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    Truganinni Inside Out
    Truganinni Inside Out
    Truganinni Inside Out
    Ebook124 pages1 hour

    Truganinni Inside Out

    By Bill Reed

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    About this ebook

    Seven years after King Billy’s death, Truganinni stood alone, arguably the most important living relic of her Tasmanian race. She would walk the streets of Hobart Town, resembling Queen Victoria in her voluminous skirts and headdress. She quite enjoyed the curiosity and finger pointing wherever she went. And she could go anywhere.

    Towards the end, she appeared to bear no malice towards her race’s persecutors. Growing stoutish, she smoked a pipe and enjoyed a daily jug of beer. But she began to grow ill and as her death loomed, so did the memories of what happened to King Billy’s body.

    On 8 May 1876, at the approximate age of 73, Truganinni died. She is said to have cried out, ‘Don’t let them cut me up. Bury me behind the mountains.’

    Only hours after the news, body-snatchers in the Royal Society of Tasmania started to bark for her body, as they had successfully done regarding King Billy. The government fought toe and nail politically to fight them off. Did it matter to the old girl?

    No, she was off regally floating across the Dreamtime skies of Australia, raising hell with her beloved Nanna, on their Shag Magnet anyway. By then the mission on Flinders Island of Act 1, and McKay’s house in Hobart Town in Act 3, were the least she wanted to put a bomb under...
    -------------------------
    Bill Reed is a novelist, playwright and short-story writer. He has worked as editor and journalist both in Australia and overseas, and has won national competitions for drama and for long and short fiction.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBill Reed
    Release dateJun 21, 2016
    ISBN9780994531155
    Truganinni Inside Out

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      Book preview

      Truganinni Inside Out - Bill Reed

      First published in 2016 by Reed Independent, Victoria, Australia.

      This is the Smashwords edition

      Available through Smashwords.com and all major online retail outlets. Also available as a paperback (ISBN 97809944531148) via major international retail outlets or bookshops with online ordering facilities

      Copyright Bill Reed 2016

      Front cover: Images courtesy of Google Images. Design assistance: Dilani Priyangika Ranaweera, Dart Lanka Productions

      National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

      Creator: Reed, Bill, author.

      Title: Truganinni Inside Out/ Bill Reed

      Edition: first

      ISBN: 9780994531148 (paperback)

      ISBN: 9780994531155 (ebook)

      Notes: includes bibliographical reference.

      Subjects: Drama/indigenous/black comedy

      Dewey Number: A822.3

      Contents

      Truganinni the Lady

      The Backgrounds

      The Characters

      Act 1: King Billy Coming

      Act 2: King Billy Going

      Act 3: Billyboy Gone

      About the author

      Also by Bill Reed

      Selected and listed on the Australian Script Centre’s website Australianplays.org.

      As its earlier shape, titled ‘Truganinni Inside’, this piece was listed for active production consideration by the Melbourne Theatre Company in 2004. In regard to this, Dr Julian Meyrick, the Director of the MTC, wrote on 10 November of that year:

      ‘I enjoyed the play immensely. The great strength of the writing, to my mind, is the way you handle the indigenous characters. So often this is not the case, and the results are stereotypes or caricatures on stage. But Truganinni and Nanna live powerfully. When Nanna, Truganinni and McKay tell Truganinni’s story together it is unforgettable. Truganinni’s cry… What I remember does not happen anymore– contains a depth of loss that has no end to it, it seems…’

      Truganinni the Lady

      ‘She was the daughter of Mangana, Chief of Bruni Island. Later in life, when she had mastered English, she told her story to Alexander McKay. Her mother was stabbed to death by a European. Her sister was carried off by sealers. In her childhood, accompanied by her intended husband Paraweena and another man, she was once on the mainland of Van Diemans Land. Two sawyers, Lowe and Newell, undertook to row the party to nearby Bruni Island. In mid-channel, the white men threw the natives overboard. As they struggled and grasped the gunwale, Lowe and Newell chopped off their hands with hatchets. The mutilated Aborigines were left to drown and the Europeans were free to do as they pleased with the girl.’

      Clive Turnbull, ‘The Black War’

      ------------------

      ‘... For example, the Tasmanian Aborigines died out not just because they were hunted like kangaroos for an afternoon's sport, but also because a world in which this could happen was intolerable to them; so they committed suicide as a race by refusing to breed. Ironically perhaps, and as though to confirm the Aborigines' judgement, the mummified remains of the old lady who was the last to survive have been preserved as a museum curiosity.’

      A. A. Alvarez, ‘The Savage God’

      -----------------

      ‘Seven years after King Billy’s death, Truganinni stood alone, a living relic of her race. She would walk the streets of Hobart Town, resembling Queen Victoria in her voluminous skirts and headdress. She quite enjoyed the curiosity and finger pointing of the townspeople.

      Towards the end, she appeared to bear no malice towards her race’s persecutors. Growing stoutish, she smoked a pipe and enjoyed a daily jug of beer. But she began to grow ill and as her death loomed, so did the memories of what happened to King Billy’s body.

      The fear obsessed her like a disease and repeatedly she begged and pleaded that no such horror should befall her.

      On May 8th 1876, at the approximate age of 73, Truganinni died.

      Only hours after the news, body-snatchers in the Royal Society of Tasmania started to bark for her body. The government tried to fight them off.

      She was buried in a secret grave in a plain wooden casket. But the promises made to her were false ones, yet again. Years after her death her body was exhumed with the full approval of the government. Her skeleton was displayed in the Tasmanian Museum, alongside the skeletons of animals.

      In 1953, a deputation to the Tasmanian Premier resulted in her skeleton being removed from public display and placed in a box to be opened only by ‘bona fide’ scientists.

      And thus it was that, for decades, in a black casket in Hobart’s Tasmanian Museum lay the broken bones of an aboriginal queen – and in her irreverent tomb are squashed the broken dreams of a race.’

      Tess Lawrence, Melbourne Herald, 24 May 1974

      Author’s note: In 2002, there came an official public burial of sorts. Some of her ‘hair and flesh’ that had been lodged with the College of Surgeons in London were returned to Tasmania, allowing a formal ceremony before the nation’s cameras of scattering her ashes on the waters of her beloved Derwent.

      The Backgrounds

      King Billy (William Lanne)

      King Billy (real name William Lanne) died in 1869 at the age of 34. As the ‘last’ male Tasmanian, his skeleton was valuable. After death, they removed his skull from its skin; cut off his hands, cut off his feet, grave-robbed him. His fully-identified bones were never found.

      He was best known as the last full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian man.

      He was captured along with his family in 1842 during a period known as the Black War. He was the youngest child in the last family taken to the Aboriginal camp at Wybelenna on Flinders Island by George Augustus Robinson. His native name is lost.

      In 1855 he joined a whaling ship and regularly visited Oyster Cove when he had time. Lanne died on 3 March 1869 from a combination of cholera and dysentery.

      Following his death, his body was dismembered and used for scientific purposes. A member of the English College of Surgeons named William Crowther managed to break into the morgue where King Billy's body was and decapitated the corpse, removed the skin and inserted a skull from a white body into the black skin. The Tasmanian Royal Society soon discovered Crowther's work, and decided to thwart any further attempts to collect samples by amputating the hands and feet. Lanne was then buried in this state.

      Because he was accused of the theft of Lanney's head (and the illicit use of another white person's head!), Crowther's honorary appointment as surgeon at the Colonial Hospital terminated. Yet in 1869, the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons awarded him a gold medal and the first Fellowship of the College ever awarded to an Australian. Crowther later became Premier

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