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Bianca Williams, Research Centre Manager, The Australian Centre, The University of Melbourne

Grief, strength and resistance: The Black Woman of Gippsland is a powerful reckoning with colonial myths

Pia Johnson/Melbourne Theatre Company

A woman is tossed ashore, bedraggled and alone. She is believed to be a survivor of a shipwreck, possibly from the Britannia or the Britomart, both lost in the Bass Strait that year.

In 1846, the colony of Melbourne was gripped by panic as rumours spread that a white woman had been shipwrecked off the coast of Gippsland and was being held by a group of First Nations people at Port Albert.

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