The Sea Inside

hardly mattered, since he was no longer Lanne at all. Having discovered what had gone on, George Stokell, resident surgeon at the hospital and member of the Royal Society of Tasmania, the rival of its London equivalent, was told to amputate Lanne’s hands and feet and so prevent Crowther from returning to claim the rest of the skeleton.
    King Billy – or what was left of him – was carried to his grave by fellow whalers, among them a Hawaiian, a South Australian Aborigine and an African-American. His coffin was covered with a black opossum-skin rug, ‘and followed by above a hundred citizens’, as
The Times
noted, adding that Lanne was ‘the last man of a race which only half a century ago numbered 7,000 souls...’ But that night, Lanne’s corpse suffered a third violation. Barely hours after interment, his coffin was dug up and his remains harvested by the Tasmanian scientists. His bones were as dispersed as St Oswald’s, only for reasons of science rather than of faith. When the bizarre conspiracy became public, cartoons appeared in the press depicting Crowther as a grave-robber, surrounded by coffins dangling from ropes and bat-winged devils out of a Victorian pantomime. It was claimed he kept Lanne’s skull as a paperweight on his desk in Hobart; its current whereabouts are unknown.
    Given these gruesome events, Truganini’s fears were entirely understandable. Shortly before she died, she asked that her body be cremated and her ashes scattered in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel that separates Bruny Island from Tasmania; like Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, she sought the oblivion of the sea. Instead, she was buried in Hobart’s suburbs, following a strange lying-in-state, wrapped in a rough red blanket and placed in a pauper’s shoe-blacked coffin. Her friend, the barrister John Woodcock Graves, said he’d never seen a corpse so ‘placid and beautifully quiet’. He suggested that a plaster cast be made of her face, and asked why the government had made no provision for the burial of such a notable person. Accordingly, the public were invited to ‘Queen Truganini’s’ funeral – but only after the Royal Society in London had removed samples of her skin and hair.
    Two years later, the Royal Society of Tasmania, which claimed, erroneously, that it did not have a female Aborigine specimen, was allowed to exhume Truganini’s remains on condition that the skeleton was not put on display. Her bones were stored in a box until 1904, when they were articulated and put on show in a glass case in Hobart’s museum as ‘The Last of Her Race’. In 1947, a belated decency overcame the curators and Truganini was removed from the public gaze, but it was not until 1976, one hundred years after her death, that Truganini’s final wishes were honoured: her remains were cremated and the ashes scattered off Bruny Island. As quickly as the events of her life had played out, so slowly history repaired the insult to her memory. In 2002 it was discovered that the samples of her hair and skin which had been taken were still held by the Royal College of Surgeons in Oxford. They were returned to Tasmania. Truganini had finally transcended her story. Her skeleton is gone from its glass cabinet, and does not even exist in the photograph that I have of it, which I cannot reproduce here.

    On 21 April 1805 a letter from William Paterson, Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, was published in the
Sydney Gazette
. It described an animal ‘of a truly singular and nouvel description’, which had been killed by dogs at Port Dalrymple, and which, so the excited editor informed his readers, ‘must be considered of a species perfectly distinct from any of the animal creation hitherto known, and certainly the only powerful and terrific member of the carniverous [sic] and voracious tribe yet discovered on any part of New Holland or its adjacent Islands’.
    Paterson’s interests were scientific as well as military. He was another protégé of Joseph Banks, to whom he had dedicated his
Narrative of Four Journeys into the Country of the Hottentots and Caffraia
, written after his sojourn in South Africa in 1780. His report from Van Diemen’s Land, which had the air of an academic paper, sealed the fate of the Tasmanian tiger. Like the island’s peoples, its seals and its whales, such exposure would prove to be the tiger’s undoing – and in the same short span. It all happened with extraordinary speed.
    For thousands of