- Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse, by Cassandra Pybus. Allen & Unwin. $32.99.
It is a historical truism that before a society can exterminate its enemies or those it fears that society must first dehumanise the people to be deleted. We saw this so powerfully demonstrated in the Holocaust where the victims were first portrayed as mean, loathsome, degraded wretches with little of humanity or dignity about them. It was quite an easy step from this portrayal to the gas ovens.
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It is the outstanding achievement of Truganini that Cassandra Pybus rescues her cast of characters from the shadows of history and places them firmly and convincingly on the page as real people, with real emotions, real hopes and fears. They have the capacity to laugh and to love, to feel sorrow and hurt and to rejoice when life is going well.
Principally, the focus is on Truganini, just a girl when we first meet her, but a person of tremendous qualities and a joy in life that must be infectious for every reader who will meet her. She was a magnificent swimmer, while the men in Tasmanian society from time immemorial did not swim. To the women, then, fell the responsibility of harvesting the oysters, the abalone, the crayfish, the mussels that were so abundant in the sea around the island.
It is such a joy to read of Truganini's sureness in exercising this important responsibility. With a basket or two to hold her catch, with an ability to stay submerged for ages, she wades into the water wherever she finds herself and can feed all for whom shellfish was such an important part of their diet. Such freedom and such grace are remarkable and so joyous in what becomes such a dark and awful story.
But Truganini is just one of the original people we meet in this book. So many others become real people to the reader. The men, tall and graceful many of them, skilled in the various arts of singing, dancing, hunting and full of life and love and fears for their changing circumstances. We meet Truganini's close friend, Dray, with whom she shares so much, her husband, Wooredy, clansfolk, clevermen, children, mothers, a whole variety of real people.
George Augustus Robinson conceived of himself as the 'protector' of these people, and though he lived closely with them for years he never understood them as people. He was a fool, a pompous blowhard, who tragically had the ear of the governor, which enabled him to round all these people up to lead them to the promised land, ultimately Flinders Island, that is to their death.
A long section of the book deals with Robinson's task of rounding up the remaining people on the west coast of Tasmania. He eventually netted sixty-six people between January and June 1833: "within a year nearly all of them were dead". Robinson blamed the alcoholic doctor, the weather, the convicts.
Robinson failed to understand the first thing about the people who regarded themselves as his assistants and his friends. They believed that they had entered into a pact with him. He believed that if he succeeded in rounding up the remaining Tasmanians, to transport them to Flinders Island, he would receive a good job for his remaining days, a good wage, a secure pension and the esteem and thanks of the settlers from Bruny in the south to Cape Grim in the north. After lengthy sojourns in Paris and Rome, after his return 'home', esteemed and well-provided for, Robinson died in Bath, 10 years before Truganini's death.
Though Robinson saw the people with whom he worked hunting, singing, dancing, explaining their world with true sophistication, developing new understandings of the new world they had entered and knew them to be successful and intimately dependent on their own land, Robinson, thought of them as children. If you don't develop a visceral dislike of this prancing fool from the first pages of this book you will miss its powerful impact.
He was, writes Pybus, "amazed at how attached these people were to their children. He had come to the startling realisation that if their children were taken from them they would probably die of grief." Robinson explained this to himself in his journal, an entry he wrote just days before arranging for the daughter of one of his helpers, Towterer, to be dispatched to the Orphan School in Hobart. The young girl "never saw her parents again".
Thereafter, Truganini descends into horror and shame. We attend the first judicial execution conducted in Melbourne in December of 1842 - inevitably botched - of two fine young men who had worked with Robinson in Tasmania. "Truganini's intimate companion for 12 devastating years, [Wooredy} during which time they had shared an agonising accretion of unspeakable loss", dies and his wife is even denied her responsibility of cremating his body.
Truganini continues, even returning to the sea she loved so well around Bruny island. With her intimate companion Dray, she returns to Bruny whenever she can to slough off the clothing she must wear and to walk naked again on the land she knew so well. Dray died in 1861, probably at around 75 years of age and Truganini lived on to die, almost alone, in 1876. "Me going back to my people," she said, simply, to the woman who cared for her.
This important book is beautifully written, well-paced and absolutely gripping. It deserves a wide readership for, truly, Truganini is 'a hugely important figure in Australian history.'
- Michael McKernan is a Canberra-based historian.