Join us for a Friends Member exclusive book club, where the book choice is eclectic, the guests are captivating and the company is Friendly.

For the second Friends online Book Club, join special guest author, Cassandra Pybus for a thoughtful conversation about her book Truganini: Journey Through the Apocolypse.

From the book description:

'Cassandra Pybus's ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn't know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne.

For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than we can imagine. But her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy. Now Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness accounts to write Truganini's extraordinary story in full.

Hardly more than a child, Truganini managed to survive the devastation of the 1820s, when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but extinguished. She spent five years on a journey around Tasmania, across rugged highlands and through barely penetrable forests, with George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary who was collecting the survivors to send them into exile on Flinders Island. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy - the so-called extinction of the original people of Tasmania.

Truganini's story is inspiring and haunting - a journey through the apocalypse.'

You’ll have the opportunity to ask questions during the session in a friendly and informal online setting. Settle in for a Friends-only chat, to learn and converse in the comfort of home with a good group of Friends.

Join this session via Zoom and learn how digitisation defeats isolation and opens up access in a pandemic, or any time.

To join this online event register for the event with your Friends membership number. We will send out an email prior to the event with the Zoom URL, as well as reminder emails a week, a day and an hour before the webinar with the URL to join.

Before joining, be sure to check system requirements to avoid any connection issues: https://zoom.us/test (note: this is to test your connection, please ignore the webcam and audio components)

Become a member of the Friends of the National Library of Australia. 

You can order you print or audio copy from the National Library Bookshop Friends Book Club List. 

Image: Cover of Truganini: Journey Through the Apocolypse  https://nla.gov.au/nla.cat-vn8167887