead returning as pale shadows of their former selves. Being
treated as some kind of kin, rather than as trespassing aliens, Cook and
his officers were not to witness the fierce territorial attachment of
the Nuenonne to their country.”
Of course, I immediately thought
of what happened in Hawaii only two years later, when Cook was killed on
14 February 1779. I think the brief mention at
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/the-death-of-captain-cook-misunderstanding-and-murder
by
Irene Wanner of the book by
Glyn Williams: “
The Death of Captain Cook: A Hero Made and Unmade” will lead you into that story of misunderstanding.
I
began to realise that I was going to learn far more than I thought I
knew already by reading on – about what happened to the daughter of the
man with childhood memories of Captain Cook. Usually, I write reviews
of live theatre, where I am responding to immediate experience. The
Convid-19 virus has put paid – or rather, unpaid – to that. Cassandra
Pybus may be a distinguished historian, but she is also a powerful
creative writer, adept at creating drama.
A paragraph chosen at random, 97 pages in:
Stopping
to rest about a quarter of a mile inland from the mouth of the
Boobyalla River, Truganini made an unsettling discovery. While
gathering swan’s eggs for Wooredy to eat, she became curious about a
deep indentation in the ground, and after digging further into the hole
she uncovered an old wooden chest that contained a jumble of human
bones. Days later, at the mouth of the Tomahawk River, she saw two
bleached male skeletons lying a few hundred yards apart that no one had
tried to hide. Awful though it was, Truganini had seem similar sights
before – the beaches and inlets of the north-east corner were
repositories of many human bones, invariably male and often shattered by
a musket ball.
This is not the stuff of romantic or ‘horror’
fiction. This is true history. The word that comes to mind for Pybus’
writing is
honesty.
This quality is especially
significant in her dealing with the extensive, thoroughly detailed
diaries, or log books, kept by the man officially credited by the
colonial government for the removal of the last Aboriginal people from
Tasmania – George Augustus Robinson. His first land grant was adjacent
to the Pybus grant in Nuenonne country.
The timeline provided in
the book after Truganini’s story has been told is an excellent reminder
of important dates and episodes. It begins in 1804 with the
establishment of the penal settlement on the Derwent River, later named
Hobart. By the time of Truganini’s likely birth in 1812 “the Nuenonne
clan was diminished and traumatised” and “no longer ‘without jealousy of
strangers’; they no longer saw the ghost men as their kin.”
It
is best, I found, to leave reading the timeline until after allowing the
experience of becoming immersed in the story to seep through beyond
your consciousness of historical detail to your emotional state in
response. This is why when reviewing a stage play, I prefer not to read
the program or interview the director or cast beforehand. It is the
immediacy of my thoughts and feelings that I need to express.
George
Augustus Robinson saw himself as a good man who wanted to save the
original people at first from themselves and then from the inevitable
ravages of the invading colonists. To “lift them from their state of
savage ignorance” required them to “put their trust in God, he told
them, and, by extension, in him, George Augustus Robinson: the good
father sent to save them from obliteration.” As in a good play, it is
not so much in the plot, but in the characters and their relationships
that the drama unfolds of the decade-long story of how Truganini played
her part from Robinson’s first noticing her in 1829, “impressed with
this young woman’s obvious intelligence and grasp of English”, to the
transporting of people from all the clans in Tasmania to Flinders Island
by 1835, and how Robinson’s attempt to move them finally to the
Australian mainland at Port Phillip (Melbourne) failed by 1841.
The final chapter is the denouement after that climactic point, simply titled
The Way the World Ends,
taking us through to the point where Truganini becomes famous as ‘the
last Tasmanian Aboriginal’. If you were taught, as I was, that this was
true, you will think again, about the cast of all the people in
Truganini’s life from her Nuenonne father Manganerer, of the South-east
Nation, through to all those others from the many clans within the
South-west, Oyster Bay, North Midland, North-east, Ben Lomond, North,
North-west and Big River Nations. Their individual biographies take up
an extra 30 pages of absorbing reading.
 |
Tasmania: Indigenous Nations' Boundaries
Map: Guy Holt |
“Driven
to distraction by rising hysteria” the farming ‘settlers’ attempted,
finally with official support authorised by Governor George Arthur by
proclaiming martial law in 1828 and the Black Line of 1830, to remove
the original owners by out-and-out murder. G A Robinson believed, with
the help of the Nuenonne clan, he could walk all around and across Van
Dieman’s Land and persuade personally everyone still living on country
to accept him as their saviour, accept his command, and go with him to
places of safety – which in the end would mean on an island off-shore
away from the temptation to return.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14443058.2012.760213?journalCode=rjau20
See
The Black Line in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), 1830 by
Lyndall Ryan to whom Cassandra Pybus has dedicated this book.
 |
Tasmania: Van Diemen's Land Locations
February - October 1830
Truganini and Dray led G A Robinson walking from Recherche Bay
to Port Davey, Bathurst Harbour, past Macquarie Harbour,
across the Pieman River and Arthur River
to Cape Grimm, then east to Launceston
600 miles
Map: Guy Holt |
My
migrating to Australia (Sydney and the Blue Mountains) introduced me to
bushwalking. This is very different from ‘rambling’ in England,
‘hiking’ in America or ‘tramping’ in New Zealand. It meant navigating
through ‘scrub’ often with no tracks (and certainly no National Park
signposts until quite recent times). My wife and I know what it means
to face the special features of Tasmanian bush: ‘horizontal scrub’,
seemingly impenetrable tangled vegetation, and mud so deep, thick and
clinging, just as Robinson describes, that I had great difficulty on one
occasion extracting my right shoe after extracting myself from such a
mudhole on the Overland Track.
Escaping convicts died from
starvation and exposure trying to cross Van Dieman’s Land from the Sarah
Island prison in Macquarie Harbour in the hopes of reaching Hobart –
except for Alexander Pearce:
Alexander Pearce (1790 – 19 July 1824)
was an Irish convict who was transported to the penal colony in Van
Diemen's Land (the modern day state of Tasmania), Australia for seven
years for theft. He escaped from prison several times. During one of
these escapes he allegedly became a cannibal, murdering his companions
one by one. In another escape, with one companion, he allegedly killed
him and ate him in pieces. He was eventually captured and was hanged and
dissected in Hobart for murder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pearce
This
episode not only shows how degenerated was the white society of Van
Diemen’s Land, but makes even more amazing the physique and cultural
adaptation of Truganini’s people who lived so successfully in this
seriously rugged landscape in such a climate 40+ degrees latitude
south. Truganini, a diver for abalone and shellfish of all kinds, and
swimmer of great strength, endurance and skill, saved Robinson twice
from certain drowning in the flooded Arthur River on the infamous West
Coast where the Roaring Forties hold sway all year round; while her
husband Wooredy could maintain their meat supply hunting kangaroos and
wallabies in areas which had been carefully managed by fire farming, as
Robinson noted – for thousands of years more than he could have
imagined.
The following photos show the nature of the country
Truganini and her friend Dray, a young woman from the Lowreenne clan of
the South-west Nation, led Robinson through to find people, such as the
Tarkiner clan of the North-west Nation. They met up on the banks of the
Arthur River. “The dominant man in the group was a very tall Tarkiner
warrior in his forties named Wyne….As evening fell, the whole group
walked back to a camp in the forest, with Robinson carrying Wyne’s
youngest daughter on his shoulders….A secret warning was conveyed to
Peevay [of Robinson’s group] that he should keep watch that night
because the Tarkiner intended to kill Robinson and any of his guides who
were not their kin, with the exception of Truganini, whom they wanted
to keep for themselves….”
This was one occasion when Truganini saved the desperate George Augustus Robinson’s life.
Photos: Meg McKone Feb (summer) 2019
Roaring Forties weather coming in, near Arthur River.
West Coast Hut Depression near Arthur River
Aboriginal huts - large beehive shaped structures composed of wood and bark that could accommodate between 6 -14 people.
The
unique beehive shape was specifically designed to withstand the harsh
weather conditions of Tasmania’s coastal environments, particularly
along the west coast where they are more commonly found.
https://www.aboriginalheritage.tas.gov.au/cultural-heritage/aboriginal-hut-depressions
Midden including abalone shells, behind Four Mile Beach south of Pieman River.
Dense rainforest inland near Montezuma Falls between Macquarie Harbour and Pieman River.
From
Friendly Mission 1829-1831, the story takes us on through
Extirpation and Exile 1831-1838, when everyone was believed to have been found and moved to Flinders Island in Bass Strait.
 |
| Map: Guy Holt |
The
situation at Wybalenna was simply dreadful, and so Robinson – in
competition with the infamous John Batman, who made entirely spurious
agreements with the Kulin people on the mainland to establish what
became Melbourne – won the day, and became Chief Protector of Aborigines
there with the intention of taking all the Van Dieman’s Land people
across Bass Strait. That story
In Kulin Country 1839-1841 reveals a new level of misunderstanding.
The
mainland was administered from Sydney, so bringing Van Diemen’s Land
people to Port Phillip was never going to be acceptable to the official
superintendent, Charles La Trobe. And, of course completely outside
Robinson’s understanding, the Tasmanian nations had had no connection
with the Australian mainland for some 10,000 years, since Bass Strait
was flooded after the last Ice Age ended. The idea that these people
would naturally get on with any Aboriginal people whose country they
were put into, just because they were all Aboriginals, was completely
out of touch. But Truganini with her diplomatic and language skills did
her best.
In Chapter 8, by 1839, “
Confronted with the
magnitude of the suffering in Port Phillip, the chief protector had no
idea what he was supposed to do for so many afflicted and desperate
people” – the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Wadawurrung, Djadjawurrung
and Taungurong clans of the Kulin Nation. When Robinson organised a
feast for more than five hundred, in the hopes of building trust as he
could personally distribute food, “
It fell to Truganini, Wooredy and
Peevay to dispel suspicions that the feast was a trap to get the clans
corralled together in one place where they could be shot. Eventually,
the offer of fresh meat was too enticing for the Kulin to stay away and
the feast went off without incident….”
But the tragic end of Chapter 9 is just too awful to contemplate.
When
considering the idea that Truganini was the last Tasmanian, though, the
story of one figure, Lacklay from the Punnilerpanner clan of the North
Nation, who spoke the same language as Peevay, may be of interest. He
apparently disappeared from Port Phillip, presumably drowned in a boat
that was wrecked – except that it did not capsize in Westernport Bay as
people then believed.
He possibly worked in the whaling
industry based in New Zealand, with an Oyster Bay Nation man known as
Ned Tomlins, who married a Maori woman (Hipora) and had a son (Edward).
Perhaps Lacklay’s story turned out like Ned’s: he was young and could
well have had a family of his own. And there are surely many others:
Wikipedia quotes “Contemporary figures (2016) for the number of people
of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent vary according to the criteria used to
determine this identity, ranging from 6,000 to over 23,000.”
Including lawyer, activist and currently chair of the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania, Michael Mansell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Mansell
The
final scene in Truganini’s life, at the end of Chapter 10, is told with
simple dignity and respect for this remarkable woman. Though we cannot
undo the past, surely we can improve the future.
Truganini – Journey through the apocalypse
is not a book to make immigrants like me feel guilty for the dreadful
treatment of our Aboriginal peoples that the colonisation of Australia
has caused.
I am angry, though, when, as Cassandra Pybus puts it in her
Afterword, “
From
all points in the southern sky, leaders of the First Nations of
Australia came together in 2017 to produce the Uluru Statement from the
Heart [and] they proposed a Makarrata, which is a word [from the far
northern Kakadu region – so distant from Truganini’s Nuenonne country on
Bruny Island in the far south] in the Yolgnu language meaning a coming
together after a struggle, facing the facts of wrongs done, and living
again in peace”; angry because the Australian Prime Minister of the day dismissed out of hand enshrining these people and
Makarrata
in our country’s Constitution – a law, by the way, passed on 5 July
1900 by the British Parliament, given Royal Assent by Queen Victoria on 9
July and proclaimed on 1 January 1901, which effectively ignored the
presence of the original owners of the land!
On our behalf,
Cassandra Pybus has faced the facts and the wrongs done, even alongside
her own family’s history since 1828. Surely now it is well past the
time, as the Uluru Statement asks, for
‘a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood’.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
