Read an extract from A Very Secret Trade by Cassandra Pybus.
My research into the colonial past in archives, newspapers, diaries and personal papers has revealed much that has been wilfully forgotten, but also there was a good deal that was deliberately hidden at the time, especially interactions with the original owners of the land. Communications never committed to paper, official records never made, diaries that spoke of events in enigmatic riddles or code, personal papers discreetly laundered to remove problematic evidence . . . all of these hidden histories vastly complicate the task of truth telling.
While writing my book Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse, I was haunted by Truganini’s anguished request that, after she died, her body be sunk into the D’Entrecasteaux Channel: ‘Bury me here, it is the deepest place. Promise me. Promise me.’ It was only after I had written her life story that I began to understand the full extent of her anguish. When that book was all but finished, I was browsing the personal papers of a distinguished Tasmanian historian when I happened upon the transcribed letter of a colonial lawyer who was a very prominent member of the Royal Society of Tasmania. This letter took my breath away. Written six years before Truganini’s death, the letter boasted ownership of the complete skeleton of one of her closest companions. Once I had recovered from the shock, I made a hasty addition to my book to include this startling information. Then I went looking for more.
It is something of a truism of historical research that you never see what you are not looking for, which may explain why this colonial lawyer escaped my notice. I would not have thought to pay him any attention, let alone read through multiple volumes of his business letterbooks to find—among correspondence about investments, wills and interest payments—a number of letters about his acquisition of the skeletal remains of the First People. That these incriminating letters had remained among his archived papers could be explained by his unexpected death in 1878, while he was only in middle age. That did not explain why the distinguished historian who had transcribed the letters into his own voluminous archive in the 1960s had chosen not to remark upon them in his published writing.
These letters were a revelation to me. I realised that even after years of exhaustive research, I still did not know the full story of what happened to the First People of Tasmania who had been exiled from their country and died in the custody of the colonial government. I had never seen an official death notice or burial record for anyone, other than the two supposed ‘last’—memorialised as King Billy and Queen Truganini. There were no official records in the archives, nor had any been created.
I was driven to investigate what this was all about, but could never have imagined how hard it would be to excavate the story of what I came to regard as ‘secret whitefella business’. More than once over the past four years I have wanted to abandon the project. It was the words of the Noongar poet and novelist Claire Coleman, which I heard on ABC Radio National in July 2022, that convinced me to persevere. She said: ‘There are truths out there that need to be found.’
A Very Secret Trade
by Cassandra Pybus
Author of the bestselling Truganini, Cassandra Pybus has uncovered one of the darkest and best kept secrets in Australian colonial history
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