Yagan's Head

July 11, 1833 — Yagan, the Noongar warrior and resistance leader, was shot and killed by a young British settler near the Swan River Colony in Western Australia. He had become a symbol of Aboriginal resistance to the expanding British settlements on his people’s ancestral lands.

After his death, Yagan’s head was severed and taken to England, where it was displayed at the Liverpool Museum before being buried in Everton Cemetery in 1964.

In 1997, after long negotiations, his head was exhumed and repatriated to Australia. For more than a decade, debates among Yagan’s descendants and the Noongar community delayed his reburial.

At last, in July 2010, nearly 177 years after his death, Yagan’s head was laid to rest with full traditional ceremony in the Swan Valley, returning him to the country he had fought to defend.