She stepped up to the bell of a gramophone and sang. What came out changed everything.

For more than a century, the world was told a lie.

When Truganini passed away in 1876, British colonists declared the Aboriginal people of Tasmania — the Palawa — extinct. A people written off like a footnote in someone else's history book.

They were wrong.

Fanny Cochrane Smith was still very much alive. And she had something to say.

Born in 1834 at the Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island, Fanny grew up absorbing the languages, songs and traditions of her people — knowledge passed to her by her mother and by Elders who represented language groups from right across Tasmania. She also kept close ties with Truganini herself, fishing, hunting and collecting bush tucker and medicinal herbs together. This was a woman deeply rooted in culture, in Country, in her people.

Then in 1899, something extraordinary happened.

Fanny stepped up and sang into the bell of a gramophone. Her spoken introduction before the song begins with the words: "I'm Fanny Smith. I was born on Flinders Island. I'm the last of the Tasmanians."

These are some of the earliest recordings ever made in Australia — a sound recording of traditional Tasmanian Aboriginal songs and language, captured on wax cylinders. Four years later, in 1903, further recordings were made at the home of Horace Watson in Sandy Bay.

In total, her voice, her language was preserved forever.

The photographs of her singing into the bell of that phonograph machine, operated by Horace Watson, are among the most striking in Australia's entire audiovisual history.

Think about the world she was living in. Aboriginal people weren't even considered Australian citizens. A culture had been brutally dismantled. And yet here was this woman, proud and unbroken, singing the songs of her ancestors into a machine she'd probably never seen before — making sure her people's voice would outlive the lie that they no longer existed.

For the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, these recordings are songs of survival and represent their ongoing struggle for rights and recognition.

In recent years, these recordings have assisted the reconstruction of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages through the palawa kani program, allowing the Tasmanian Aboriginal community to actively reestablish ownership over their language.

In 2017, the recordings were added to the Australian Memory of the World Register, part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme.