Eltham – now a suburb of London – was a village at the time of Yemmerrawanne’s death.

Watkin Tench was a Captain–Lieutenant of the Marine Corps and sailed with the First Fleet on the Charlotte in May 1787. Tench’s narrative is engaging and easy to read. He provides entertaining accounts of the daily activities in the colony and intelligent, often sympathetic, observations of important events, convict life and the nature and status of the Indigenous peoples. 

Yem-mer-ra-wannie was the youth who ‘voluntarily and cheerfully’ left his native shores to partner Bennelong on their voyage of adventure. Both ‘were very much attached’ (according to Captain David Collins in his account of NSW at that time) to Governor Arthur Phillip and in all likelihood it was he who persuaded them to accompany him on his return to England.

Yemmerrawanne and Bennelong became popular guests in the salons of London’s rich and famous – they reportedly found London as exotic and fascinating as London found them – and have been described by one historian as ‘the first Australian tourists’.

‘Lost Aborigine’s secret grave uncovered at last’, Kathy Marks, The Independent, 21 March 2014

Yemmerrawanne was the first Australian Aborigine to die in England.

At some time in the past, it was an annual event for the children of Eltham to lay flowers on Yemmerrawanne’s grave.