Truganini is by Cassandra Pybus, a descendent of the first white colonisers on Tasmania’s Bruny Island. The Booktopia website says:
Cassandra Pybus’s ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn’t know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne.
For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than we can imagine. But her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy. Now Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness accounts to write Truganini’s extraordinary story in full.
Hardly more than a child, Truganini managed to survive the devastation of the 1820s, when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but extinguished. She spent five years on a journey around Tasmania, across rugged highlands and through barely penetrable forests, with George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary who was collecting the survivors to send them into exile on Flinders Island. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy – the so-called extinction of the original people of Tasmania.
I found it very interesting to get quite a lot of detailed information about what was life like for the First Nations people in Tasmania before colonisation. The book provides this because it is based almost entirely on the diaries of Augustus Robinson as he travelled around Tasmania with Truganini and her friends and relatives. Infamously Robinson was trying to collect the remaining First Nations that had not yet been murdered, and exile them to an offshore island. His objective was neither to learn or document their lives. In the hands of Pybus his diaries become something close to an eyewitness account of the other side of the frontier. She describes a lot of appalling coloniser behaviour but interspersed with that there are periods where she and her relatives have found a piece of Tasmania that is relatively peaceful and they enjoy themselves hunting and telling stories around the fire at night and all of this is documented by Robinson.
Book group has read quite a few frontier war stories now, Tongerlongeter most recently, so I found it hard to read more of the same. However it was very interesting to get some sort of a feel for their life and also some kind of a feel of the interactions between the different nations within Tasmania. The way Robinson describes what Truganini and her friends and relatives say about the other groups on the island I got the impression that the groups must’ve been quite small because there seem to be so many of them even though Tasmania is so small.
I found this review which has a lot more detail and is a good read if you are trying to decide whether to take the plunge.
[…] For more information on this cycle of theft and reprisal, you could try the TV series The Australian War , the podcast Frontier Wars Stories, and a number of books we’ve covered here in the book group by Henry Reynolds and others; such as Forgotten War, Tongerlongeter and Truganini. […]
Dave's Book Group 
1. 1788 by WATKIN TENCH | Dave's Book Group | October 4, 2023 at 1:17 am
[…] For more information on this cycle of theft and reprisal, you could try the TV series The Australian War , the podcast Frontier Wars Stories, and a number of books we’ve covered here in the book group by Henry Reynolds and others; such as Forgotten War, Tongerlongeter and Truganini. […]