"We’re in Truganini’s country. She cries, my sister. I forget to turn on the microphone. Her words are taken by the wind. But it’s not guilt or moral outrage. It’s sadness at the trauma of what happened here. There’s a wound in the coloniser’s mind. We have to go there, open to other possibilities: land rights, treaty and a deep connection to country and other ways of remembering. Truganini, then, not a victim of our white guilt, but Truganini a survivor of depth and complexity." Narration extract from Island Home Country, my documentary film in post production, 2007. She had the longest funeral in the history of the world. From the time of her physical death in 1876 to her cremation in 1976, it took a hundred years. Not that she wished it that way, but others thought her to be so important that they could not let her depart this life until they had finished with her. Andrys Onsman, Truganini's Funeral, Island No. 96.
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