Yadhaigana

The Yadhaigana were an indigenous Australian coastal people who once lived in the area extending from Escape River to Pudding Pan Hill in the Cape York Peninsula. Their numbers at the time of contact with colonial pastoralists who took over their land in the 1860s has been estimated to range between 1,500 to 1,600.

The Yadhaigana were traditional enemies of the Gudang but, Alfred Cort Haddon found in the 1880s that the two had forged an alliance with each other. Together with the neighbouring Unduyamo and Gudang aboriginal tribes, they were regarded as warlike by the colonial authorities and settlers who moved into their lands and encountered their resistance. Writing in 1864, the Scottish immigrant John Jardine (1807–1874), from 1863 to 1865 the police magistrate at the newly established Somerset settlement. thought of these natives in his area of administration 'to be in a lower state of degradation, mentally and physically, than any of the Australian aboriginal tribes which I have seen'.

British marines stationed at Somerset were withdrawn in 1868, and native troopers under Henry Chester set about dispersing the local tribes with terror tactics, punitive forays, and by adopting methods such as inciting one tribe against another. The young men and women were subject to Blackbirding in order to obtain slave labour on pearling boats. 2 Anglican missionaries present Rev F Jagg and William Kennett wrote on protest at the shocking conditions the tribes were subject to, only to be speedily removed Internecine hostilities, already frequent, flared between the Yadhaigana and their Gumakudin neighbours as settlement expanded, and eventually the latter were absorbed by the former. Within 3 decades of settlement, by 1896 of the estimated 3,000 aborigines belonging to the 3 tribes, only a 100 remained.

After the shattering of the traditional east-coast tribal groupings and their dispersal, many remnants of each group intermarried and a new more collective identity was formed at Red Island Point, from descendents or survivors of the Wuthgathi, Yadhaigana, Gudong and Unduyamo, who came to be known as the Red Island Point tribes. By virtue of this amalgamation, the Yadhaigana, as part of their native title claim, consider themselves heir to the old Gumakudin lands extending from Pudding Pan Hill, across Utingu, Red Island Point, Injinoo to Muttee Head on the southwest of the York Peninsula.

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