How Truganini became an outlaw on the run in Victoria after husband shot and killed two men
Truganini has often been called the last Aboriginal Tasmanian, but a new book details her little-known life on the run as an outlaw in Victoria after her husband shot and killed two men.
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Truganini is remembered best for the erroneous claim that she was the last Aboriginal Tasmanian.
But it’s her extraordinary life – and not the mere fact of her death – that we should remember, according to historian and author Cassandra Pybus.
While her connection to Tasmania is well-known, far less is known about her time in Melbourne and life on the run as an outlaw after her husband shot and killed two men.
Truganini, who lived well into her 60s, is the subject of the latest episode of the free In Black and White podcast on some of Australia’s forgotten characters, available today.
In her new book, Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse, Pybus paints the Nuenonne woman as a feisty, intelligent and sensual woman, in contrast to her usual portrayal.
Pybus describes Truganini as an “astonishing survivor”.
“She lived through an apocalypse that was so complete and tremendous that it’s almost beyond our capacity to imagine,” she says.
“These are a people who have lived for maybe 60,000, maybe only 40,000 years … and suddenly these other people arrive in these kind of strange crafts and their life in a very short time is just traumatised and then extinguished.
“And this happens basically within the frame of her life. It begins when she’s a baby and it finishes when she dies.”
Truganini witnessed the murder of her mother by fur seal hunters in a snatch-and-grab raid gone wrong. Her sisters were abducted in another snatch and grab, and sold to other sealers.
Then Truganini spent five years travelling around Tasmania with evangelical Christian missionary George Augustus Robinson, who rounded up the last Aboriginal survivors before sending them into exile on Flinders Island.
Later, Truganini travelled with Robinson to the fledgling settlement of Melbourne, living in a camp directly across the Yarra from controversial founding father John Batman’s house.
But she ran away to the Western Port area with a group of four other Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
Two of them – Truganini’s husband, Maulboyheener, and Tunnerminerwait – shot and killed two whalers, who they wrongly believed had killed their friend, in a payback murder gone wrong.
Authorities caught up with the group after weeks on the run and the two men responsible for the killings became the first people executed in Victoria.
The public hanging outside the Old Melbourne Gaol drew a festive crowd of several thousand.
Pybus says the two men have been commemorated in recent years in Melbourne as “revolutionary heroes” and “resistance fighters”, but her research shows that to be far from the truth.
“The whole thing is a tragic, tragic story, but it has got nothing to do with trying to stir up some kind of resistance against the colonial overlord,” Pybus says.
Pybus has a deeply personal connection to Truganini’s story.
The author’s great-great-grandfather, Richard Pybus, was an Englishman enticed out to Van Diemen’s Land in 1829 with a huge free “great big whack of land” on Bruny Island, where Truganini and her family lived.
“I see my life hangs on hers,” says Pybus says, who lives in Tasmania at Lower Snug, not far from where Truganini lived for a time.
“When I found out about my strong family connection to her clan, the fact that we are the biggest beneficiaries of the extinguishment of her clan by being given this huge land grant in their country, I had to realise that I had an obligation to understand and pay tribute to the lives that were extinguished to make way for me.
“And none more so than hers, because she lives for a long time, and luckily for part of that time she was very well documented, so I’m able to find her, which is not something that’s easy to do about indigenous people in the 19th century.”
Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse (Allen & Unwin, RRP $32.99) is on sale now in bookshops.
Play the free In Black and White podcast on Australia’s forgotten characters on iTunes here or Spotify here or on your favourite platform.
Listen to previous episodes including the tale of Australia’s lost convict boys, the link between the Ashes urn and Ned Kelly armour, and the story of why the Freddo frog almost didn’t exist.
And check out In Black & White in the Herald Sun newspaper Monday to Friday to see more stories from Victoria’s past.
inblackandwhite@heraldsun.com.au
Originally published as How Truganini became an outlaw on the run in Victoria after husband shot and killed two men
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