YANKEE YANKEE: THE BOONWURRUNG BOY WHO CAME HOME

YANKEE YANKEE: THE BOONWURRUNG BOY WHO CAME HOME

A story from the Yalukit-willam Boonwurrung landscape of Tromgin

Before there was a Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne, there was Tromgin.

Tromgin was water and wetland. A place of fishing, camping, family and gathering within the living Yalukit-willam Boonwurrung landscape of early Melbourne.

Derrimut and his family are recorded repeatedly camping around Tromgin and through the wider Melbourne landscape. The old Tromgin billabong would later be transformed as the Botanic Gardens developed, its water landscape surviving today within the Gardens’ Ornamental Lake.

This was not an empty landscape waiting for the colonial city to arrive.

It was already filled with people, relationships and stories.

And one of the most extraordinary of those stories belongs to a little Boonwurrung boy named Yankee Yankee, also recorded as Yonki Yonke and Robert Cunningham.

He was the son of Big Benbow, also known as Baddourup.

And when he was still a child, he was taken.

Around 1833, when he was about nine years old, Yankee Yankee was abducted from Boonwurrung Country near Point Nepean during the violent sealing period around Port Phillip.

He was taken alongside Boonwurrung women and carried across Bass Strait.

Melbourne had not yet been established as a colonial settlement.

A Boonwurrung child had disappeared from his Country.

There was no photograph to circulate.

No message that could reach across the continent.

No map home in his pocket.

His family had no way of knowing where their little boy had been taken.

And the years passed.

Yankee Yankee survived

His journey carried him through the Bass Strait world and Tasmania, and eventually thousands of kilometres across the continent to Western Australia.

There he worked as a shepherd.

Years had passed since he had been taken from his Country.

Eventually, Yankee Yankee earned money.

And with that money, he bought passage east.

He made his way from Western Australia to Adelaide.

From Adelaide, he found passage again.

This time, he made his way back home to Melbourne.

And on 6 June 1841, almost eight years after he had been taken, a young Aboriginal man walked into a Yalukit-willam encampment in Melbourne.

He was dressed in European clothes.

He spoke fluent English.

William Thomas recorded his keen eyes and long black hair, carefully worn in ringlets.

Then the young man told Thomas who he was.

He was Big Benbow’s lost son.

And he told Thomas something else.

He said he was “a native of this place.”

Thomas did not believe him at first.

The nine-year-old boy who had disappeared years earlier was no longer standing before him.

A young man was.

But as Thomas looked more closely, and as the connections between this young man and the people around him became apparent, recognition followed.

The stranger was no stranger at all.

Big Benbow’s son had come home.

And then comes one small detail in the historical record that carries the weight of the whole story.

That first night back on his Country,

Yankee Yankee slept in his father’s miam.

After almost eight years.

After being taken across the sea.

After travelling thousands of kilometres across the continent.

A father had his son home again.

Two days later, his people welcomed him home

On 8 June 1841, two days after Yankee Yankee returned, his people held a formal ceremony of welcome.

William Thomas recorded its name as Woolworkbullunberlin.

Within it he described Kobin Koolin, the embrace given to someone who had returned after a long absence.

A relative knelt before the person who had returned, pressed their face against their breast, and wept.

Thomas recorded that the embrace could continue for three to five minutes.

After almost eight years away, Yankee Yankee was once again surrounded by his people.

Held against their breasts.

Wept over.

Welcomed home.

A boy had been taken.

A young man had returned.

Yankee Yankee stayed home

His story did not end with his return.

When Yankee Yankee first walked back into Melbourne, he was dressed in European clothes. He spoke fluent English and had spent years living and working within colonial society.

But once home, he discarded his European clothes and returned to life among his people.

Thomas struggled to understand why, after spending so many years living and working among Europeans, Yankee Yankee would choose to return to the ways of his own people.

When Thomas questioned him about his choice, Yankee Yankee’s answer was simple:

“If I like it, what’s that to the white man?”

After almost eight years away, the young man who had been forced into another world had come home and chosen how he would live.

He rebuilt a life among his people.

He married Bungurook, daughter of the Woiwurrung leader Billibellary, connecting two important families.

He joined the Native Police for a time.

He carried knowledge of other Boonwurrung and Kulin people who had been taken away.

And he challenged colonial authorities when promises made to the Boonwurrung about land at Kullurk were not honoured.

The little boy who had disappeared into the sealing world had returned as a young Boonwurrung man with a voice.

But he would have only five more years on Country.

1846

Yankee Yankee died suddenly in 1846.

He was still only a young man.

That same year, Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens were established.

By then, Tromgin and the wider Melbourne landscape were already undergoing profound transformation.

The colonial government had placed an Aboriginal mission across part of this Country years earlier. The colonial town was expanding. The river and surrounding landscape were increasingly being reshaped.

But Boonwurrung people had not simply vanished as the colonial city appeared.

They were living through its creation.

Derrimut was here.

Big Benbow was here.

Yankee Yankee had returned here.

Families were living, camping, gathering and maintaining their relationships with Country as the colonial city grew around them.

And Tromgin was part of that living world.

The Gardens did not begin on an empty landscape.

They grew within a place already carrying generations of lives, relationships, memory and Country.

Yankee Yankee’s return in 1841 is recorded at a Yalukit-willam encampment within this broader Melbourne world.

When he died five years later, the contemporary record placed his grave “on the brink of a hill, across the Yarra opposite Melbourne.”

Yankee Yankee was buried according to custom, wrapped in an opossum cloak.

A remarkable place in the Australian historical record

Yankee Yankee’s return also appears to hold significance far beyond Melbourne.

Based on the available Australian historical record, his return on 6 June 1841 appears to be the earliest documented case of an Aboriginal child abducted from Country by Europeans, carried far away, and ultimately reunited with his own family and people.

What makes the record even more extraordinary is how much of that homecoming survives.

We know the day he returned.

We know Thomas initially struggled to believe who he was.

We know that first night Yankee Yankee slept in his father’s miam.

And two days later, we have the recorded name and physical form of the ceremony through which his people welcomed him home.

Woolworkbullunberlin.

Within it, Thomas described Kobin Koolin, the embrace for someone returned after a long absence. A child had been carried thousands of kilometres from his Country.

Eight years later, the archive captures the moment he was held by his people again.

Tromgin is still here

Today, millions of people walk through the Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.

They walk beside water that carries the memory of Tromgin.

They walk through a landscape where Yalukit-willam Boonwurrung families lived their lives long before the Gardens existed.

Most have never heard Yankee Yankee’s name.

We often talk about needing to create First Peoples stories for Melbourne.

Sometimes we don’t.

Sometimes the stories are already here.

Beautiful.

Painful.

Human.

Recorded in extraordinary detail.

Waiting for us to find them again.

Yankee Yankee was taken from Boonwurrung Country as a child.

He travelled across an emerging colonial Australia.

And against extraordinary odds, he found his way back home to Melbourne.

His return appears to be the earliest documented case of its kind in the available Australian historical record.

But it is also something much simpler.

The story of a little boy who was taken from his Country.

Who survived.

Who travelled thousands of kilometres.

Who found his way home.

And who, on his first night back,

slept in his father’s miam.

Yankee Yankee’s story is one of many Boonwurrung stories still held within the landscape of Melbourne.

They deserve to be remembered.

Jaeden Williams-Briggs
Yalukit-willam man, Boonwurrung Cultural Educator
Founder & Director, Biik Bundjil