Revamp inspired by Yagan

The City of Albany in Western Australia is proposing to update its Alison Hartman Gardens that includes a statue of Mokare, who did much to inform colonists about the culture and beliefs of the local Noongar people. The revamp has been inspired by Yagan Square in the centre of Western Australia’s capital, Perth.  Read more in Toby Hussey’s story in the Albany Advertiser, 10 July 2018 at: https://thewest.com.au/news/albany-advertiser/revamp-inspired-by-yagan-ng-b88890184z

Left: Robert Hitchcock’s Yagan Statue, Heirisson Island, Swan River, near Perth, Western Australia. Yagan (c. 1795–1833) was a Noongar warrior who played a key role in Aboriginal resistance to colonisation in the Perth area in the 1830s. Yagan died on 11 July 1833, when a trusted non-Aboriginal friend, William Keats, shot and killed him for a government bounty. Keats allegedly needed the money for his fare back to England. Yagan’s body was mutilated, his head removed so the bounty could be claimed. Yagan’s head was sent to England, where it was exhibited as ‘an anthropological curiosity’. It took 177 years for English authorities to return Yagan’s to relatives for a religious burial in July 2010. Yagan Square, named in honour of the famous warrior, was opened in Perth’s city centre on 3 March 2018.