Tragedy and loss

Dear Editor,

In his otherwise eloquent defence (‘Seeing Truganini’, May 2010) of Benjamin Law’s busts of Truganini and Woureddy as ‘irreducible historical objects’, secular works of art and therefore items that should be available for free discussion and exchange, and also in his sketching of the various shades of guilt accompanying this very complex issue, David Hansen, a professional curator, is, I feel, himself ‘guilty’ of looking around these works rather than at them – in fact, not ‘seeing’ them. Dr Hansen says: ‘It is not the sculpture that conveys the extinction myth, but the way the image is and has been used in another past, a later past.’ Focusing on Truganini, he details how, when her bust was made, there were still ‘two hundred full-blood Palawa living’, Darwin’s ‘Origin’ was twenty years off, Truganini was ‘smart and vivacious, young and attractive’, and she and her treaty group were ‘A-list colonial celebrities’.