Bruny Island is a 362-square-kilometre (140 sq mi) coastal island of Tasmania, Australia, located at the mouths of the Derwent River and Huon River estuaries on Storm Bay on the Tasman Sea, south of Hobart. The island is separated from the mainland by the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. The island and the channel are named after French explorer, Antoine Bruni d'Entrecasteaux.
The island's Aboriginal name is lunawanna-allonah, from which the island settlements of Alonnah and Lunawanna are named.
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 Tasmanians 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 Cove and began to be mythologised and romanticised as the "last of a dying race", becoming an object of fascination for the European population.
An isthmus (/ˈɪs(θ)məs/ ISS-məs, ISTH-məs; pl.: isthmuses or isthmi /-maɪ/ -my; from Ancient Greek ἰσθμός isthmós 'neck') is a narrow piece of land connecting two larger areas across an expanse of water by which they are otherwise separated. A tombolo is an isthmus that consists of a spit or bar, and a strait is the sea counterpart of an isthmus, a narrow stretch of sea between two landmasses that connects two larger bodies of water.
The D'Entrecasteaux Channel /ˌdɒntrəˈkæstoʊ/ is a body of water located between Bruny Island and the south-east of mainland Tasmania, Australia. The channel forms the estuarine mouth for both the Derwent and Huon Rivers and empties into the Tasman Sea of the South Pacific Ocean. It was sighted by Abel Tasman in 1642 and later surveyed in 1792 by Bruni d'Entrecasteaux.
Towns along the channel include Margate, Snug, Kettering, Woodbridge, Flowerpot, Middleton and Gordon.
Alonnah is a rural locality on Bruny Island in the local government area (LGA) of Kingborough in the Hobart LGA region of Tasmania. The locality is about 60 kilometres (37 mi) south (by ferry) of the town of Kingston. The 2021 census recorded a population of 164 for Alonnah.
It is a small township on the western side of Bruny Island, facing the D'Entrecasteaux Channel.
Lunawanna is a small township on the western side of Bruny Island, Tasmania, facing the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. It is named after part of the Tasmanian Aboriginal name for Bruny Island, Lunawanna-alonnah, a nearby township about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) to its north being named Alonnah.
Lunawanna is in the federal electorate of Franklin, the Tasmanian House of Assembly division of Franklin, and the Tasmanian Legislative Council division of Huon. The Bruny Island local council amalgamated with Kingborough council in 1994 and Lunawanna is located in the Kingborough Council local government area.