Yagan

Yagan (; c. 1795 – 11 July 1833) was an Aboriginal Australian warrior from the Noongar people. Yagan was pursued by the local authorities after he killed Erin Entwhistle, a servant of farmer Archibald Butler. It was an act of retaliation after Thomas Smedley, another of Butler's servants, shot at a group of Noongar people stealing potatoes and fowls, killing one of them. The government offered a bounty for Yagan's capture, dead or alive, and a young settler, William Keats, shot and killed him. Yagan is considered a legendary figure by the Noongar. After his shooting, settlers cut off Yagan's head to claim the bounty. Later, an official sent it to London, where it was exhibited as an "anthropological curiosity" and eventually given to a museum in Liverpool. It held the head in storage for more than a century before burying it with other remains in an unmarked grave in Liverpool in 1964. Over the years, the Noongar asked for repatriation of the head, both for religious reasons and because of Yagan's traditional stature. The burial site was identified in 1993; officials exhumed the head four years later and repatriated it to Australia. After years of debate within the Noongar community on the appropriate final resting place, Yagan's head was buried in a traditional ceremony in the Swan Valley in July 2010, 177 years after his death.

Biography

Early life A member of the Whadjuk Noongar people, Yagan belonged to a tribe of around 60 people whose name, according to Robert Lyon, was Beeliar. Scholars now believe that the Beeliar people may have been a family subgroup (or clan) of a larger tribe whom Daisy Bates called Beelgar. According to Lyon, the Beeliar people occupied the land south of the Swan and Canning rivers, as far south as Mangles Bay. The group had customary land usage rights over a much larger area than this, extending north as far as Galup (formerly called Lake Monger) and northeast to the Helena River. The group also had an unusual degree of freedom to move over their neighbours' land, possibly due to kinship and marriage ties with neighbouring groups. Yagan is thought to have been born around 1795. His father was Midgegooroo, an elder of the Beeliar people; his mother was one of Midgegooroo's three wives. Yagan was probably a Ballaroke in the Noongar classification.

Marriage and family According to the historian Neville Green, Yagan had a wife and two children. A report in the Perth Gazette (now The West Australian) in 1833 gives the names of his children as Naral, age 9, and Willim, age 11, but most other sources state that the warrior was unmarried and childless. When his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography was rewritten in 2019, Reece suggested those said to have been his sons may have been his younger brothers. Described as taller than average with an impressive burly physique, Yagan had a distinctive tribal tattoo on his right shoulder, which identified him as "a man of high degree in tribal law". He was generally acknowledged to be the most physically powerful of his tribe, and was said to have been able to spear another stick from a distance of 23 metres (75 ft) or penetrate a tree from a distance of 55 metres (180 ft).

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