TRUGANINI WATCHED WOOREDY’S body being wrapped in a shroud as the ship dropped anchor at Green Island. They had just come within sight of Flinders Island when Raegewarrah finally caught this proud Nuenonne warrior. Even before they left Melbourne, Wooredy had been desperately debilitated—Robinson expressed alarm that his old companion had become an ‘imbecile’. The official reason for Wooredy’s death was given as ‘general decay of nature’, yet he was a very strong man in his mid fifties. Less than a year before, Wooredy had been hunting and cutting out sheep from a flock with his dog. The final stage of syphilis was a more likely explanation for his rapid decline and death.
Wooredy had been Truganini’s intimate companion for twelve devastating years, during which they had shared an agonising accretion of unspeakable loss. Although she no longer looked on Wooredy as her husband, it was her obligation to cremate his body, then collect ashes and relics of bone to give to his sons. Instead, he was unceremoniously put into a hole in the ground on Green Island. It was a cruel affront that she was not permitted to perform any ceremony for his departed spirit.
At first Jeanneret was impressed with Truganini, mistaking the quietude of mourning for compliance. She was enrolled at the school, as they all were, where her efforts were described as ‘indifferent’. She was not interested in learning to read any more than she was interested in learning to sew the shapeless dresses she was obliged to wear. Within a matter of weeks, Jeanneret had completely reversed his opinion of her disposition. In his report of September 1842, Jeanneret complained of the ‘shamelessly immoral conduct’ of Truganini and her friend Maytepueminer, who were undermining his every effort to create an environment of modesty, monogamy and sexual restraint.
Soon after arriving from Port Phillip, Truganini and Maytepueminer made contact with the sealers who regularly came to Flinders Island from nearby Cape Barren Island. Jeanneret was unable to prevent the two women from running off and staying away for days, sometimes weeks, due to ‘some collusive arrangement’ they had with the sealers. Truganini’s refractory conduct intensified after October, with the arrival of four people repatriated from Port Phillip.
Superintendent La Trobe had insisted that all the Van Diemen’s Land people be returned, except the mixed-race youth Thomas Thompson, who was allowed to keep working on Solomon’s pastoral run, and Wooredy’s younger son, Peter Bruny, who stayed on Robinson’s farm.
Jack Allen was the first youth to be sent back, arriving in Hobart on 12 July 1842. He stayed there for more than two months, under the protection of the Quaker missionary George Washington Walker, who had a keen interest in the welfare of the original people. In early September, he was joined by Wooredy’s elder son, Davey Bruny, as well as Walter George Arthur and Mary Ann. As these four tarried in Hobart, they heard rumours about the harsh regime instituted by Jeanneret at Wybalenna and urgently expressed concern to their Quaker guardian. Walker sent a letter to Jeanneret’s wife in the hope that she might persuade her husband that kindness was the best tool for the management of his vulnerable charges. Walker’s cautious advice was entirely lost on the new commandant.
Jeanneret was determined to bend the people to his will. He considered his charges inherently lazy, unwilling to lift a finger without the inducement of tobacco, and even then doing little beyond seeing to their own basic needs. His predecessors had faced the same intransigence, although they had recognised that these exiled people were not lazy—rather, the people believed the government was obligated to provide for them. They were free, not prisoners, and would not be made to work as the degraded convicts were.
Those returned from Port Phillip were the most intractable, in Jeanneret’s view, perpetually undermining his efforts to establish labour routines. Truganini and Maytepueminer were licentious and uncontrollable. Walter George Arthur spent his time playing marbles and fomenting discontent. Davey Bruny and Jack Allen were the most indolent, using their experience of paid employment at Port Phillip to insist that free people must be paid for their work, and giving ‘exaggerated accounts of the value of their services’. These two young men also undermined Jeanneret’s ideas about moral improvement by bringing fresh supplies of ochre, obtained from the Boonwurrung in Westernport, which encouraged a resurgence of ceremony.
Jeanneret was horrified by ‘the dirty custom they have of besmearing themselves with red ochre and grease’ and, worse still, of stripping naked for nightly corroborees that involved ‘scenes scarcely equalled in the spheres of greatest depravity’. He bullied them into promising to cease this disgusting behaviour, only to find they were sneaking away to hold their ceremonies deeper in the bush.
Like Robinson, Jeanneret placed great store in formal marriages as a path to moral improvement. He pushed the people returned from Port Phillip into Church of England marriages, even though he could not legitimately perform weddings. He married Jack Allen to a recently widowed Lairmairermener woman known as Wild Mary, and Davey Bruny to Clara, the last surviving daughter of the Tarkiner warrior Wyne. Not long after the wedding, Clara gave birth to a mixed-race child who died soon afterwards. She would not say who the father was, if indeed she knew. She herself died of syphilis a few months later. Jeanneret then married Davey Bruny to Maytepueminer.
In another of his sham wedding ceremonies, Jeanneret married Truganini to Mannapackername, the most senior man of the Big River people, now called King Alphonso. Jeanneret described the groom as ‘the steadiest of men’, on whom he placed much reliance. A big man in every respect, King Alphonso towered over his diminutive wife. Jeanneret expected he would exert patriarchal control to curb Truganini’s transgressive behaviour, but that was not how things turned out. Truganini instead took her new husband with her to visit the sealers, causing Jeanneret to ‘growl at him with his pistol in his hand’, as King Alphonso later recounted, and curtail his sugar and tobacco ration. Jeanneret’s nasty retribution only served to turn ‘the steadiest of men’ into an aggrieved adversary, ready to make common cause with the intractable young men returned from Port Phillip.
Simmering grievances among the exiled people, and among the military stationed on the island, led to Jeanneret’s dismissal in November 1843. He was replaced by Dr Joseph Milligan, who had previously been an inspector of convict discipline in Hobart. Jeanneret fought to be reinstated, and both men sought to influence the colonial office in London with an absurd series of charges and countercharges. It was Jeanneret who triumphed, in December 1845.
Reaction to the news that Jeanneret would return to Wybalenna was intense. Walter George Arthur, Davey Bruny and Jack Allen took the extraordinary step of organising a petition to Queen Victoria to pray that he not be permitted to return. At their request, the catechist Robert Clark drew up the petition, and those who could write a little signed their name to it. The petition asserted that ‘we are your free children, that we were not taken prisoner but freely gave up our country’ and that ‘Mr Robinson made for us with Colonel Arthur an agreement which we have not lost from our minds since and we have our part of it good’. What followed was a litany of complaints about how Jeanneret threatened them with a gun, withheld their rations, made them work for their clothing and put people in jail ‘because we would not be his slaves’. One passionate complaint was that ‘he had shot our dogs before our eyes and sent other dogs of ours to an island where we told him they would starve and he said they might eat each other’.
Significantly, one of the eight signatures was that of a very senior man, King Alexander, brother of King Alphonso. The two brothers were regarded by Jeanneret as the most compliant and reliable of the captives at Wybalenna.
The petition was received by the colonial office in London and may have reached the Queen. If Victoria read it, she made no response.
Jeanneret returned to Flinders Island on 14 March 1846, incandescent with rage about the petition. He ‘growled at them plenty’, Walter reported, and bullied all those he saw as complicit in this heinous act of rebellion. He even threw King Alexander’s son Washington into the jail. Outraged at the treatment of his brother’s son, King Alphonso demanded Washington’s release and threatened to write to the governor. On 19 June, he made good on that threat. In an extraordinary joint letter, King Alphonso and King Alexander accused Jeanneret of gross intimidation. They wrote that he had threatened the petitioners by saying, ‘Queen take care of him and hang white man [Clark] and black man together’ and that he refused to issue the warm winter clothing sent from Hobart unless they worked in his garden. This last was a particular concern for King Alphonso, who was ‘a sick man plenty to much cold come and what he do to keep him warm he no able to work’. Determined they not be seen as pawns of Jeanneret’s rival Milligan, they proudly signed the letter ‘Me write myself King Alphonso’ and ‘Me write myself King Alexander’.
Truganini appears to have played no role in her husband’s political activism. This was men’s business. Certainly she wanted to be rid of Jeanneret and refused to bend to his will, but her preferred mode of resistance was more covert.
Tension grew when Jeanneret threatened libel against Walter George Arthur for sending yet another letter of complaint to the governor and confined him to jail for seventeen days. This was a step too far. The governor immediately sent the harbourmaster from Launceston to investigate. He found that there was no basis for Walter’s imprisonment, that the people fully understood the purpose of the petition, and that their sense of grievance was very real. The mood was best summarised by Davey Bruny, who explained to the harbourmaster, ‘I told the Queen that we had given up our country and we expected in return to have what we wanted.’ What they wanted was so very little. ‘I have asked for clothes,’ he elaborated. ‘Dr Jeanneret said I must work for it.’
Jeanneret’s final dismissal came in May 1847, and Joseph Milligan returned the following month. By that time the governor had received the colonial office’s response to the petition. Rather than address the petitioners’ complaints, or consider the government’s obligation to recompense them for the loss of their country, the colonial secretary advised that Wybalenna should be closed. It became Milligan’s responsibility to dismantle the establishment and supervise the transfer of twenty-three women, fourteen men and ten children, together with their many dogs, to an abandoned penal station at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart.
Truganini came to Oyster Cove on 18 October 1847, one of nine single women. King Alphonso had not survived the ‘plenty to much cold’ that he so feared at Wybalenna, dying on 7 July that same year. She had no reason to be sorrowful about the loss of another husband or the move to Oyster Cove. She was back in her own country, at last.
The old convict station at Oyster Cove was beside a small rivulet that trickled into the broad D’Entrecasteaux Channel. It was a place of great significance to her, as the cove held a stone quarry where the Nuenonne had made their flaked-stone implements. At low tide, layers and layers of shell middens were exposed on the southern arm, testimony to a timeless heritage of gatherings of Truganini’s clan. Across the variegated blue water of the channel she could see the knobbly fist of North Bruny, then the long sandy ribbon of the Neck, and in the far distance the mauve majesty of fluted cape at the end of Adventure Bay.
The site for the station was certainly picturesque. It was also low-lying, sitting on a saltmarsh that extended into wide mudflats at low tide, which made it perpetually damp. In winter it was wreathed in morning fog, and in summer it became a humid haven for biting insects. The place had proved to be so damp and the land so infertile that it had been abandoned as a convict station after less than three years. The quadrangle of brick and timber-slab buildings had been empty for eight months and was already falling into disrepair, despite a quick application of whitewash and a new watercourse.
Milligan chose to reside in Hobart, leaving day-to-day control to the catechist Robert Clark and the constable Jack Russell, who had both come from Flinders Island as part of the transfer. The children were sent to the Orphan School in Hobart to be educated ‘in a manner to fit them to mingle with and to be ultimately absorbed into the community’, so the colonial secretary told the public. Another reason may have been to remove them from the none-too-tender care of Clark and his wife, who continued to face serious accusations of brutality in the management of the children, especially the girls.
At Oyster Cove the people were expected to dress and live as the settlers did. Truganini was issued a blue serge petticoat to be worn under an ankle-length woollen sack dress that fastened around the neck and was tied at the waist with rope. Over that she wore a loose-fitting knitted jacket, a scarf, and one of her luminous shell necklaces. Sometimes she wore a blanket as well. She used broken bottle glass to keep her hair close-cropped and often covered her head with a red peaked cap, although she also liked to wear a silk scarf wound around her head like a turban, with a tobacco pipe tucked into the fold. Her hut had a fireplace in which a fire was kept burning day and night against the cold and she had a cooking pot, plates and utensils. It was furnished with a table, chairs and a bed. Truganini preferred to leave the bed to her dog Trumpy and sleep on the ground in front of the fire.
Any attempt to inculcate a work ethic at the station was soon abandoned. Milligan had already discovered that he could not use people’s craving for sugar and tobacco as an inducement to make them work. The people were ‘intelligent enough to perceive they have a fair claim to support and good treatment without any exertion on their part’, he told the colonial secretary. They would readily work for themselves, gathering firewood to keep fires roaring inside their huts to fend off the insidious chill, and sourcing traditional foods so they did not have to subsist entirely on the substandard meat ration. Somehow they were still able to get red ochre that they would grind and mix with grease to paint their bodies for ceremony, well away from disapproving eyes.
There were three boats at the station; the men were experienced boatmen who had become expert at fishing with lines on Flinders Island. They fished day in and day out. The women would take the dogs and beat through the scrub surrounding the station to catch the small, shy marsupials known as kangaroo rats. Using sticks they had sharpened with glass, the women would dig under the bark of the wattle trees to hook out fat oily grubs. Truganini remained especially adept at climbing trees to catch possums.
Truganini would often go out to the rocky point at the end of the cove, where she would tuck her cumbersome dress into the rope at her waist and dive for oysters and scallops that lay on the bottom, picking up the shells with her powerful toes and storing them in woven bags hung around her neck. Settlers who saw her would marvel at her grace and ease in the water, how she could stay under for maybe five minutes, bobbing up like a bottle to take a breath and then diving down headfirst again.
Truganini was so impressive in the water that in local settler lore she was believed to have swum from Oyster Cove to Bruny Island, a tribute to her extraordinary ability as a swimmer and her deep attachment to country. However, it was pure myth—the distance was too great. Nor could she swim down the channel to visit Alexander McKay at Peppermint Bay, also in Nuenonne country, as some settlers thought. Truganini undoubtedly did visit her one-time paramour, who was now married with a brood of children. She loved being around children, and she and McKay could reminisce in her language about the two years of her early life spent in each other’s company. She must have walked the six miles to get there.
As often as she could get a boat to take her, Truganini would cross the channel to Bruny Island, most likely accompanied by her kinswoman Dray. Truganini knew every inch of North Bruny. After landing at Woodcutters Point, she would be seen walking across Richard Pybus’s grant, and then William Davis’s, to get to the southern section of the island where there were no settlers. At the long narrow stretch of the Neck, on the channel side, were hillocks of shells not yet covered by the undergrowth, indicating where Nuenonne families had made camp before the settlers came. Here, Truganini and Dray would cast off their long sack dresses to walk about naked. They would wade into the water to scoop up mussels, oysters and scallops that they opened on their fire at night. After feasting on this harvest, they threw the shells over their shoulder, just as their families had done in that lost world of only forty years earlier.
Crossing to the ocean side of the island, Truganini would dive for the succulent crayfish she knew hid in the rock crevices behind the waving kelp forests. She would comb the fine sand of Adventure Bay for tiny marineer shells to polish and string into long necklaces. If it was egging season, she might walk to the grassy point at the far southern end of the bay, where James Kelly’s whaling station was now a tumbledown ruin, to reach the rocky island where the penguins nested. Or else she might follow the brackish creek inland to find swans’ nests. When the mutton bird chicks hatched in the burrows at the Neck, most of the people from the station would come to the island with her. The settlers on North Bruny always knew when Truganini and her friends were on the island, and no one was disturbed by their presence. The Pybus and Davis families remembered Truganini and Dray as young women and it pleased them to give them tea, tobacco and potatoes, just as they had all those years before.
Truganini and Dray would also take the people and their dogs on extended trips into their country, to the Huon River and beyond, to Recherche Bay, and even to Port Davey on the south-west coast. At these times, usually in late spring and early autumn, they would be away for at least a month, and occasionally several months.
At Oyster Cove it was impossible to be insulated from the intrusion of settlers. Grazing sheep were irresistible quarry for the people’s cherished canine companions, and dog attacks caused endless complaints. Milligan had to order that some dogs be shot after the governor received a hefty claim for damages. Milligan’s greatest concern was not the dogs so much as the disreputable men who had built rough-hewn huts on the Crown land beside the station in order to trade liquor for sex. To get rid of them, the governor was reluctantly persuaded to grant them land three miles away. The move made little difference: three miles was no distance when it came to sourcing the alcohol that had become a potent addiction.
Prostitution became a feature of life at the station. The exchange of sex for grog was the kind of reciprocal relationship Truganini understood only too well. There was also a brisk exchange in government-issue blankets, clothing, meat and flour. Robert Clark did nothing about it. Milligan thought him too indolent to exercise even a modicum of control—not that Milligan was much bothered to go to Oyster Cove to correct Clark’s dilatory oversight. The gross neglect became apparent when Davey Bruny died in October 1848 after a lingering illness during which Clark made no effort to call in medical assistance. Wooredy’s treasured elder son was thirty when he died, and had no children.
Clark himself was felled with a heart attack at the end of 1849 and died in March the following year, leaving Jack Russell in charge. Russell had worked for years at Wybalenna and he got along with the people just fine. He could easily communicate in their pidgin language. He was also an alcoholic. In October 1850, Russell got into an altercation with a local settler when he was ‘beastly drunk’, in the company of several men from the station. The argument escalated and Russell made a signal to one of the men—maybe Jack Allen—who drew a knife, causing the settler to flee in terror and subsequently write an outraged letter of complaint to the colonial secretary.
The official response was to install Keith Davie as resident overseer and storekeeper at a pay grade above Russell. Like Russell, Davie had known the people for years, as the coxswain at Wybalenna, and he had no interest in trying to manage their lives. He was more than happy to facilitate their drinking, since he was a drunk as well. As the storekeeper, his job was to distribute the rations, and when people were away from the station on hunting expeditions Davie was pleased to appropriate their rations to trade for spirits.
The closest neighbour was Richard Pybus’s eldest son, Henry Harrison Pybus, who had a house and orchard at the adjacent bay, known as Little Oyster Cove. He also acquired large tracts of land in the hills above the station, facilitated by the colonial surveyor, James Erskine Calder, who was married to Henry’s sister Margaret. Here he established a timber business in partnership with the colonial surgeon, Dr William Crowther. A jetty was built on the arm of the cove that marked the southern boundary of the station, and in 1855 a tramway was constructed to carry the milled timber from the hills directly to the jetty. By then, most of the men in the vicinity of Oyster Cove were transient ex-convicts, employed as sawyers and woodsplitters for Pybus and Crowther’s timber operation.
In April 1851, Henry Harrison Pybus had played host to George Augustus Robinson, who was about to permanently leave the colonies for England. He had returned to Van Diemen’s Land briefly to finalise the sale of his land grants. After visiting Richard Pybus on Bruny Island, he stayed at Little Oyster Cove for a weekend while waiting for the boat that came four days a week from Hobart. On 26 April, he made an unexpected visit to the station to say goodbye to Walter George Arthur, from whom he had been receiving letters. Robinson’s journal entries for that weekend were very sparse; he only recorded interactions with Walter George Arthur, Mary Ann and her sister Fanny. Both women gave him a shell necklace as a keepsake.
Robinson thought the station an unhealthy place, too low and damp, with a bitterly cold wind that swept ‘like a tunnel’ off the mountain. He wrote that everyone was in residence on Sunday, 27 April, when he read prayers, and noted that several had grown fat. If he saw Truganini he made no mention of it. He copied down a list of the names of those in residence from a list that Davie provided, and drew a rough map of the small graveyard in a cleft in the hills to the south of the station, on which he marked the places where ten people were already buried. Given that he was about to leave for England, it was strange that he wanted to identify the graves. Perhaps William Crowther had asked him to do it. The colonial surgeon was a man of science with a keen interest in the original Tasmanians.
As for Milligan, he didn’t visit the station often enough to judge the state of affairs for himself. His annual reports between 1852 and 1855 document a rising percentage of people dying each year, without bothering to record individuals by name or cause of death. No one kept a record of when people died or the date of their burial, or even if they were buried; their names were just removed from Davie’s ration inventory. Milligan ventured the opinion that the people had themselves to blame for their fatal illnesses, by moping about inside their overheated huts ‘like hothouse plants obnoxious to the breeze that promotes health and vigour’. Another contributing factor he identified was the sly grog shops that had begun to proliferate in the vicinity with the influx of splitters and sawyers, ‘with whom it is understood they are far from straight laced in their intercourse’.
Grog certainly proved fatal for Mathinna, the child sent from Wybalenna in February 1839 to live in the pampered inner sanctum of Government House with Sir John and Lady Franklin. She was very much a young lady when Thomas Bock painted her portrait in 1842, but the following year, when Sir John and Lady Franklin returned to England, she went to the dreadful Orphan School. In July 1851, when she was sixteen, she was unceremoniously discharged from the school and sent to live at Oyster Cove.
As Towterer’s daughter, Mathinna was kin to Dray, but she had no language or cultural knowledge to help make that connection meaningful. In the dysfunctional environment of the station she quickly learnt to make carnal connections with the itinerant workers in the neighbourhood, becoming a regular at a disreputable public house about four miles away. On 1 September 1852, seventeen-year-old Mathinna was stumbling back to the station in a drunken stupor when she fell into a puddle, passed out and drowned. Only because of a brief coroner’s inquest was her death documented at all. There was still no record of her burial.
On a rare visit to the station early in 1855, Milligan found only twelve people living in the dilapidated huts. Tanganutura’s other mixed-race daughter, Fanny, had married one of the local splitters and moved away in 1854, and soon after her young half-brother Adam went to live with her. Jack Allen, with another young man known as Augustus, had joined the crew of a whaling ship. Of the people who remained, Milligan reported favourably on the industrious Walter George Arthur and Mary Ann. He noted that their ‘adopted son’ Billy Lanne, aged about fifteen, had recently returned from the Orphan School and was helping Walter grow potatoes. Milligan suggested that these three, ‘whose manner and sympathies are to some degree European’, should live apart to insulate them from the ‘irregular and profligate’ behaviour of the rest. He exempted ‘two women from the bush’—meaning Truganini and Dray—from his dismay at the others, who were in thrall to ‘the maddening excitement of strong liquors’. Although Milligan did not point the finger at his subordinates, there could be no mistaking that Russell and Davie were acting as conduits and pimps to facilitate the debilitating traffic in grog.
The dissolute life of the station was a cause for concern among its respectable neighbours, and especially the absence of any spiritual guidance for these benighted souls. Henry Harrison Pybus had a particular concern for the condition of the people living adjacent to his jetty. He was a pious man who fondly remembered his family’s dealings with the people on Bruny Island in his youth. He persuaded his influential brother-in-law, the colonial surveyor James Calder, who was also churchwarden at St David’s Cathedral, to visit the station to see for himself how bad things were.
Calder arrived at the station on a sunny day in April 1855, having walked there in the company of a young friend, James Kirwan, who was the assistant police magistrate for the district. Calder wrote an account of it for a Hobart newspaper. While passing along the edge of North West Bay, he and Kirwan spoke with the licensee of a public house beside the North West Bay River and another at Snug Cove. Both publicans gave distressing accounts of women from the station in shocking states of intoxication engaging in ‘disgusting scenes of immorality … with white men in open day’.
After thrilling to the panoramic glory of the channel landscape, Calder received a visceral shock at the ‘vile contrast’ of the dank, derelict station. If there were people within ‘that desolate-looking shealing’, they had made themselves invisible by the time he began to look around the huts the people shared with their many dogs. The rooms were inherently unhealthy, with low ceilings, tiny windows that let in little light, and no ventilation. The bedding was filthy and covered in lice, while the dirt floors were strewn with litter and scraps. Calder was especially dismayed that the former convict chapel appeared to be unused and he could find no evidence of any religious instruction. He noted that Supervisor Milligan was drawing a salary of £600, yet he ‘might as well be in Spitzbergen’ for all he did to protect the vulnerable people in his care.
Indignant, Calder determined that ‘even at this late hour’, something must be done to improve the conditions of life for a people ‘we have forcibly dispossessed of everything but mere existence’. It never occurred to him that he might surrender his own substantial land grant on Bruny Island for that humane purpose. He made informal representations about the dereliction of the station, reinforced by the swingeing formal report submitted by Kirwan. Finally, the government was stirred to action.
Parsimony rather than benevolence drove the reorganisation of the station management. With an eye to the cost to the newly self-governing colony, now named Tasmania, funding was cut to a bare minimum. The positions held by Milligan and Davie were abolished, with Russell expected to retire the following year. The duties of the three were collapsed into the role of a resident supervisor, at a fraction of Milligan’s salary. Milligan himself stayed on the government payroll in another capacity and remained as secretary of the Royal Society of Tasmania until he retired from government service in April 1860. Returning to England, he supplemented his pension by surreptitiously selling skulls he had collected from the original people of Van Diemen’s Land. Later in life he donated several skulls to the Royal College of Surgeons.
New regulations were promulgated for the station, reminiscent of the penal establishment it had once been. Henceforth, the people were to be mustered each day so their persons, clothing and rooms could be inspected. Any infringements of the rules, such as bartering rations or getting drunk, would cause the tobacco and sugar ration to be suspended. Kirwan was ordered to make unannounced inspections of the station and submit a report at least once a month. Prayers must be read every morning and evening and a visiting clergyman was to hold monthly services in the convict chapel. An amendment to the Licensing Act instituted a penalty of £50 for ‘supplying with any liquor any native’. This would make no difference, Kirwan ruefully observed, as they could always get liquor from timber workers in the bush.
Rumours that draconian changes were in train reached Walter George Arthur soon after Kirwan’s report was submitted. Reprising the strategy that had rid Wybalenna of Jeanneret, he wrote to the governor, saying that if Kirwan were given management of the station he and his wife would have to leave. He begged the governor not to place Kirwan in control of the people as ‘they have got bad disliking for that gentleman’. Walter got his way. He and Mary Ann were permitted to live separately on a Crown lease adjacent to the station, while a man genuinely committed to the welfare of the people was appointed as resident supervisor on a salary of £100.
John Strange Dandridge had just turned thirty when he took on the challenging role of supervisor of the station at Oyster Cove. He was the son of an Anglican minister from Oxfordshire, and his wife, Matilda, was the daughter of the artist John Skinner Prout, who had visited Wybalenna in 1845 and made portrait sketches of several of the people, including Truganini. The Dandridges arrived in July 1855 with several young children, who provided a source of delight to Truganini. She doted on the children and carried them around on her shoulders.
Almost immediately, Dandridge sought to have the decaying buildings repaired and made watertight, although it was nine months before any work began, and the people had to endure another winter with gaping holes in the roof and next to no glass in the windows. The accommodation for Dandridge and his family was scarcely any better. Dandridge also objected that the government contract for supplying the station was so stingy that no contractor could afford to supply decent meat. The meat rations were invariably sourced from animals that had died from illness rather than those freshly slaughtered, and often had to be returned. The meat ration was of most concern to Dandridge and his family. The people could always find other sources of protein for themselves, if not for their army of dogs. Truganini found the ration supply was a problem only if the boat from Hobart was long delayed and she ran out of flour or tea and sugar. She couldn’t go a day without sugar.
Dandridge taught himself to row in order to take Truganini and Dray across the channel to Bruny Island so they could gather protein-rich abalone, or young mutton birds, or swans’ eggs, depending on the season. In the spring and summer months, most of the people would disappear into the Huon district with their bedding and as much flour, tea and sugar as they could carry. Four to six weeks later they would return, looking sleek and healthy after enjoying a steady diet of possum and wallaby, supplemented with the subterranean fungus known to the settlers as native bread.
To attend to their spiritual welfare, a chaplain visited every month to give Sunday services. Dandridge reported that the people so detested this meaningless ritual that the moment they knew he was coming they would disappear into the surrounding bush, and ‘not one of them would make their appearance till he was gone’. To be sure they could make their getaway, one person would lie down, hand under cheek, pressing an ear to the ground to pick up the vibrations of horses’ hooves up to two miles away.
The colonial bishop finally found the time to make a visit to the station in April 1858. He came by boat so the people did not have a chance to escape. The reason for the visit was to take their photographs. His subjects stood or sat in front of the slab wall of their huts, staring blankly into his camera, each face a study in sullen defiance. The bishop was unimpressed with their want of spiritual yearning, and after that the chaplain never visited them again. The bishop himself returned once, the following January, to take more photographs.
In May 1858, an opportunistic settler was granted a licence to run a public house called The Aborigine at Little Oyster Cove, despite opposition from Pybus and Crowther, who warned of the deleterious effect it would have on both their workers and the people at the station, tacit acknowledgement of how these two groups intertwined. By then, rampant alcoholism at the station was causing serious problems for Dandridge, especially in trying to contain the younger men, like Jack Allen and Billy Lanne, who were volatile and violent when drunk. Billy Lanne was twenty and already sexually involved with Truganini. In March that year, she suffered an unexplained fracture of her arm. On another occasion the doctor had to be called to tend Jack Allen’s wife Emma after she suffered a severe beating. Dandridge was greatly relieved in June 1859 when Jack Allen went back to whaling, taking Billy Lanne with him, both signing on for a long voyage.
Walter George Arthur had become a serious problem. He had shown a good deal of initiative when he had first arrived at Oyster Cove. He and Mary Ann had proudly taken on the mantle of leadership, greeted as the king and queen by the occasional visitors to the station. When they were given the lease on a separate parcel of land, Walter George Arthur paid for labourers to clear several acres to plant potatoes; however, a formal request for an assigned convict to work on his farm was refused. It was made apparent that he was not, nor would he ever be, considered the equal of a settler. While he was in Port Phillip, Walter George Arthur had become a heavy drinker, and in his humiliation and defeat, he now reverted to alcoholic oblivion.
He could be nasty while drunk, violent and abusive to everyone at the station. Mary Ann, who also drank heavily, bore the brunt of it, although she was a big strong woman who gave as good as she got. When Walter gave up on trying to farm, Dandridge arranged for him to be employed at the station, getting firewood and meeting the steamer from Hobart. This employment had to be suspended in 1858 because he and Mary Ann continued to drink and cause havoc with their fighting, ‘exhibiting a violence of conduct impossible to describe’, a despairing Dandridge reported to the colonial secretary. When drunk, which was much of the time, they physically attacked others at the station and subjected Dandridge to ‘most virulent abuse, conveyed in disgusting & disgraceful language’.
In April 1858, Walter went to Hobart to ask the colonial secretary if he and his wife could be removed from proximity to the station. He requested land in the Huon region, closer to Mary Ann’s sister Fanny, now married to William Smith. His request was never even considered because the couple refused ‘to take the pledge against drinking’. In October 1859, the doctor was called to treat Mary Ann for ‘injuries caused by ill usage’, by which time her abusive husband had signed on for a long whaling voyage. He returned to the station early in 1861, ‘looking much worse than when he left’. A few months later, he fell from a boat belonging to the publican of The Aborigine and drowned. His body was never recovered.
Surviving the winter in the bleak conditions of the station was a challenge. Four people died of influenza in the winter of 1860, and by 1862 only eight remained, described in the Royal Kalendar and Guide to Tasmania as ‘uncleanly, unsober, unvirtuous, unenergetic, and irreligious, with a past character for treachery, and no record of one noble action … the race is fast fading away and its utter extinction will hardly be regretted’.
The prospect of the imminent extinction of a race of people had the scientific community scrambling for memorabilia. By some mysterious circumstance, not explained in Dandridge’s correspondence with the colonial secretary, nor in the visiting magistrates’ reports, members of the Royal Society of Tasmania were given access to the body of Augustus, a relatively young man who had died on 29 August 1860, as well as an older woman known as Caroline, who had died weeks earlier, on 10 July. Moulds of their faces were made within days of their death and their skulls were removed to be stored in the society’s museum collection. In 1861 the Ethnological Museum at Oxford wrote to the governor to request a male and female skull be obtained ‘without injuring the feelings … of the few survivors’. Dandridge refused to contemplate such a request. Three years later, the Oxford museum acknowledged they had managed to get the skulls from ‘another source’. This was the prominent Hobart solicitor Morton Allport, who was vice president of the Royal Society of Tasmania. As a longstanding friend of the Dandridges, Allport was an occasional visitor to the Oyster Cove station.
There was money to be made from the neglected burial site above the station; it was ripe for pilfering, so overrun with bracken that the graves were barely distinguishable from the scrub and a number of graves had collapsed. Who would know if skeletal remains were being exhumed?
Sensitive to accusations of wasting public money on the people at Oyster Cove, the government had no intention of repairing the graveyard or the dilapidated station, which had become basically uninhabitable. At this point Henry Harrison Pybus weighed in with a proposal: he would look after the eight survivors on his adjacent property and keep them from ‘intimacy of an objectionable nature’. For relieving the government of the continuing responsibility for the people he requested £500 a year, which was less than the current government outlay.
Pybus was a pious man, keen to do good works; he had established a school for local children and he had nostalgic memories of Truganini. His curious gesture was also possibly prompted by his business partner, William Crowther, who understood how valuable the skeletons of these last people would be. He had already approached the colonial secretary about securing their skeletal material. As the joint owner of the property to which the people were being invited to move, Crowther would have prime access to the bones and skulls he so coveted. Nothing came of it. Pybus’s price was considered too much to spend on a small group of ‘dipsomaniacs’, and the settlement was allowed to continue in its deplorable condition, under the despairing supervision of Dandridge, who did what he could with his meagre provisions.
Truganini suffered a profound blow when Dray died in the winter of 1861, said to be not less than 75 years old. Losing her intimate friend and the last connection to her clan caused her to become somewhat isolated within the station. For friendship and emotional warmth she was dependent more than ever on the Dandridge family and one or two settler women at Little Oyster Cove who had been the children of government employees and had spent their childhood with her at the station. She continued to go to Bruny Island with Dandridge, and every year in late spring she and the other women took the dogs on hunting trips into the Huon.
She was not immune to the contagion of alcohol that had overwhelmed the station. In 1863, when Billy Lanne and Jack Allen were in residence at the station, Truganini was one of the seven people from the station reported to the police for being ‘senseless drunk’ at a hotel at North West Bay. Truganini and the others were kept in the lockup overnight because of the very real fear they would come to harm trying to walk the six miles back to the station.
Truganini’s two-room hut was in a shocking state of disrepair. The partition wall was damaged, part of the roof had caved in and the windows had no glass. The visiting magistrate had requested repairs that were never made. She shared the hut with Billy Lanne whenever he was back from a whaling voyage. According to later reminiscences from one of her settler friends, Truganini was very proud to have a husband more than thirty years her junior. Bessy Clark, one of the three other women at the station, was much closer to Billy Lanne in age and she also claimed him as a husband. Mrs Dandridge vividly remembered having to protect Truganini and Bessy from Billy’s drunken rages. They would both run into her house and hide under her bed while he banged on the door to get them.
It was nearly impossible to contain this volatile and very strong young man, no matter how far gone in drink he was, and Billy resented Dandridge’s attempts to keep him out of trouble. Just before shipping out in December 1864, Billy lodged a complaint against Dandridge with a magistrate in Hobart. He accused the superintendent of expropriating clothing and food rations for the private use of his family and the neighbours, as well as forbidding the use of the station boat. ‘I am the last man of my race and I must look after my people,’ he was reported as saying.
An inquiry was held to investigate the accusations. Truganini and the three other women at the station were interviewed, as well as Mary Ann who lived on adjacent land. Dandridge was completely exonerated. It was found that when the steamer had failed to arrive he occasionally lent supplies of flour to local families, and none of the women seemed to mind. Truganini explained that should she ‘suffer a little short when the boat not come’ she could always ‘eat plenty kangaroo rat’, and if she wanted fish or oysters she could always use the boat. As for Dandridge, he was ‘kind fine fellow’, she told her inquisitor. ‘Mrs Dandridge fine fellow too.’
The decay and dissolution that surrounded Truganini was belied by photographs taken in 1866, when the women were dressed up in silk ballgowns and put on show at Government House. A newspaper social columnist reported them to be ‘charmed beyond measure by the position they occupied’. On the contrary, they look grumpy and uncomfortable in the photograph, as though they would much prefer to be someplace else.
Having once been a model for painters and sculptors, Truganini was now regularly called upon to pose for photographers. While Billy Lanne was again in residence at the station in June 1866, the government requested a photographic record for posterity. Truganini, Bessy Clark, Patty Clark and Billy Lanne had portraits taken in a Hobart studio. Dandridge requested the colonial secretary allocate a constable to accompany them while they were in the town, warning of ‘what outrageous scenes might be expected in the public streets if they wished to go into particular public houses they knew (and they know a great many) and were refused’. Unauthorised photographs were taken later that year when unknown photographers opportunistically came down to Oyster Cove.
Billy was about to ship out on a whaling voyage in November 1866 when a Hobart newspaper reported that ‘King William THE LAST OF THE ABORIGINES is about to visit England, and his ambition is to have the honour of an audience of Her Majesty Queen Victoria … and seems to think himself every inch a king’. It was nonsense, of course, but the royal appellation took hold. Ever after he was known as King Billy.
In February 1867 Truganini was away on a month-long hunting expedition with Patty Clark and Mannalargenna’s daughter Wapperty, while Billy Lanne and Bessy Clark remained at the station. Dandridge was surprised and dismayed when Bessy died on 12 February, as she was the strongest and most likely to survive, with ‘no disease about her’. She had been suffering from a bout of dysentery yet seemed to have recovered, when she suddenly stopped eating, drinking or speaking. Mrs Dandridge, who was with her at the end, said Bessy died of inflammation of the bowels. The visiting doctor gave the cause of death as dysentery. Truganini was not there to see for herself, yet she believed that Billy was to blame, telling her settler friend Annie Benbow that Billy had kicked Bessy in the stomach when he was drunk.
Presumably Bessy was buried in the decrepit burial plot above the station, although her body did not lie there for long. In December 1871 Morton Allport sent her complete skeleton to the Royal College of Surgeons in London, along with a male skeleton he had retrieved ‘at no small difficulty’ from the abandoned burial ground at Flinders Island.
After weeks in the bush in wet weather, Truganini, Wapperty and Patty all succumbed to the annual bout of influenza. Patty was taken ill in the bush and Dandridge had to walk thirty-six miles to fetch her. She was admitted to hospital in April in such a bad way that she was not expected to live. In June, she was joined there by Truganini and Wapperty. Dandridge sent his wife to Hobart to comfort the women in this strange environment and provide clean clothing. He was unable to come himself, he told the colonial secretary, because Billy was still at the station and likely to make trouble.
Patty Clark died on 8 July 1867 and was not returned from the hospital for burial at Oyster Cove. Indeed she received no burial at all. Her skeleton was ‘dissected out, not having been buried’, according to the description provided by Morton Allport to a British collector. Her skeleton joined the growing collection of remains held by the Hobart museum of the Royal Society. Allport boasted that, unlike other, incomplete skeletons, ‘this specimen is perfect’.
Truganini and Wapperty were discharged into the care of Mrs Dandridge, although their recovery was very slow, and Wapperty died at the station on 12 August 1867.
Six months later, in January 1868, Billy Lanne was again living at the station when he and Truganini were required to be in Hobart to be presented to the Duke of Edinburgh at the anniversary regatta celebrating the foundation of the colony. The Mercury newspaper described ‘King Billy, and the old woman, Truganini’ standing on the steps of the pavilion to be presented to His Highness. ‘Mrs. Truganini, the wife of King Billy, consented to present the prize,’ the paper reported. ‘King Billy then called for three cheers for the winners, three cheers for the Prince, and three cheers for the Queen.’ Dandridge was with them, keeping an anxious eye on how much of the punch they consumed.
Billy joined the crew of the whaler Runnymede at the beginning of March. That was the last Truganini saw of her fourth husband. Twelve months later, the Runnymede returned and Billy was discharged with twelve pounds in his pocket. He headed for the familiar haunt of the Dog and Partridge pub in Hobart. He was not well, and complained of stomach pains for several days before he died at the hotel on 3 March 1869.
The very next day, Crowther wrote to the colonial secretary, asking that the body be sent to the hospital morgue and requesting permission to secure the skeleton for the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Almost simultaneously, the Royal Society wrote to secure the skeleton for their own collection. Fearing foul play, the governor issued special instructions for the medical superintendent to protect the body from theft or mutilation. That evening, Crowther arranged for the medical superintendent to take tea with his wife while he and his son stole into the morgue, wearing protective clothing, and removed the skull from the corpse, cunningly substituting into the head another skull taken from a nearby corpse. On discovering the macabre remains of this scientific escapade, the medical superintendent contacted several members of the Royal Society, who came to the hospital and cut off the hands and feet for their collection.
Billy’s mangled remains were buried the next day in an impressive ceremony, with a full procession to the graveyard at St David’s cemetery in Hobart. That night, the cemetery watch was distracted while three members of the Royal Society dug out the grave, heaved the body into a wheelbarrow and made off with it. Crowther arrived sometime later, to find only the discarded European skull. In the public furore that followed, Crowther claimed that the body was reduced to a skeleton in the back room of the hospital and the bones were secreted away in the Royal Society’s collection. He would never acknowledge having stolen the skull. Crowther was suspended as honorary surgeon at the hospital, which must not have greatly troubled him since he became premier of Tasmania less than ten years later.
All this grisly scientific grasping had a very unsettling effect on Truganini, who was aware of the grave robbing at Oyster Cove and was quick to perceive the interest her body would excite. Until then, next to no attention had been paid to her, but almost overnight ‘the old woman Truganini’ became the subject of sentimental mythologising, cast as an antipodean Pocahontas in newspaper stories, the beautiful but self-denying native princess who had risked her life to save her beloved Mr Robinson. It was awkward that by that time Truganini was both old and ill, with whiskers on her chin. Writer James Bonwick magnificently rose to the occasion in 1870, reminiscing about briefly meeting ‘this sylvan goddess’ at Oyster Cove in 1858: ‘Her coquetry reminded me of the faded loveliness of French courts,’ he wrote.
A number of colonial gentlemen claimed a special relationship with Truganini, but only Henry Atkinson had a substantial history with Truganini that gave credence to his recollections of her, published in 1905. Atkinson was the Anglican minister appointed to the Oyster Cove parish between 1869 and 1874, where he got to know Truganini. He bluntly admitted that when he first saw her he thought she looked like an ape, sitting with her hands clasped around her knees, gazing across the channel to her country. As he rode past her she gave him a momentary glance, ‘such as an animal in the Zoological Gardens might … swift but expressionless and without even the faintest interest or animation’. He thought he had never seen a human so repulsive.
Nevertheless, they became friends. She commandeered the reverend and his boat to take her over to Bruny Island ‘scores of times’. In his telling, they were out fishing in his boat or in the bush together ‘almost every day’. He never tried to preach to her, recognising that she had no interest whatsoever in Christian belief and that if she had any belief in the supernatural it was in the devil she called Raegewarrah.
Among his down-to-earth reminiscences of hunting and fishing expeditions with Truganini, Atkinson provided a poignant glimpse into her private terror. In March 1869, Atkinson was startled to hear a terrible racket at the station made by Truganini and Mary Ann with their dogs, all howling in unison. Dandridge explained that they had just learnt of Billy’s death and this was a mourning ritual where the people would ‘kick up a row’ for about ten minutes and then never mention the death again. Not so, in this case—Truganini did mention the death again. Days later she asked Atkinson to take her out in his boat to the deepest part of the channel. With tears coursing down her face, she said all the people were dead and people in Hobart had taken their skulls. Now they would want her skull. Suddenly kneeling before him and clasping her arms around his legs, she pleaded, ‘Bury me here, it is the deepest place. Promise me. Promise me.’
By 1872, Truganini was the sole resident of Oyster Cove, and the government decided that the station would be sold. She was moved away from her homeland to a house Dandridge had bought in Hobart. Dandridge had stipulated that she be able to continue her regular trips to Bruny Island, but when he died unexpectedly in March 1873 there was no one to take her. Sole responsibility for Truganini passed to his widow.
In these last years of her life, Truganini was a curiosity in Hobart, occasionally glimpsed with Mrs Dandridge taking short walks in the town: a tiny, stout black woman in a dark bombazine dress with a lace collar and wearing a red turban with a pipe tucked into the fold. She received numerous gentleman callers seeking to take her photograph or otherwise exploit her rarity as ‘the last Tasmanian’. Prominent members of the Royal Society, including Morton Allport, James Erskine Calder and John Woodcock Graves, visited Truganini in her final days, as did James Gravenor, a man she had not seen for forty-three years. Now a prosperous baker, Gravenor was once a convict assigned to the last mission, who travelled with Truganini and her friends for a few months in 1834. He used this brief connection and deathbed visit to claim a close friendship with Truganini in spurious articles that he later published in the Hobart Mercury.
Old and frail, Truganini needed constant medical attention. As her sole carer, Mrs Dandridge had the devil of a job of pushing the necessary pills down her throat with a long pencil. Expecting to die soon, Truganini eagerly anticipated being with her family again. ‘Me going back to my people,’ she told Mrs Dandridge, saying she was waiting for a message from her father, Manganerer, to know when it was time.
On 4 May 1876, Mrs Dandridge gave Truganini her medicine and checked that she was warm enough, lying on the floor of her room in front of a roaring fire, nestled comfortably into her dogs. A little time later, she heard Truganini suddenly call out, ‘Raegewarrah catch me.’ By the time Mrs Dandridge reached her, Truganini had lapsed into a coma. Three days later she was pronounced dead.