Listen to historian and award-winning author Cassandra Pybus discuss the inspiring and heart-wrenching story of Truganini.

The name of Truganini is vaguely familiar to most Australians as 'the last of her race'. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy: the extinction of the original people of Tasmania within her lifetime. For nearly seven decades she lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than most human imaginations could conjure.

Cassandra examines the original eyewitness accounts to write Truganini’s extraordinary story.

A lively, intelligent, young woman, Truganini managed to survive the devastating decade of the 1820s when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but extinguished. Taken away from Bruny Island in 1830, she spent five years on a journey around Tasmania, across rugged highland with the self-styled missionary George Augustus Robinson, who was collecting all the surviving people to send them into exile on Flinders Island. She managed to avoid a long incarceration on Flinders Island when Robinson took her to Victoria where she was implicated in the murder of two white men. Acquitted of murder, she was returned to Tasmania where she lived for another thirty-five years.

Her story is both inspiring and heart-wrenching, and it is told in full in this book for the first time.

*Refreshments will be offered following this Author Talk.

Image: Cassandra Pybus by Peter Mathews (2019)