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'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.
Notes
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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 -
Dedication: For Lyndall Ryan
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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
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Other Formats
- Large print.
- Sound recording.
Works about this Work
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[Review] Truganini : Journey Through the Apocalypse
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Historical Studies , vol. 53 no. 4 2022; (p. 649-650)
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography'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)
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Interest and Truth in History : A Review of Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse by Cassandra Pybus
2022
single work
review
essay
— Appears in: Aboriginal History Journal , April no. 45 2022;
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography 'The last glimpses of Tasmanian Aborigines born before or around the time of the British invasion of Tasmania were recorded just 10 years after the introduction of photography to the island in 1846.1 Among the earliest and best known of these photographs were those taken at Oyster Cove by Tasmania’s first bishop, Francis Russell Nixon, and displayed at the London International Exhibition in 1862. More intimate studio portraits were made by locally born photographer Charles Alfred Woolley in 1866. Woolley’s images were highly successful and used to illustrate the earliest international publications on Tasmanian Aborigines by Enrico Giglioli and James Bonwick.2 A consistent presence across these portfolios is the face of a woman who has become emblematic not just of an entire people, but of our survival of an attempted genocide and ongoing need to liberate our story from the legacies of an oppressive colonial narrative.'(Introduction)
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Cassandra Pybus Explores the History of ‘terror, Blood and Tears’ on the Frontiers of Colonial Tasmania in This Captivating Biography
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: History Australia , vol. 19 no. 1 2022; (p. 186-188)
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography'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)
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Jennifer Bird Review of Cassandra Pybus, Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , August no. 5 2021; (p. 239-243)
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography 'My 18-year-old daughter, on seeing Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini lying on my bedside table, immediately picked it up and stroked its cover sighing, ‘what a beautiful book’. Indeed, it is. Inside and out. The cover photograph of Peter Dombrovskis’s ‘Giant kelp’ taken at Hasselborough Bay, Macquarie Island, Tasmania, gives an emotive, textural feeling to a beautifully written book.' (Introduction) -
Cassandra Pybus : Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , May 2021;
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography'Cassandra Pybus places Truganini centre stage in Tasmania’s history, restoring the truth of what happened to her and her people.'
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y
Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse by Cassandra Pybus
2020
19052493
2020
single work
review
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography'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)
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On Her Own Terms
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 28 March 2020; (p. 14)
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography'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'
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Truganini by Cassandra Pybus
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: Jessie Street National Women's Library Newsletter , February vol. 32 no. 1 2021; (p. 5-6)
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography 'For many years, Truganini was described erroneously as ‘the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigine’. A figure of sadness and nostalgia akin to the last Tasmanian tiger, few Australians understood her reality or grasped what her death in 1876 really represented. Historian Cassandra Pybus, in the preface to her compelling new biography: Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse, published in 2020, says ‘a lot of what is said or written about her is myth and fabrication.’ Pybus sets out to correct these untruths using extensive documentation including eyewitness accounts, personal letters and official correspondence. She aims to bring Truganini back to life by recreating her as ‘a lively, intelligent and sensual woman.’' (Introduction) -
Cassandra Pybus : Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: The Newtown Review of Books , May 2021;
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography'Cassandra Pybus places Truganini centre stage in Tasmania’s history, restoring the truth of what happened to her and her people.'
-
Jennifer Bird Review of Cassandra Pybus, Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , August no. 5 2021; (p. 239-243)
— Review of Truganini : Journey through the Apocalypse 2020 single work biography 'My 18-year-old daughter, on seeing Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini lying on my bedside table, immediately picked it up and stroked its cover sighing, ‘what a beautiful book’. Indeed, it is. Inside and out. The cover photograph of Peter Dombrovskis’s ‘Giant kelp’ taken at Hasselborough Bay, Macquarie Island, Tasmania, gives an emotive, textural feeling to a beautifully written book.' (Introduction) -
Kate Grenville, Sofie Laguna, Julia Baird and Others : The 20 Best Australian Books of 2020
2020
single work
column
— Appears in: The Guardian Australia , 17 December 2020;
Awards
- 2022 shortlisted Dick and Joan Green Family Award for Tasmanian History
- 2022 shortlisted ASAL Awards — The Australian Historical Association Awards — Magarey Medal for Biography
- 2021 shortlisted Prime Minister's Literary Awards — Non-Fiction
- 2021 winner National Biography Award
- 2021 shortlisted Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) — Australian Biography of the Year
- Tasmania,
- 1850s
- 1860s