02/07/2026
Reading the story of F***y Smith you can discover the power of a simple phonograph cylinder. This story sums up so well Music Makers Museum’s vision and tag line, Vocies from the Past Inspiring the Future.
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In 1899, a 65-year-old woman stood before a strange device—a wax-cylinder phonograph—and spoke into its metal horn:
"I'm F***y Smith. I was born on Flinders Island. I'm the last of the Tasmanians."
Then she began to sing in a language no one else alive could speak.
F***y Cochrane Smith was born in 1834 at Wybalenna on Flinders Island—not into freedom, but into what the British called an "Aboriginal Establishment." In reality, it was a concentration camp.
Her mother, Tanganutura, belonged to the Cape Portland people of northeastern Tasmania. Before European invasion in 1803, between 2,000 and 8,000 Palawa people lived across the island. By the 1830s, disease, massacres, forced removals, and systematic violence—now known as the Black War—had reduced that population to roughly 200 survivors.
In 1833, George Augustus Robinson persuaded those survivors to surrender, promising safety and protection. Instead, they were exiled to Wybalenna—a windswept island settlement where people died in shocking numbers from illness, hunger, despair, and deliberate neglect.
Into this place of death, F***y was born. She was the first child born at Wybalenna.
That gave her a tragic distinction: as a child, she learned songs, words, and stories from survivors of many different Tasmanian language groups—the last people who still remembered them. She was gathering fragments of a disappearing world before she could understand what loss meant.
At five years old, F***y was taken from her parents and placed in the care of Robert Clark, the settlement's catechist—the man responsible for Christian instruction. His wife gave her the surname "Cochrane," as though renaming her could erase who she was.
What followed was cruelty. A later government inquiry found that Clark had "on several occasions chained and flogged F***y Cochrane." She was a child. The man tasked with her spiritual care was torturing her.
Another Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, suffered similar abuse under Clark until Lady Jane Franklin removed her through adoption. Mathinna's life ended young as well—another victim of colonial destruction.
Wybalenna closed in 1847. The survivors were transferred to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. Two years later, F***y's father, Nicermenic, died there. She was fifteen years old.
At twenty, F***y married William Smith, an English convict transported for theft who worked as a sawyer. From then on, she was known as F***y Cochrane Smith.
Together, they built an outwardly ordinary life. They ran a boarding house in Hobart, then moved to Nicholls Rivulet near Oyster Cove. The Tasmanian government granted F***y land—first 100 acres, later expanded to 300 acres in 1889—as compensation for her Aboriginal status.
They raised eleven children. F***y split roofing shingles by hand and carried them herself. She walked fifty kilometers to Hobart for supplies. She grew food, fed neighbors, and became known throughout the region for her generosity, hospitality, and powerful singing voice.
She remained closely connected to other Aboriginal survivors, including Truganini—often wrongly called "the last Tasmanian." Truganini taught F***y traditional bush skills. Together they fished, hunted, and gathered traditional foods and medicines, keeping knowledge alive that the world assumed was already dead.
F***y converted to Methodism and, in a gesture both remarkable and heartbreaking, donated part of her land for a Methodist church that opened in 1901. An Aboriginal woman giving land for a settler church, on a continent stolen from her people.
After Truganini died in 1876, the Tasmanian government officially recognized F***y as "the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal."
That declaration triggered a grotesque debate. Scientists measured her skull. Scrutinized her hair. Argued over whether she was "full-blood" or "half-caste." Racist pseudoscience could not accept that a capable, articulate, successful woman could be fully Aboriginal.
Witness testimony, family accounts, and F***y's own words all confirmed her father was Nicermenic—not a European sealer. But prejudice refused to listen.
As she aged, F***y understood something devastating: when she died, the songs and languages she carried would die with her. Not one language—but fragments of many, gathered from the survivors she had known as a child at Wybalenna.
So she chose to preserve what she could.
She performed across Tasmania, singing the songs she remembered. In 1899, Horace Watson attended one of her concerts and recognized its historical importance. He arranged for her to record her voice using Thomas Edison's wax-cylinder phonograph—cutting-edge technology at the time.
On August 5, 1899, at 65 years old, F***y stood before the machine at the Royal Society of Tasmania and sang. She recorded again in 1903. Eight cylinders in total.
She spoke her name. She sang in English. She sang in Tasmanian Aboriginal languages no one else remembered. Melodies carried across thousands of years, now captured in wax grooves.
When she heard the playback—her own voice emerging from the machine—she wept.
"My poor race," she said. "What have I done?"
Some accounts say she believed she was hearing her mother's voice—her ancestors speaking back through the machine, reaching across death to touch her one more time.
F***y Cochrane Smith died on February 24, 1905, near Oyster Cove. She was seventy-one. Over 400 people attended her funeral. She was buried in secret to prevent the grave-robbing that had been inflicted on so many Aboriginal remains, including Truganini's.
Her recordings survived.
Those eight fragile wax cylinders became the only audio recordings of any Tasmanian Aboriginal language in existence. The sole surviving sounds of cultures the world had tried to erase.
For more than a century, linguists, historians, and her descendants safeguarded them. In 2017, they were added to the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register, recognized as irreplaceable human heritage.
More importantly, they became the foundation for palawa kani—a revived Tasmanian Aboriginal language reconstructed using F***y's voice and early written records.
Her descendants are now learning words she sang into a machine 125 years ago.
The language was not lost. It was waiting.
F***y's declaration—"I'm the last of the Tasmanians"—turned out to be wrong.
She was not the end. She was the bridge.
Many Tasmanian Aboriginal people today descend directly from her eleven children. The church built on her donated land is now a museum in her honor. The songs she sang are being learned again by people who carry her blood.
She was beaten for being Aboriginal. Questioned for being too accomplished to be "really" Indigenous. Told she represented extinction.
Instead, she ensured survival.
At 65, she sang into a machine and carried her people forward in sound.
Her voice remains—faint, crackling, undeniable—proving that even when colonization tries to erase a civilization, one woman's courage to sing can preserve an entire world.
