Aboriginal Tasmanians
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Aboriginal Tasmanians are the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, a large island south of mainland Australia. Aboriginal people lived in Tasmania for tens of thousands of years before European settlement.
Illustration from The Last of the Tasmanians – Woureddy, Truganini's husband
A picture of the last four Tasmanian Aboriginal people of solely Aboriginal descent c. 1860s. Truganini, the last to survive, is seated at far right.
Horace Watson recording the songs of Fanny Cochrane Smith, considered to be the last fluent speaker of a Tasmanian language, 1903. Singer Bruce Watson, descendant of Watson, composed a song about this picture and later performed it with singer Ronnie Summers, a descendant of Smith.
Robert Dowling, Group of Natives of Tasmania, 1859. Critic Bernard William Smith assessed the work as a "history painting in the full sense of the word", with the natives "seated – emblematic of their situation – around the dying embers of a burnt-out log near a great blackened stump, and in the far left corner there is a leafless tree with shattered branches."
Fanny Cochrane Smith
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Fanny Cochrane Smith was an Aboriginal Tasmanian woman considered to be the last fluent speaker of an Aboriginal Tasmanian language. Born at the Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment in 1834, she married
Aboriginal Tasmanians
…colonial writers and popular media incorrectly described Aboriginal people in Tasmania as an extinct people following the deaths of Truganini in 1876 and Fanny Cochrane Smith in 1905, two women wrongly presented by colonial writers as the "last" Aboriginal Tasmanians. Tasmanian Aboriginal communities survived, particularly…
Smith c. 1900
Smith wearing shell necklaces and a belt with wallaby pelts
Smith recording songs for the ethnographer Horace Watson in 1903