‘We die we go to heaven, good people always crackney in heaven.’

– Druemerterpunner/ Alexander (Big River people)
Wybalenna, Flinders Island, 21 April 1838

‘Crackney’ means to ‘sit down’. Druemerterpunner lived through the first generation of colonial disruption in lutruwita / Tasmania. He expresses the interplay of his language with the colonists’ English and the different mythologies in dialogue between them. Powerful mythologies continue to shape how we speak of the past and imagine our future.