Simpsons Bay

Bruny Island is a well kept secret and we were up for exploring as much of it as possible.
After the ferry trip we travelled to a memorial site for Truganini who was a famous indigenous native who became a voice for all local indigenous peoples.
Her story is best summarized as someone who was prepared to stand up and fight for what was rightfully theirs and she has become nationally renowned as a result.

Truganini (also known as Lallah Rookh; c. 1812 – 8 May 1876) was an Aboriginal Tasmanian woman. She was one of the last native speakers of the Tasmanian languages and one of the last individuals solely of Aboriginal Tasmanian origin.
Truganini grew up in the region around the D'Entrecasteaux Channel and Bruny Island.
Many of her relatives were killed during the Black War. From 1829 she was associated with George Augustus Robinson, later an official of the colonial government of Van Diemen's Land. She accompanied him as a guide and served as an informant on Aboriginal language and culture. In 1835, Truganini and most other surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians were relocated to Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, where Robinson had established a mission. The mission proved unsuccessful, and disastrous for the Aboriginal Tasmanian people.

In 1839, Truganini, among sixteen Aboriginal Tasmanians, accompanied Robinson to the Port Phillip District in present-day Victoria. She soon severed ties with him. Around two years later, she and four other Aboriginal Tasmanians, including Tunnerminnerwait became outlaws, leading to the killing of two whalers and an eight-week pursuit and resistance campaign. The five of them were charged with murder. Tunnerminnerwait and another man were found guilty and executed, while Truganini and the others were returned to Tasmania. In 1847, she was moved to the Oyster Cove settlement close to her birthplace, where she maintained some traditional lifestyle elements.

By the 1860s, Truganini and William Lanne had become anthropological curiosities, being incorrectly regarded as the last "full-blood" Aboriginal Tasmanians under the racial categories used at the time. After her death in Hobart in 1876, her body was exhumed by the Royal Society of Tasmania. Her skeleton was on public display in the Tasmanian Museum until the 1940s, but was returned to the Aboriginal community in 1976 and cremated. Some of her remains were sent to the Royal College of Surgeons of England and were only repatriated in 2002. Czytaj więcej