Background
Alas Poor Yagan was published shortly after the return of Yagan's head from the United Kingdom. Yagan was a Nyungar warrior who resisted the European settlement of Western Australia. He was shot dead by a settler in 1833, and his head was removed and sent to the United Kingdom for display in a museum. In 1964, it was buried in an unmarked grave in a local cemetery. The Nyungar community began efforts to locate and repatriate the head in 1990. Yagan's head was finally exhumed in September 1997, but organisation of the handover "was accompanied by a degree of sometimes undignified acrimony over who had the appropriate cultural claims, by descent, to bring the remains back". These conflicts within the Nyungar community were publicly aired, and at one point even involved litigation in the Supreme Court of Western Australia.
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