home | news l

Remains of Truganini coming home after 130 years

By Peter Fray

May 29 2002 - Remains of Tasmanian Aborigine Truganini were returned to her community by a British museum yesterday, almost 130 years after her death.

Truganini, Tasmania's most famous Aboriginal woman. A hair sample was returned in 2002 from Britain's Royal College of Surgeons.

The Royal College of Surgeons of England repatriated the remains - skin and hair samples - along with several bones from unidentified Aboriginal people, to Tasmanian activists Jeanette James and Tony Brown.

Truganini, who was widely and erroneously described as the "last" Tasmanian Aborigine, was an enduring symbol of white colonial rule.

Mrs James said the college's remains were probably from four or five people, plus Truganini, and would be buried or cremated in Tasmania once attempts were made to identify their ancestors.

"This is very important," she said. "It enables us to put our ancestors to rest, to bring them home where they were born and belong."

The college is the first English institution to return Aboriginal bones and samples, which were mainly collected during the 19th century by anthropologists and officials for scientific research.

A high-powered House of Commons working group, which includes the college's president, Australian-born Sir Peter Morris, is examining British laws on human remains and is expected to report later this year. The laws prevent many museums from returning bones and other body parts that are deemed to be part of the national collection.

Truganini died in Hobart in 1876, aged about 73, the last full-blood Aborigine to succumb to generations of colonial illness, persecution, murder and dispossession. Her skeleton was on display in the Tasmanian Museum until 1947. A century after her death, she was cremated and her ashes scattered off the southern Tasmanian coast.

During a visit to London last year Aboriginal leader Rodney Dillon discovered the Royal College of Surgeons had her remains in its museum collection.

This story was found at: The Age

Further information: repatriation issues page - includes news index and external links

|| click to go to the top of this page