By the late 1820s, the Black War between British colonists and Tasmania's Aboriginal clans had grown savage. The Lieutenant-Governor, George Arthur, settled on a policy of exile, shipping captured Aboriginal people to islands off the coast. Into this came George Augustus Robinson, a former bricklayer who proposed gathering the scattered survivors not by force but by persuasion. He genuinely believed he was saving them — a paternalistic conviction that made him incapable of seeing how thoroughly his mission served the colonial agenda of dispossession. His "friendly mission" set out in 1830, guided by Aboriginal people who walked their own Country to bring in their own kin. One of those guides was Truganini, a Nuenonne woman from Bruny Island. Another leader, Mannalargenna of the Trawlwoolway clan of north-eastern Tasmania, cooperated with Robinson in the explicit belief that his people would be protected. He died at Wybalenna in 1835. The promise that drew them in was the first thing the place broke.

At an earlier camp called The Lagoons, the people had been allowed to hunt, hold corroborees, and build their own well-ventilated shelters around a central fire. Wybalenna took all of that away. They were pressed to wear European clothing, attend church, give up the bush. They were housed in a row of small plastered rooms, poorly ventilated and overcrowded, where respiratory disease moved easily from body to body. The food and water were inadequate and stayed that way. In 1836 an official from Launceston, surveying the toll, concluded that the inhabitants were being deliberately exterminated. When the Quaker James Backhouse visited in 1837, he found their health wretched. The dying was not sudden. It was a slow attrition, year after year, in a place that called itself a refuge.

What the people of Wybalenna did next deserves to be remembered as an act of extraordinary defiance. In 1846, led by Walter George Arthur of the Ben Lomond people and signed by seven others, they wrote directly to Queen Victoria, protesting the brutality of their commandant, Henry Jeanneret. It was the first petition ever written by Indigenous Australians to a reigning monarch. "He used to carry pistols in his pockets and threatened to shoot us," they wrote. "Our houses were let fall down and they were never cleaned but covered with vermin... eleven of us died when he was here... he put many of us into jail for talking to him because we would not be his slaves." The petition worked. An inquiry followed, Jeanneret was removed, and in 1847 the surviving 47 people were taken to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. The mission had failed at everything except killing.

The indignities did not end with death. Robinson ordered autopsies on those who died at Wybalenna and the removal of skulls from at least a dozen bodies, which were handed out as curiosities to collectors. After the site was abandoned and the chapel converted to a barn, the cemetery, holding more than a hundred graves, was left to be trampled by livestock. In the 1870s a collector named Morton Allport paid a local landowner, nicknamed "Resurrection Bob" for his grave-robbing, to dig up Palawa skeletons. The remains of named people, among them Mannapackername, Lucy, and Trowlebunner, were taken. This was theft of the dead, dressed up as science, and it is part of why repatriation remains an open wound across Australia and the world's museums to this day.

The story that Tasmania's Aboriginal people were wiped out is false, and it matters that you know it. Truganini, who died in 1876, was long and wrongly called "the last Tasmanian Aboriginal" — a claim her own descendants and modern scholars reject outright. Even her remains were not left in peace; her skeleton was displayed for decades before the community finally won the right to cremate her in 1976 and scatter her ashes on the D'Entrecasteaux Channel, as she had begged. The Tasmanian Aboriginal community endured, largely through the families of the Bass Strait islands — particularly at Cape Barren Island, where Palawa descendants of Aboriginal women taken by sealers built a community that persists to this day. In 1973 they founded the Flinders Island Aboriginal Association and reclaimed Wybalenna as sacred ground. They mark the graves. They tend the healing garden. The people the establishment was built to erase are still here, and Wybalenna is theirs.