Australian
Screen

Clip description

Narrator Rachel Perkins recounts Truganini’s concerns about her burial and the resting place of her body after her death. Darlene Mansell, historian Professor Marcia Langton of the Yiman-Bidjara Nation, and writer Bruce Pascoe of Boonwurrung Heritage, discuss Truganini’s government-given status as the last legitimate Tasmanian Aboriginal person alive. Her burial wishes are finally enacted 100 years after her death.

Curator’s notes

This clip is a testament to the violent and gory history of colonisation, when Indigenous people were not seen as people but as inferior beings to be cut up, dissected and studied. Lyndall Ryan describes how they were seen merely as specimens, in part to ‘remove their humanity – then you don’t really have to worry about what you did to them’.

What a trophy the body of ‘the last Tasmanian’ would have been! It is because of these brutal collectors that Aboriginal peoples’ remains all over the world were not safe from interference and why their descendants have worked tirelessly over the past 30 years to have them repatriated and put to rest.

The perpetuation of these colonial myths of inferiority and extinction, which is evident in the declaration of Truganini as the last Tasmanian, has made it especially hard for her descendants and the present day Indigenous Tasmanians to be recognised as such. Darlene Mansell is especially vocal on this topic in the clip, while later in the episode we see some of Ricky Maynard’s stunning photographic works that attest to the survival of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania.