Her father was Towterer, an exiled leader of the Ninine tribe originally from south-west Tasmania, and her mother was Wongerneep.

[1] In 1837 Sir John Franklin was appointed Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen's Land for a term of four years.

Robinson sent her a nine-year-old boy named Timemendic, whom Lady Jane renamed Timeo and handed over to her step-daughter Eleanor Franklin.

He was trained as a household servant but was deemed too "idle and disobedient" and the Franklins attempted to offload him to the Hobart Orphan School.

[1] In 1842, Lady Jane commissioned Thomas Bock to paint Mathinna's portrait in which she is portrayed famously in a scarlet dress.

Lady Jane sent the portrait to her sister in England with a letter describing Mathinna as "one of the remnant people about to disappear from the face of the earth", who has "the unconquerable nature of the savage".

Her skull was determined to have been among the dozen or so ransacked from that burial ground in the summer of 1908-09 by Sir William Edward Hamilton Crowther and his friend Wendell Inglis Clark.