TASMANIA - WOOLLEY, Charles Alfred (photo.).

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Twin photographic portraits of Trugernanner (Truganini) and William Lanne, taken at Oyster Cove in 1866; These compelling studio portraits of Truganini (c.1812-1876) and William Lanne (1834-1869), issued in the 1870s by Hobart photographer Alfred Winter, have long been burdened by the colonial myth of "the last of the Tasmanians". Truganini, a Nuennone woman and daughter of Mangana, endured the killings of close family members, forced relocation to Oyster Cove, and the continual intrusions of settler violence. Although repeatedly described as the final Tasmanian Aborigine, this was a racist fiction disproved by the many descendants of her contemporaries.Lanne, often named as Truganini's third partner, was seized with his family in 1842, confined on Flinders Island, later moved to Oyster Cove and into a Hobart orphanage, and eventually went to sea as a whaler. Labelled the "last male" of his community, he died in 1869 of disease exacerbated by these conditions.Their portraits must be read within the 19th-century "salvage" ethnography that treated Indigenous peoples as vanishing subjects and sought to record them before their supposed extinction. From Bishop Francis Nixon's 1858 photographs of the tiny, imprisoned Oyster Cove community to Charles Woolley's 1866 studio images for the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, photography served a pseudo-scientific narrative of disappearance. Woolley's vignetted portrait of Truganini became an icon of this myth, even as it misrepresente

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