- há 9 horas
For well over a century the remains of Yagan, an Indigenous Noongar warrior from Western Australia, were missing in the United Kingdom. The search for Yagan and the fight to bring him home is one of history's wildest detective stories.
Categoria
📚
AprendizadoTranscrição
00:02The world is in shock.
00:04August 31st, 1997.
00:06On a night of tragedy.
00:08If you were alive and old enough,
00:10I promise you will remember where you were on this day.
00:15Diana, Princess of Wales, is dead,
00:17and Britain is in mourning.
00:19The 36-year-old princess was killed
00:21in a high-speed car chase in Paris
00:23early Sunday morning Australian time.
00:25Newspapers, magazines, they were all screaming with headlines.
00:28But for one community here in Perth, in Western Australia,
00:31this day means something else entirely.
00:36I remember going to the airport
00:38and there was just a wave of our people.
00:42You see all the colours, red, black and yellow.
00:45You hear the cries and it's something you don't forget.
00:49They lost their daughter and we brought home our son.
00:54There were hundreds of people wailing in this very airport
00:58but they weren't crying for a princess.
01:00They were crying because something, someone for years,
01:06had been missing.
01:10In the days of the British Empire, things were taken.
01:14They usually ended up in museums and galleries with polite plaques.
01:19My name is Mark Fennell and this is the not-so-polite story
01:23of how they really got there.
01:34Welcome to Perth, Western Australia,
01:36home to the Indigenous Noongar people for thousands of years.
01:40This place is the beginning and the end
01:43of one of the wildest archaeological detective stories.
01:47When he turned his back...
01:48He was shot by a young bloke.
01:50He thought we were his friends.
01:51The bullet went into the back of the skull.
01:55This is the story of a leader who stood against an empire
02:00only to find himself lost right at the heart of Great Britain.
02:06And that man is why I'm here to meet this woman, Vanessa Karuna.
02:11Hiya!
02:12Like a lot of Noongar mob, Vanessa can draw a bloodline
02:15right back to that warrior.
02:17My connection to Yagin is through my dad.
02:20He'd be one of my grandpops, grandfathers, yeah.
02:24Yeah.
02:24Yeah.
02:28Yes.
02:29Yagin.
02:30Born in the late 1700s, Yagin was a Noongar leader
02:33at a crucial time.
02:37A time when the water brought pale-skinned visitors
02:40to Noongar land.
02:42The British.
02:47In the beginning, the Noongar were welcoming,
02:50but the settlers started carving up the land as they saw it.
02:53Suddenly, fences like this start popping up all around
02:57as the British start dividing up the land like this.
03:00Yeah, completely different.
03:02They brought in laws that restricted our people
03:04from actually going into places.
03:07Yeah, look, I think it would have been very difficult
03:10for our people because, you know,
03:12we want to go into our country and hunt
03:14and do what we used to do.
03:15We know that's our land.
03:17Why can't we go in there anymore?
03:19Who are these people?
03:20And that is when the reality of colonisation,
03:25invasion, starts to be realised by everyone.
03:27Our people did put up a big resistance
03:31against this colonisation.
03:33And then we see that there is these early pockets
03:35of conflict that take place and killings.
03:38If you go flicking through the records,
03:40it seems like the first conflict that's recorded,
03:42at least by the British, is that Noongar men
03:44take potatoes from some of these British farms.
03:47Like, that's how they see this conflict starting.
03:51That is so ridiculous.
03:53I mean, the conflict started when they came in and took the land.
03:57That's where it started.
03:58And you can't say that it started over a potato.
04:02No way.
04:04Settlers kill Noongar people for what they perceive to be trespassing and taking food,
04:09which, in Yeagin's Noongar law, demands a response.
04:14You know, with Yeagin, it was an eye for an eye.
04:17And so, if someone in his clan group had been killed,
04:22then there was a need to give payback.
04:25And that happened.
04:29When the British, at the time, write about Yeagin,
04:32they call him an outlaw, they call him a murderer.
04:35They're labels that they've put on him.
04:37But we know that what he did was the right thing for his people.
04:41And so, what did the British do?
04:43Well, they put out a price on his head, really, don't they?
04:48By his law, Noongar law, he's done right.
04:51But according to British law, Yeagin now finds himself a criminal.
04:54And so, you have the situation of two laws on one land with one man.
04:59And that is why we're here.
05:02So, we're headed to the old courthouse in Perth.
05:05This was the original courthouse
05:07and apparently also the first public building here.
05:10Dr Hannah McGlade is a Noongar woman and human rights lawyer.
05:14My interest is Aboriginal justice.
05:16And that's what I've done, using the law any which way we can
05:21to fight for Aboriginal justice.
05:23For Hannah, the story of Yeagin has been misrepresented
05:26for a very long time.
05:31Hi, welcome Hannah. I'm Natasha Fenner.
05:34Hi, I'm Mark. Nice to meet you.
05:35Historian Natasha Fenner is opening up archives for us.
05:38OK, I'll put out some documents for you both today to have a look at.
05:41And these pages reveal really a war with Yeagin and those closest to him at the heart of it.
05:49The violence between the British and these Noongar men escalates.
05:54Yeagin's brother is killed and his father, Mijuguru, is captured by the British.
05:58And they blindfold him and tie him to the door and he's executed by firing squad by the military.
06:06Yeagin does hear of his father's death and he vows to take revenge.
06:13I think in this story that I'm reading here, Yeagin has said basically that he has speared three white men.
06:21And he's saying, my brother was killed. His father was killed.
06:25He's doing what he had to do by Aboriginal law.
06:28What actually happens to Yeagin in the end?
06:31There was a bounty put on his head.
06:34He came across two young men that he knew, some settlers, and he was friendly to them.
06:41They were two teenagers, boys.
06:44And I never forget this growing up. We don't forget this.
06:47When he turned his back, that's when they took the opportunity to shoot him in the back.
06:54And for Yeagin, who was a warrior, it's shocking that he was killed in such a cowardly way.
07:04But in the end, the British didn't just take Yeagin's life.
07:08They took something else.
07:11His body was violated.
07:14His head was paraded around the colony.
07:17And it was really to send a strong message of who were the superior race, apparently, the white colonists.
07:26And to send a message to the Noongar people not to resist, not to fight, as Yeagin did.
07:36Yeagin's decapitated head became a brutal trophy for the British.
07:40But where exactly were Yeagin's remains taken?
07:43That is a mystery that would take over a century to solve.
07:53The mystery of the missing head of the Indigenous leader, Yeagin, might never have been solved at all, were it
07:58not for the obsession of one person.
08:01Hi. How are you?
08:03Good, thank you. I'm coming in.
08:05This is Asandra Kolbang. Her dad was Noongar leader Ken Kolbang.
08:10So where does Yeagin and Ken's story intersect?
08:14Probably even before my time, I would say.
08:18I grew up just hearing about Yeagin constantly.
08:22It's always been a part of my upbringing.
08:24Yeagin's always been that part.
08:28Ken spent decades amassing any information or records on what happened to Yeagin's head.
08:35It was actually 30 years of voluntary research that he'd done specifically to find Yeagin.
08:42I believe that the spirit of his old father or one of his relatives could be inside of me and
08:47I'm probably on the reincarnation of that spiritual being.
08:53It's decades. It's decades of his life that he's dedicated to this.
08:57Was there a sense that Yeagin's remains would never come home?
09:00Like that they just would never find it?
09:02I think there was a little bit of it, but my dad being who he was would never let that
09:08up.
09:09It was something that he just saw and he visioned and that was it.
09:15But Ken wasn't alone in his quest. He had help.
09:20Back in the 1990s, Cressida Ford and Lyndon Ormond Parker were two researchers living in London.
09:27And that's when they were put in contact with Ken.
09:29Ken had a big file. Like he'd been doing his work as much as he possibly could using all these
09:34ways that were available to him.
09:37And he never wavered from his search for Yeagin.
09:40And that search paid off when one day Ken Colbung got a crucial piece of evidence, a British newspaper clipping.
09:49A clipping saying that Yeagin's head had been on display at the surgeon antiquarian Thomas Pettigrew's house in London.
10:00Just months after his death, Yeagin's head reportedly appears in a house of an English doctor, this Thomas Pettigrew.
10:07It was brought to Pettigrew and the UK from Western Australia by a Lieutenant Robert Dale.
10:14Lieutenant Dale, who was trying to sell Yeagin's head and as part of that he had given it to Pettigrew,
10:20really as a do you want to buy.
10:22This surgeon Thomas Pettigrew is one of the weirder figures in British medical history.
10:28He used to throw private parties in the 1800s where he unwrapped Egyptian mummies for science.
10:34Now Pettigrew had Yeagin's head studied in detail.
10:38But as for buying it...
10:40So Pettigrew clearly didn't want to buy Yeagin's head or didn't want to buy it for the amount that Dale
10:45was wanting.
10:46Right.
10:47So then the question is where is Dale?
10:49Thanks to family diaries, they find that Dale ends up in the city of Liverpool.
10:54But does he bring Yeagin's head with him too?
10:56He couldn't sell Yeagin's head.
11:00What's he going to do with it?
11:02So then the first obvious thing is you give it to the local museum.
11:06That would be the Liverpool Museum.
11:08And so off Cressida went to go ask around there.
11:11I was talking with one of the curators at the time and this wonderful woman said,
11:15well, actually, I think we buried some remains in the 1960s in the local cemetery.
11:21Let me go and pull you the file.
11:23And in that file there was correspondence, administrative correspondence in the 1960s,
11:28about the need to bury the head of Yeagin, Chief of Swan River, in the Everton Cemetery.
11:34It was pretty extraordinary.
11:36It was a pretty extraordinary moment.
11:37What goes through your head when you see that, when you finally see this name?
11:41I was blown away.
11:42I was like, oh, my God, I've got to tell Ken.
11:44I think I ran out of the museum and I went to it, you know, because there was no mobile
11:47phones.
11:48I went to a phone box with my coins, you can imagine.
11:51It was just joy all around just to see how Dad reacted just with that.
11:57But it's a sense of relief of we're getting that little bit closer to getting him home and the healing
12:04process for everyone, really, you know.
12:10But in Everton Cemetery, Liverpool, England, there's no gravestone for a Yeagin, no map and Cressida has no leads.
12:19We decided that the only thing to do was actually go and talk to the gravediggers.
12:24How'd that go?
12:24I knocked on the door of a prefabricated office that they were temporarily in.
12:32And I said, can I talk to the, can I talk to whoever's in charge or something like that?
12:36And I said, I said, look, I'm looking for a museum box that was buried here in the 1960s.
12:45And he went, oh, you mean the two Aboriginal heads and the Peruvian mummy, Cressida?
12:48And I went, yes, I do, actually.
12:51And he said, yeah, I know exactly where they are.
12:52What?
12:53Yeah, yeah.
12:54And I think he either went out or he had in his office a grave plan.
12:56So this is the working plan that the gravediggers use.
13:00And he took it out and annotated on the side that the grave plan was buried in grave number 296.
13:07And I was completely, you know, oh, my gosh, this is, I don't know, I'm speechless.
13:11I don't know how to, I don't know how to.
13:13It was extraordinary.
13:16But the thing is, when they did find where he was buried in the UK, he wasn't buried down there
13:22alone.
13:29Missing for decades, the head of the Indigenous leader, Yagen, has been found in a British graveyard.
13:35But there's a problem.
13:36When Yagen was buried, it was a pauper's grave.
13:39And of course, they buried other people.
13:41You weren't just buried by yourself.
13:43There were stillborn babies that were buried above Yagen.
13:49The problem is, it's now beneath the bodies of 22 babies who died at birth.
13:54And some families have refused permission for the remains to be moved.
13:57Then hence became a long process of trying to lobby the British government for an exhumation licence.
14:03We know that the end of the road is near and that we will return with Yagen's head to Australia.
14:09The British government refused the exhumation licence request because there were these stillborn children buried.
14:16Ken, he was using all of his skill to speak at the highest levels to state that this was an
14:23incredibly important thing that would happen.
14:25Yagen's head must return to Australia with me and I'm not going to leave without it.
14:33And that's who Dad was.
14:35He made sure that if he was going to follow through with the task, he did it.
14:40Ken actually tried to get permission from the families of all of those stillborn babies, ultimately to no avail.
14:48But what if there was another way?
14:53They decide to access the grave from the side and use survey equipment to sense the metal hinges of Yagen's
15:00box and then extract him.
15:01And they started very early in the morning, I think about four o'clock in the morning.
15:05They emptied the grave next door.
15:07Then they began retrieving the box and then found Yagen.
15:15They did a forensic report and weirdly, thanks to Thomas Bredegaroo's skull studies of Yagen, they could confirm they'd finally
15:22found him.
15:23That's actually at the grave site.
15:25That's the grave site?
15:26That's the grave site for Yagen.
15:28Wow.
15:29Yeah.
15:30I feel grateful, I feel happy and I'm waiting now to take him back to all the other members of
15:41the tribal groups who will also now be so happy.
15:47A delegation of Noongar elders travelled to the UK to escort Yagen home.
15:53And among them was one woman, Mingly Maglade, who, as it turns out, is the mum of Hannah Maglade.
16:01Hi mum.
16:01Hello.
16:02Mike's here.
16:03Good to see you.
16:04Mum's like this nice old lady now, but this is not the mum that I knew at that time, I'm
16:09sorry.
16:09She was fierce.
16:11Yeah.
16:11And determined and very strong.
16:13So, when you first came in contact with Yagen's remains after over a century, what did you do?
16:20Well, I'd taken Sand from about near the area where he was buried and took her to London and put
16:29it on his head and said, it's your country.
16:34Mingly held him until the moment they walked through those gates at the airport.
16:40That was another incredibly momentous occasion of hundreds of Noongars at the airport.
16:48Seeing them come through the gates with the box and the booker and that, it was a pretty overwhelming time
16:55for everybody.
16:56I guess it was a sense of relief because we've brought him back and he's at rest now.
17:02He can be at peace before there wasn't any peace.
17:08With the return of Yagen to Noongar country, the job of holding him until he was finally buried fell to
17:14the Wilkes family.
17:15This is Ian and his father Ted Wilkes.
17:18And when I brought him up for the burial the final day, I remember touching him and going into the
17:25Swan River and put my hand into the water and saying, Yagen's back.
17:31Hey, Yagen's back everybody. I saw things that were just a little bit different on that morning. And we buried
17:40him there that day.
17:43Sadly, my father didn't get to see that because it was only six months prior that we lost him from
17:50when we buried Yagen.
17:52After all this?
17:53Yeah.
17:54He didn't get to see him, remember?
17:55No, no.
17:56Which was quite sad.
17:57But you know, I know that their spirits would have been connected somewhere along the line.
18:06Why do you think he took that, I guess that mission and took it so seriously and kind of committed
18:11to it?
18:12Like what was it about him?
18:13I think probably because of where he came from.
18:16Yeah.
18:17So as a child, he never knew his father.
18:21He never got to meet his mum.
18:23He lost his mum when he was a baby.
18:26So he's always understood and learned from that, that the importance of keeping those cultural connections.
18:34It was one part of him that he never let go, even though he was taken from it.
18:39He'd always hang onto it and ensured that part was still within him.
18:57There used to be this saying, the sun never sets on the British Empire.
19:02And in a sense, it's true.
19:04The impact of the events here, the pain of it, never really ends.
19:09Instead it reverberates throughout history, through families, through generations.
19:16And yet, today on the mouth of that river that brought so much unwelcome strife, Noongar people still stand.
19:26I'm quite privileged to stand here today with you and welcome you to this country.
19:29And I hope you have a safe journey on our country.
19:32Thanks for having me.
20:04At the end of the day, it's our job.
20:06Sharing culture.
20:09It's who we are.
20:10That's why we survived.
20:11We'll always survive.
20:14I have spent months all over the globe tracing stolen histories.
20:18It's easy to forget that there are just some things you can't take from a people.
20:25It's really hard to capture in words of what it means to be a colonised person, to be born a
20:31colonised person.
20:32But even though we are colonised, we didn't give our land away.
20:37And I still feel that strong sense of connection to my country.
20:42They can't take that from me.
20:44The genocide has not been complete.
20:46The genocide has not been complete.
20:47We're here today.
20:48We're different.
20:48But we're still fighting.
20:50We're still speaking up.
20:51We're still caring about our people too.
20:53Having an ancestor like Jagen spurs me on to be proud of who I am.
20:59My country knows me.
21:01And I know my country.
21:02That strength of my culture, what I carry in me, is in my blood.
21:05It can't be colonised.
21:42We, as a race of people, must stand up.
21:46We must take note of Jagen and stand up and fight.
Comentários