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This is one sad fucking story of an absolute genocide, so buckle up. The British colonized Tasmania, exterminating local cultures and people in the process. Truganini, believed to be the last full-blooded Tasmanian, died on May 8, 1876.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: May 8, 1876--
It’s important to note that terms that reference Indigenous blood percentage have an incredibly racist history, and this post is using the terminology of the time to examine how it was seen by those who committed these atrocities. Speaking of which, beginning in the 1760s, Captain Cook voyaged to Australia and said hey this shit is ripe for some conquering. The following century the region was not a good place to be Indigenous Australian, because 90% of them died and the survivors suffered brutal oppression.
The inhabitants of Tasmania had been living there for 42,000 years and were isolated by rising sea levels in 8,000 BCE. In the 18th century, the population of Aboriginal peoples in Tasmania was estimated at 7,000. Then these sun-sensitive fuckfaces showed up and started the killing. And killing. And killing.
Truganini was born around 1812, shortly after colonization began in earnest. She was the daughter of the chief of the Bruny Island people. When she was 17, her mother and uncle were murdered by soldiers, and her sister abducted by seal hunters, never to be seen again. Then loggers took a break from cutting down trees to cut down Truganini’s fiancé in brutal fashion, followed by repeatedly raping her.
The following year, 1830, she was involuntarily transported to Flinders Island with the last remaining Aboriginal Tasmanians, which now numbered only a hundred people. Massive colonization, murder, war, disease, and destruction of their lifestyle and habitat had all but obliterated the people. Those few who survived were subjected to missionaries trying to indoctrinate them into a western lifestyle and religion, but they became increasingly melancholic, refusing to bear children, choosing death as the only escape from their oppressors.
Eight years after the relocation to Flinders, Truganini said fuck this place and fled to mainland Australia to join an Indigenous Australian resistance under a freedom fighter named Tunnerminnerwait. She fought with them, receiving a head wound from a gunshot, until the group was captured in 1841. Tunnerminnerwait was executed in 1842 while Truganini was forcibly returned to Flinders. The Indigenous Tasmanian population continued to dwindle, and she was relocated to Oyster Cove near Hobart in 1856. By 1873, she was the only one left alive. She died three years later.
Knowing her body would be defiled for “scientific” reasons, she begged to be cremated and scattered in the ocean. But she was buried instead, and two years later the colonizers dug her up and put her skeleton on display at the Tasmanian Museum. A full century later her remains were finally given the treatment Truganini requested.
There is debate as to whether Truganini was truly the last full-blooded Indigenous Tasmanian. Fanny Cochrane Smith, who died in 1905, was the last fluent speaker of the Tasmanian language, but it’s unknown if she was fully Indigenous. Two years before her death, Smith made recordings of Aboriginal songs, which are the only audio recordings in existence of the Tasmanian Aboriginal language.
Thanks, Finnbar, for the suggestion of today’s post.
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