Interest and truth in history: A review of Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse by Cassandra Pybus

336 pp., Allen & Unwin, 2020,

ISBN: 9781760529222 (pbk), $32.99

Greg Lehman

University of Tasmania

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.

Woolley’s portraits of Trukanini³ cemented her in the public imagination as the ‘last of her race’, a caption regularly added to reproductions of her image on popular cartes de visite and later postcards, and persistently quoted in historical literature. This established a powerful narrative of extinction that persists today, despite the continued cultural presence of the descendants of her people.

Woolley’s portrait of Trukanini also repeatedly surfaced in scientific texts, conscripting her as a Darwinian archetype of the ‘missing link’ between the most highly evolved (supposedly European) examples of hominids and antecedent apes. In this way, the image of a single Tasmanian Aboriginal woman came to signify a racist rationale for colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous people from their land. At the same time, these images corroborated the consequences for us of contact with exploitative, globalised processes that continue to impact on First Nations across the world today.

The proliferation of images of Trukanini across colonial and scientific historical literature attached a trope of vulnerability to her life; something that continues into the twenty-first century as her visage reappears on posters, T-shirts and banners supporting political campaigns for Aboriginal rights in Tasmania. Demands for justice and the restitution of Aboriginal sovereign rights are defiantly amplified by the undeniably human face of victimhood. But such visual representation does little justice to the life of this extraordinary woman. Deployed in this way as an icon of oppression and genocide, Trukanini is silenced, and the complex story of her agency across the tumultuous events that played out in the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land and the District of Port Phillip during her lifetime is unrecognised.

It is against such a backdrop of contested power and representation that the importance of Cassandra Pybus’s biography of Trukanini is most apparent. Pybus’s Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse does arguably more than any previous work to elucidate this barely understood, but essentially important, figure in Australian Aboriginal history. As Lyndall Ryan pointed out in her 1997 Eldershaw Memorial Lecture:

Trukanini has been the subject of more than fifty poems, a number of novels and plays, several histories and biographies, at least fifty paintings and photographs and nearly fifty scientific articles.⁴

Undaunted by this apparent diversity of representation, Pybus sees her subject as having been enslaved to a derivative, imperial narrative made available ‘through the gaze of pompous, partisan, acquisitive, self-aggrandising men’ (p. xiv). She sets herself the challenge of liberating not only Trukanini, but all Tasmanian Aboriginal people of the time ‘from entrapment in a paternalistic and self-serving account of the colonial past’ (p. xix).

The figure of Trukanini is not without precedent in the West’s history of colonial endeavour. The tantalising trope of native beauty, seductive to the expeditionary gaze of the European male, was already familiar when Van Diemen’s Land was proclaimed. Two hundred years before, the British establishment was bemused by the Powhatan woman Pocahontas when she was presented to King James I at Whitehall in 1617. The Virginia Company enthusiastically painted her as a princess to cement allegiances and peace in a north American colony that had endured years of war with her Powhatan nation. Tales of her intervention to save the life of enterprising explorer and writer John Smith mythologised Pocahontas’s life, weaving it into the Virginian (and American) colonial foundation narrative as an enduring presence, most famously popularised by the eponymous 1995 Disney film.

The figure of Trukanini played easily to the same Elizabethan nation-building sentiments that so successfully celebrated Pocahontas; translating effortlessly to serve the subsequent interests of Queen Victoria in a more remote southern outpost of the British empire. Born a decade after the arrival of the British in her homeland, Trukanini, like Pocahontas, was celebrated for her youthful beauty and wily character. Most notably, Trukanini was also looked upon favourably by colonial authorities for the assistance she was seen as rendering to the governor’s campaign to remove the survivors of the colony’s Black War against fiercely resistant Palawa Nations.

The popular story of Pocahontas began with John Smith’s A True Relation of Virginia (1608). Similarly, we owe most of what we know about Trukanini to an opportunistic English builder-turned-missionary. George Augustus Robinson left voluminous hand-written journals as testament to his labours under the commission of Governor George Arthur to rid the island of its traditional owners. These journals, edited and published in 1966 by Brian Plomley, spanned 13 years of Trukanini’s life, making her what Pybus calls ‘the most documented First Nations actor in colonial Australia’ (pp. xvii–xviii).⁵ In the latter part of her life, Trukanini was embraced by newspapers as a curious local figure known for her congenial and compliant manner. But this Palawa woman is remembered most for her fame as the ‘last of her race’; lamenting what was felt as the ‘necessity’ to exterminate the entirety of her people. While no feature film has yet been made to further mythologise Trukanini’s story, the popular success of Pybus’s biography hints at future possibility.

Pybus is careful to explain in her preface why the account she offers of this life is far more worthy than the records of pompous colonial men such as Robinson. First, there is an intimate connection between her own colonial patriarch Richard Pybus and Robinson himself. This is evidenced, she explains, by an inscription in a book of essays gifted by Robinson to Mr Pybus who, like Robinson, was granted extensive tracts of land on Bruny Island. It was grants such as these that displaced Trukanini and her family from their ancestral homelands. Cassandra Pybus laments this terrible legacy, but explains how it also binds her to this story. ‘I owe Truganini and her kin my charmed existence in the temperate paradise where my family have lived for generations’ (p. xvi). In this way, Pybus’s book comes from a place of insight. It serves as an intimate gesture of atonement for both the author and her postcolonial readers. However, this is not her first foray into such territory. Pybus’s earlier volume, Community of Thieves, threads Richard Pybus’s good fortune and pioneering success into a wide-ranging account of the dispossession of Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

Community of Thieves, wrote Pybus in the preface to her 1991 volume, ‘is not a work of history so much as a personal meditation on history; an attempt to unearth the meaning the historical record has for me, personally’.⁶ This approach, which she admits to being ‘subjective and partisan’,⁷ is clearly apparent in the absence of any footnotes, referencing or index that might be expected from a former professorial fellow of history at the University of Sydney. A selected bibliography is supplied as a tantalising hint at the archival substance of her text, but the author denies her readers the usual opportunities to interrogate her work. The same approach is used in Truganini. There is a generalised list of source material, but insufficient detail to ease further inquiry.

In this way, Pybus makes the story of Truganini her own. To expect a conventional history, of the sort created by authors such as Lyndall Ryan or Henry Reynolds, is to misunderstand Cassandra Pybus. Her approach to academic discourse rendered her a far slipperier target than her more orthodox peers during Australia’s history wars in the 1990s. There was no opportunity here to trip the author up on errors of citation, or inconsistent interpretation across disparate source contexts, as Keith Windschuttle did with Reynolds and Ryan in his well-known campaign against what he considered to be partisan historians. The only criticism of Pybus that Windschuttle could muster was an offhand implication that her work was ‘moralistic’.⁸

Pybus does not sit neatly among the ranks of ordinary white historians who sift through the messy intrigue of Tasmanian colonial history in their search for better appreciation of the motives and consequences of those who perpetrated and those who resisted this genocidal invasion. Nicholas Clements perhaps comes closest to Pybus in his personal entanglement with the topic. In the foreword to The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (2014), his mentor Henry Reynolds points to Clements’s family history of eight generations in Tasmania, originating with ancestors ‘who lived through and participated in the conflict of the 1820s’.⁹ Clements draws on this personal context as an inspiration for his method of resolving the moral relativities of invasion and resistance by setting out to ‘write two histories in parallel’.¹⁰ The implication here is that Clements can identify with something of the legacy of the colonial settler who must choose between killing or being killed. This does not, however, explain his ability to speak for the Tasmanian Aboriginal people who were hunted down with what he, quoting John West, calls ‘malicious vigour’.¹¹ Can the ability to remotely identify with the perpetrator somehow infer an empathy for the victim? This is disturbing and fraught territory.

Truganini is a book written not only with empathy but also a proprietorial command of the subject matter. It is difficult to think of another Australian historian who could pull this off so successfully. Most non-Indigenous scholars these days retreat from claiming bold acquaintance with an Aboriginal lifeworld for fear of accusations of appropriation or professional exploitation. Rather, Pybus has crafted a compellingly intimate and unashamedly familiar relationship with her subject. While she states that ‘there is no way I can truly know what (Truganini) thought or how she felt’, Pybus nevertheless wants to ‘redirect the lens to find the woman behind the myth’ (p. xix). This is a search for self that pursues an intimate engagement with an unknowable historical figure; a search that also gives the author a place in history. ‘Truganini’, writes Pybus, ‘compels my own attention and emotional engagement because her story is fundamental to my life story’ (p. xvi).

Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse is the latest, and perhaps final gesture in an epic historical journey begun more than 30 years ago. This is a project as much about the author as it is about Trukanini. And it is perhaps this nexus, more than the scholarly quest that it also entails, that underpins the accolades Truganini is now enjoying. Pybus embraces a historical character and her life with passion and intimacy. Rather than standing back to demonstrate academic objectivity, she steps forward to prove that contemporary Australians can embrace the tragedy of Aboriginal history as essential and necessary to understanding their own place in postcolonial Australia.

In August 2021, Pybus received the National Biography Award, from a shortlist that included acclaimed Aboriginal songwriter and performer Archie Roach’s own memoir Tell Me Why? Commentators who feel vexed that an Aboriginal biography written by a white author is being celebrated ahead of the work of a much-loved artist like Roach might pause to consider. That a best-selling book seeks to find personal meaning in a colonial narrative that has been a primary instrument for silencing Tasmanian Aboriginal voices on our own history, and indeed denying our continued existence, is undeniably extraordinary. This points to the multifaceted challenge faced by contemporary Australians with a desire for unencumbered engagement with our fraught colonial history.

Woolley’s studies offer a tantalising glimpse of the personality, the experience, the life of Trukanini; captured in an enduring, enigmatic gaze from the surface of a photographic print. In discussing the ‘extreme popularity of the portrait’ in his influential 1869 essay Pictorial Effect in Photography, Henry Peach Robinson remarked:

photography has only developed and encouraged a desire for representations of those we love, honour, or admire, by giving us the means of producing portraits, not only within the reach of the humblest purse, for their cheapness, but that we can believe in for their truth.¹²

The prospect of truth in photographic portraiture is likely to explain the enthusiasm with which the customers of Hobart photographic studios purchased images of Aborigines like Woolley’s Trukanini. The success of Pybus’s book points to the persistence of this desire for truth to the present day.

Australians are still touched by the events of the early nineteenth century. They are reminded of their relevance every day by continuing deaths in custody and persistent calls for treaties. And they are frustrated by the abstraction of Reconciliation to the lived reality of injustice and dispossession that remain existential facts of Aboriginal life in Australia 250 years on from the beginnings of British invasion. The sort of truth Pybus offers in this book evokes that promised by the gaze returned from Woolley’s portrait. Her aspiration to ‘find the woman behind the myth’ may be unavoidably compromised by her reliance on the Robinson source material. But it is deeply nuanced by a unique personal relationship with her subject.

Ultimately, the tragedy of Trukanini is compounded, rather than relieved, by Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini. Despite the author’s marathon passion and dedication to the task of searching for the essence of this enigmatic figure, Trukanini still seems irrevocably condemned to remoteness by the limitations of the colonial record, the passing of centuries, and popular mythology attached to her life. Is there anything more to be extracted from the archive that might bring us closer to knowing this woman? Probably not.

Ironically, it may be Disney’s legacy that offers the best hope of bringing Trukanini closer to the world we now live in. This is a world that continually redefines our perceptions through rapidly proliferating new media and an increasing appetite for interchangeability between fact and fiction. Is it a forensic quest for footnoted and indexed evidence that will better inform our imagination of how the woman behind the myth of Trukanini thought or felt? Or will it be a freer project informed by more fictive arts?

We can, no doubt, look forward to the offerings of historians, novelists, screenwriters, poets, visual artists, animators and virtual reality designers in future explorations of Trukanini’s story. Increasingly these will be Aboriginal practitioners, who draw on their cultural connections and continuities to broker some further truth into the interpretation of her life. Long-time Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Heather Sculthorpe spoke at the launch of Pybus’s book. Sculthorpe’s extended family recalled being visited by Trukanini or her countrywoman Tanganutura at their home not far from Oyster Cove. They have their own perspective on her story. Sculthorpe commented to a Mercury journalist following the launch, ‘we could have improved Cassandra Pybus’s book. Let’s hope we get a chance …’.¹³

The work of white historians raking over the coals of colonial catastrophe may seem done. The task of storytelling about our culture and our kin is increasingly falling to young Aboriginal artists and writers who are stepping forward with competent abilities to bring analysis, vitality and perspective to lives like Trukanini’s. But in the meantime, we have Cassandra Pybus’s Truganini: Journey through Apocalypse, which slips between the historical and the personal to remind us that the complex agenda of liberation in history requires much more than just an archive and a scholarly method. Real conciliation and profound and enduring justice require transformations not only in our critical understanding of difficult histories but also in our ability to place ourselves willingly in their embrace.

References

Bonwick, James. The Lost Tasmanian Race. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1884.

Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2014.

Giglioli, Enrico. I Tasmaniani: Cenni storici ed etnologici di un popolo estinto. Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1874.

Long, Chris. Tasmanian Photographers, 1840–1940. Edited by Gillian Winter. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 1995.

Plomley, N. J. B. Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834. Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966.

Pybus, Cassandra. Community of Thieves. Melbourne: Minerva Australia, 1992.

Robinson, Henry Peach. Pictorial Effect in Photography: being hints on composition and chiaroscuro for photographers. London: Piper and Carter, 1869.

Ryan, Lyndall. ‘“The Struggle for Trukanini 1830–1997”. 1997 Peter Eldershaw Memorial Lecture’. Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings 44, no. 3 (1997): 153–73.

Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002.

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