William Lanne

William Lanne (1836 – 3 March 1869), also spelt William Lanné and also known as King Billy or William Laney, was an Aboriginal Tasmanian man, known for being the last "full-blooded" Aboriginal man in the colony of Tasmania.

Early life Lanne was born into the Indigenous Tarkinener clan of remote north-western Tasmania around 1836. He probably belonged to the last Aboriginal family group which was living a traditional lifestyle on mainland Tasmania after the policies of the colonial British government had either killed or removed almost the entire remaining Aboriginal population.

In December 1842, Lanne's family group, which included his father and mother, his four brothers, and himself as a young child, made contact at Arthur River with employees of the Van Diemen's Land Company which had an extensive land grant in the region. His father answered to the name of "Lanna" or "Lanne" and this was the surname that was applied to the whole family. Lynette Russell has argued that in all but one of the numerous existing portraits of Lanne he is wearing his whaling attire, confidently asserting his identity as a seaman.

Lanne had a good-humoured personality, was well-spoken and admired among the Hobart community. He is recorded as advocating for improving the living arrangements of the women at Oyster Cove Settlement by writing to colonial officials in 1864. He formed a relationship with Truganini and was generally regarded as being her spouse during this period. It is here that he was also introduced by the governor as the "King of the Tasmanians".

Death After returning from a whaling voyage on the Runnymede, which had been operating in the southern Pacific Ocean, Lanne was paid off and went to live at the Dog and Partridge Hotel at the corner of Goulburn and Barrack Streets in Hobart Town. Lanne died there two weeks later on 3 March 1869 from a combination of alcohol poisoning, cholera and dysentery. He was around 33 years old.

Mutilation and theft of Lanne's corpse Following his death, Lanne's body was mutilated and dismembered as part of a dispute between the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal Society of Tasmania over who should possess his remains. A member of the Royal College of Surgeons named Dr William Crowther applied to the government for permission to obtain and send the skeleton to the college's headquarters in London, but his request was denied.

Crowther ignored this decision and managed to break into the Hobart morgue where Lanne's body was kept. He dissected the corpse, removing Lanne's skull and replacing it with the skull of Thomas Ross, a recently deceased white school-teacher whose body was also in the morgue.

However, Sir James Agnew and George Stokell, from the Royal Society of Tasmania, soon discovered Crowther's work, and decided to thwart any further attempts by Crowther to collect "samples" by amputating Lanne's hands and feet. After cutting off Lanne's appendages, Stokell gave them to his associate John Woodcock Graves who stuffed them in his pockets as he left the morgue.

An enquiry was quickly organised into the theft of Lanne's body but was abandoned for political reasons. Stokell accused Crowther of stealing the corpse. Crowther, on the other hand, claimed he went to the hospital with a police escort where he found Stokell removing Lanne's bones from his corpse "in an indecent manner in which...messes of fat and blood were all over."

Other colonists took note of Crowther's act:

Crowther, it seems, retained Lanne's skull, which was probably donated to the Anatomy Department of the University of Edinburgh in 1888 by his son, Dr Edward Crowther. The rest of Lanne's skeleton appears most likely to have been retained in the Royal Society of Tasmania's museum.