11 April 1876, Hobart, Tasmania – There is but one survivor of the Tasmanian race still alive, her name is Mrs or Queen Truccanine, she lives here ‘en famille’, the kind people who have taken her under their protection for some years get a government grant of £60 to help defray the expenses of her keep. I believe it’s a common practice of visitors to go and inspect her, but we didn’t know till we had left & she kicked the bucket a fortnight after. (From the journal of Victor Emmanuel Smyth)
Can I describe her, whose voice is so long gone
whose language is remaindered in the wind
whose mother British sailors stabbed to death
whose sisters were enslaved and sold for sex
whose uncle British soldiers shot. Who at sixteen
was seized and raped by several timbermen.
Whose step-mum mutinous convicts stole away.
Whose lover, tossed from a boat, died not from that
but from his hands being cut off with an axe
when he tried climbing in. Who still somehow
took joy in hunting – deftly wove a rope from
wiry grass – to catch the possums in the Eucalyptus
trees, whose voice is gone, whose people died
by kidnap, hunger, theft, by government decree.
