Yagan

Yagan was an Aboriginal Australian warrior from the Noongar people. He played a key part in early resistance to British colonial settlement and rule in the area surrounding what is now Perth, Western Australia. Yagan was pursued by the local authorities after he killed Erin Entwhistle, a servant of farmer Archibald Butler. The government offered a bounty for Yagan’s capture, dead or alive, and a young settler, William Keats, shot and killed him. After his shooting, settlers removed his head to claim the bounty. It is considered a symbol of the unjust and sometimes brutal treatment of the indigenous peoples of Australia by colonial settlers.

About Yagan in brief

Yagan was an Aboriginal Australian warrior from the Noongar people. He played a key part in early resistance to British colonial settlement and rule in the area surrounding what is now Perth, Western Australia. Yagan was pursued by the local authorities after he killed Erin Entwhistle, a servant of farmer Archibald Butler. The government offered a bounty for Yagan’s capture, dead or alive, and a young settler, William Keats, shot and killed him. After his shooting, settlers removed his head to claim the bounty. 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. The burial site was identified in 1993; officials exhumed the head four years later and repatriated it to Australia. The head was buried in a traditional ceremony in the Swan Valley in July 2010, 177 years after his death. It is considered a symbol of the unjust and sometimes brutal treatment of the indigenous peoples of Australia by colonial settlers. He was generally acknowledged to be the most physically powerful of his tribe. He had a distinctive tribal tattoo on his right shoulder, which identified him as ‘a man of high degree in tribal law’ Yagan belonged to a tribe of around 60 people whose name, according to Robert Lyon, was Beeliar. His father was Midgegooroo, an elder of the beeliar people; his mother was presumably one of his two wives. According to the historian Neville Green, Yagan had a wife and two children. He would have been about 35 years old in 1829 when British settlers landed in the region and established the Swan River Colony.

In December 1831 Yagan and his father led the first significant resistance to white settlement in Western Australia and killed one of the settlers, Thomas Smedley, who had shot at a group of Noongars stealing potatoes and fowls. A few days later Yagan stormed a potato patch and killed a few of his family, and one of others, and killed another settler who had ambushed some natives who were raiding a potatoes patch. He is considered to have been a Ballaroke in the Noongsar classification. The Beelar people had customary land usage rights over a much larger area than this, extending north as far as 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. As time passed, conflicts between the two cultures gradually became more frequent. The settlers incorrectly thought that the Noongoar were nomads who had no claim to the land over which they roamed. As the colonists fenced off more land, the Noongaar were increasingly denied access to their hunting grounds and hunting grounds. They also developed a taste for traditional sacred sites, killed their cattle and began to take flour and other food, which became a serious problem for the colony. In addition, the practice of fire-stick farming, which encourages the farming of undergrowth for sustainability, threatened the settlers’ crops and houses.

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