Yagan biography sample

Australian Noongar warrior (c. 1795 – 1833)

For other uses, see Yagan (disambiguation).

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.

Yagan biography sample pdf

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.^[1][2] The government offered a bounty for Yagan's capture, dead or alive, and a young settler, William Keats, shot and killed him.

He is considered a legendary figure by the Noongar.^[3][4]

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