Australian Dictionary of Biography

Trugernanner (1812-1876), by unknown photographer

National Library of Australia, nla.pic-an23378504

Trugernanner (c. 1812–1876), palawa spokesperson and leader, also known as Truganini, was born in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) on the western side of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, in the south-east of the island. . Her father was Mangerner, leader of one of the south-eastern Tasmanian bands, and she grew up learning the ways of her people, making occasional visits to Port Davey. The lives of the south-eastern Tasmanian people were disrupted by European sealers, whalers, and timber-getters; by March 1829, when she and her father met the European colonist and missionary G. A. Robinson at Bruny Island, her mother had been killed by sailors, her uncle shot by a soldier, her sister abducted by sealers, and Paraweena, a young man who was to have been her husband, murdered by timber-getters. At Bruny Island mission in 1829 she married Woorraddy, from Bruny. They were associated with the missions that Robinson and his sons conducted around Van Diemen’s Land in 1830–35; they acted as guides and as instructors in their languages and customs, which were recorded by Robinson in his journal, making it one of the best ethnographic records of palawa society.

Trugernanner, Woorraddy, and other palawa from Robinson’s mission arrived at the Flinders Island Aboriginal settlement (Wybalenna) in November 1835. With another hundred or so captured palawa, they were to be Christianised and Europeanised and taught to be farmers. Trugernanner, who was renamed ‘Lallah Rookh’ by Robinson, held to her people’s traditional ways. In March 1836 she and Woorraddy returned to Van Diemen’s Land to search for family members remaining in the north-west. Arriving back at Wybalenna in July 1837, they found that many people had died, mainly due to malnutrition and illness. Trugernanner told Robinson that all her people would be dead before the houses being constructed for them were completed.

In February 1839, with Woorraddy and fourteen other palawa, she accompanied Robinson to Port Phillip. She and four others, without Woorraddy, later joined a party of whalers near Portland Bay. In 1841 all five Aboriginal people were charged with the murder of two whalers and in January 1842 two men were hanged. In July Trugernanner, with palawa women Fanny and Matilda, was sent back to Flinders Island with Woorraddy, who died en route. She lived with another palawa man, Alphonso, until October 1847 when, with forty-six others, she was relocated to a new establishment at Oyster Cove, in her traditional territory. She resumed much of her earlier lifestyle, diving for shellfish, visiting Bruny Island by catamaran, and hunting in the near-by bush. By 1869 she and William Lanney were said to be the only palawa of full-descent still alive. The mutilation of Lanney’s body after his death in March led Trugernanner to express concern; she told Rev. H. D. Atkinson, ‘I know that when I die the Museum wants my body’.

In 1874 she moved to Hobart Town with her guardians, the Dandridge family, and died in Mrs Dandridge’s house in Macquarie Street on 8 May 1876, aged 64. She was buried at the old female penitentiary at the Cascades at midnight on 10 May. Her body was exhumed in December 1878 by the Royal Society of Tasmania, authorised by the government to take possession of her skeleton on condition that it be not exposed to public view but ‘decently deposited in a secure resting place accessible by special permission to scientific men for scientific purposes’. But it was placed in the Tasmanian Museum where it was on public display from 1904 to 1947.

Trugernanner’s life is shrouded in myth and legend. Working with Robinson in 1829–35, she assisted in bringing in her compatriots because she wanted to save them from European guns. The establishment at Flinders Island was a grave disappointment to her. Small in stature, forceful, gifted, and courageous, she held European society in contempt and made her own adjustment on her own terms.

♦♦  This article was revised on 11 July 2025