Governor Arthur Phillip who took Yemmerrawanne and his Wangal kinsman Woollarawarre Bennelong from Sydney to England in December 1792 aboard the convict transport ship Atlantic, arriving at Falmouth in Cornwall on 19 May 1793. They stayed in London at 125 Mount Street, Mayfair, the home of William Waterhouse, father of Phillip’s aide Lieutenant Henry Waterhouse.

On their first day in London Yemmerrawanne and Bennelong were measured for ruffled shirts, waistcoats, breeches, frock coats with plated buttons and buckled shoes in the latest fashion. They toured the sights, including St Paul’s Cathedral and the Royal Zoo at the Tower of London, swam in the Serpentine and saw plays, comic operas, pantomimes and a circus.

When Yemmerrawanne fell ill in October 1793, he and Bennelong went by coach to the village of Eltham in Kent, three miles south of Greenwich, where they were lodged at the home of William Kent, who was employed by the former Home Secretary Lord Sydney.

Despite frequent treatment by navy surgeon Dr Gilbert Blane, Yemmerrawanne died from a lung ailment one year after his arrival and was buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in Eltham.

We know from bills in the Treasury Board Papers at the National Archives in London that Yemmerrawanne’s grave was covered with turf by a gravedigger, who charged one shilling and sixpence for his services. The granite headstone, which cost £6.16.0, has been restored and stood against a brick wall when I saw it at Eltham in 2012.

Few people in England apart from Bennelong and Phillip would have known that Yemmerrawanne could use the name Kebarrah, only given to an initiated man whose tooth had been knocked out by a kebba (stone or rock). Yemmerrawanne had been initiated in February 1791 at a bay in Gamaragal territory on the north shore of Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) in which Bennelong officiated, removing teeth with a specially cut womera (throwing stick). Though Yemmerrawanne ‘suffered severely’, losing a part of his jawbone, he ‘boasted the firmness and hardihood, with which he had endured it’, said Tench.

Until recently it was believed that Yemmerrawanne’s gravestone had been separated from his burial plot after German bombs rained on Eltham during World War II.

There is another version of why the location of the grave is unknown. Seeking to exhume Yemmerrawanne’s remains, Geoffrey Robinson QC discovered, as he told television journalist Liam Bartlett on Channel 9’s 60 Minutes (22 April 2007), that ‘when the space was needed they just threw his remains out … he was disposed of’.

In ‘Losing the Plot’, an article in the Bulletin magazine (Sydney, 26 April 2007) the Australian-born barrister and human rights lawyer named his source as the Bishop of South London. Retelling the story in his new book Dreaming too Loud, (Random House Australia, 2013), Robertson states:

It seemed a simple matter to uplift Yemmerrawannie, whose headstone stood in Eltham. But then, to his almighty embarrassment, the bishop discovered that the grave was empty: the plot had been needed for more important white parishioners and the Aborigine's bones had been thrown away.

Of course, the bishop confided, if it was bones we wanted, there were some lying around ... I resisted the temptation.