Seani Fool

CURSE OF THE APPLE ISLAND
Frater Carfax


from Liber Malorum, page 401

On the 20th of August, 1788, the same year as the mainland invasion of Australia by British colonists, Lieutenant William Bligh pulled into Adventure Bay on Bruny Island, Tasmania which was known then as Van Diemen's Land. Bligh planted Australia's first apple trees, thereby dooming the state of Tasmania to be known ever after as 'The Apple Island'.

Unaware of the curse he had invoked, Lieutenant Bligh then set sail for Tahiti and into history with the famous Mutiny on the Bounty in April 1789 which was led by Bligh's one-time close friend, Fletcher Christian. This was to be the first of three mutinies experienced by the unfortunate bearer of apples.

Much more tragically, the island state of Tasmania was to be the scene of some of the worst acts of genocide against the indigenous aboriginal population. In 1804, settlers were given permission to shoot the aboriginal peoples.

Amongst the most well known of the indigenous Tasmanians was a woman named Truganini, who has become an archetype of the struggle for aboriginal survival in Tasmania. Born in 1812, by the time she was seventeen her mother had been murdered by whalers, her sister abducted and shot by sealers and her husband-to-be murdered by timber fellers, while she herself had been brutally raped. She was instrumental in facilitating the movement of the surviving Tasmanian aboriginal peoples to nearby islands rather than face extermination.

Truganini died of natural causes in 1876.

One hundred years later, after many years as a museum exhibit, her remains were finally cremated and scattered in the D'Entrecasteaux Channel near her native lands on Bruny Island – the site of the first apple trees in Australia.