Truganini (c. 1812 — 8 May 1876) was an Aboriginal Tasmanian woman who has been widely described as the last "full-blooded" Aboriginal Tasmanian. She was a member of the Nuenonne people and grew up on Bruny Island in south-eastern Tasmania. As a teenager she saw the death and displacement of much of Tasmania's Aboriginal population as a result of European colonisation during the Black War. She became a guide to George Augustus Robinson and took part in a series of expeditions to capture and exile the island's remaining Aboriginal population.

Truganini was herself exiled along with the surviving Aboriginal Tasmanian population to the Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island in 1835. She later spent time in the Port Phillip District (modern-day Victoria), where she became a fugitive and was tried alongside four others for the murder of a pair of whalers. After being acquitted of the crime, she was returned to Wybalenna and later moved to Oyster Cove. By 1872 she was the only Aboriginal resident left at Oyster Cover and began to be mythologised and romanticised as the "last of a dying race", becoming an object of fascination for the European population.

After her death, Truganini became a symbol of the supposed extinction of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. She has featured prominently in art, music, and literature, while the narratives surrounding her life have been continually re-defined and re-interpreted. Once cast as the final survivor of a "doomed race", she has since been reframed by some as a memorial to British genocide, and reclaimed by others as an anti-colonial figure. The mythology of Truganini as the "last Tasmanian" has itself been challenged as part of broader efforts to contest the myth of Aboriginal Tasmanian extinction.

Truganini was born around 1812 at Recherche Bay in southern Tasmania. She was the daughter of Manganerer, a senior figure of the Nuenonne people, whose country included Bruny Island and the coastal area of the Tasmanian mainland between Recherche Bay and Oyster Cove. Truganini's mother was likely a member of the Ninine people, another clan group from the Nuenonne's language group whose territory encompassed the area surrounding Port Davey.

By the time of Truganini's birth, the Nuennone population had been diminished by disease and violence as a result of European colonisation. Captain James Cook had first landed on Bruny Island at Adventure Bay in 1777, and within a few decades runaway convicts had begun to conduct raids on Tasmanian Aboriginal settlements to kidnap Aboriginal women. When a group of French explorers and scientists arrived on Bruny Island in 1802, they observed that the Nuenonne they encountered were terrified of the Europeans' guns and refused to allow their women to go near the visitors. After the establishment of Hobart in 1804, a large number of ships began to sail past Nuenonne country to enter the Derwent River.

The seal colonies that the Nuenonne relied on for food were soon destroyed, leaving many of the women reliant on trading sex for food with European settlers who had established whaling stations on the island. In 1816 Truganini's mother was murdered by a group of sailors, and in 1826 two of her sisters were kidnapped by a sealer. There is also an unverified account published in a book shortly before Truganini's death that around 1828 Truganini herself was abducted and raped by timber-cutters. According to the book, the timber-cutters also murdered two Nuenonne men, one of whom was Truganini's fiancé, by throwing them out of a boat and cutting off their hands as they tried to clamber back in.

By the 1820s, Tasmania was in the midst of the Black War. The kidnapping of Aboriginal women was particularly common, and retributive violence between displaced Aboriginal clans and settlers was prevalent. In 1828, driven by settler fears of Aboriginal guerrilla violence, the colony's governor George Arthur declared martial law. The order did not extend to Bruny Island, where the more cooperative attitude of the Nuenonne towards the European settlers was viewed as a model for Tasmania's other Aboriginal peoples. Given this less hostile relationship, the island was identified as a suitable site for an experiment in conciliation between the settlers and the Indigenous population. Arthur appointed George Augustus Robinson to set up supply lines and manage the colonists' relationship with the Aboriginal population of Bruny Island.

Robinson first encountered Truganini while she was living amongst a group of convict woodcutters on the mainland. He brought her back to Bruny Island, where he established a Christian mission at Missionary Bay. He used Truganini's presence at the mission to entice her father and a small group of other Aboriginal people to join her. He deplored the widespread trade in sex between Aboriginal women and European settlers, attempting with little success to "civilise" the mission's residents and put them to work in exchange for extra rations. Truganini spent her days at the mission diving for shellfish and crafting necklaces and baskets.