Too many prominent Indigenous figures are recalled in popular myth and history as supposedly having slipped between traditional and European worlds.

Even when historians began affording greater texture to the Indigenous experience in the mid-20th century (novelists and dramaturgs would follow), popular distorted myths about some of the most important Aboriginal people of colonial times nonetheless persisted.

Bennelong is still fallaciously recounted as an obstreperous drunk who ultimately fitted in with neither his people nor with the colonists. Bungaree’s epic part in Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation and his unofficial role as emissary to the invaders is often eclipsed by his later descent into drunkenness (in a colony whose currency was grog), ill health and vagrancy.

And then there is Truganini, storied incorrectly as “the last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal race”, a Nuenonne woman from one of the Earth’s most beautiful realms – the paradise off the south-east coast of Tasmania that became Bruny Island.

Truganini’s life has frequently been crafted into something of a three-act “tragedy” – a trope that focuses, first, on her idyllic early life and European disruption; second, on her dispossession from country; and third, her 1876 death at Oyster Cove near Hobart and the later display of her remains in a cabinet at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. So very much else that came between has been forgotten or gone untold.

Tragedy, of course – as Emma Dortins wrote in relation to Bennelong – “is not life or history”. Indeed, tragedy is a dramatic reinterpretation of the peaks and troughs – a precis – of both, with all of the rounding out of story and the honing off of the barnacles of human experience that impede smooth narrative.

Barrister John Woodcock Graves stands over Truganini. Photograph: Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts

The Tasmanian historian and writer Cassandra Pybus pushes the historiographical boundary on Truganini. She does a profound service to the complex life of this remarkable woman with her new biography, Truganini: Journey Through the Apocalypse. Pybus ventures beyond the tragic trope that has defined Truganini, the sadness surrounding her death and the horror of the exhumation and display of her remains by the Royal Society of Tasmania.

This was part of Truganini’s life and postmortem, of course. But Pybus brings so much more of Truganini’s experience to the page. She gives us her story of survival and at times unimaginable physical endurance in what Pybus aptly describes as an apocalypse (Ria Warrawah – the intangible force of evil unleashed with European arrival – to Truganini’s Nuenonne people) that descended upon the first Tasmanians post-invasion.

Their world was upended. Under the governor George Arthur martial law was declared as the colony tried to rid itself – through war, ongoing massacres and poisonings, and later the absurdly ineffective “black line” – of Tasmania’s First Peoples.

Pybus presents Truganini’s life as one of resilience and of adaptation to precarious pathways through dispossession. It shows her negotiating the sexual demands of the violent sealers and others, and of the traditions she managed to cling to – including marriage to Wooredy – despite the constant infringements of colonialism’s avaricious commodification of land, resources and Indigenous bodies.

The figure – and the rich archive – of George Augustus Robinson, a self-styled missionary who took it upon himself to “conciliate” with the Indigenes of Tasmania (and to remove them from their land and herd them into one isolated place) partly informs Pybus’s Truganini. But where other scholars and writers have mined the Robinson archive for all it says about this perplexing and morally ambiguous man himself, Pybus has drawn from his invaluable, decades’-long observation of Truganini.

Photograph: Allen & Unwin

Truganini emerges as wholly, spiritually and physically in sync with her natural world, having rejected Christianity despite the efforts of Robinson and others to inculcate her and the others.

We learn of the fabulous swimmer who relished diving for crayfish (there’s an encounter with a shark!). We see a woman who loved children, a desired and desirous lover who took agency where she could, and a canny negotiator with Robinson and the colonial authorities who were pursuing the extinction of her people.

Of Truganini’s possum trapping, for example, Pybus writes: “She deftly wove a rope from the long wiry grass and hooked it around the trunk of a tree to pull herself up, cutting notches in the bark for her feet as she ascended. Once in the canopy, she would grab at the possum to knock it to the ground.”

While this communion with nature should be no surprise, Pybus’s portrayal of that relationship is laced with moving poignancy, her prose about the bounty and wonder of country and Truganini’s connection to it as lush and beautiful as the land itself.

There is a reason for this. Pybus is descended from the colonist who received the biggest freehold land grant on Truganini’s Nuenonne country.

“Wooredy and Truganini compel my attention and emotional engagement because it is to them I owe a charmed existence in the temperate paradise where I now live and where my family has lived for generations,” she writes.

It is a profound hook for an important book that goes a long way towards reinvesting Truganani with all that has been eclipsed by the trope of her “tragedy”.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist. Truganini by Cassandra Pybus is out now through Allen & Unwin