Descendant refused Aborignal relic

An Aboriginal leader has failed in his attempt to persuade the Government to allow him to exhume the head of an ancestor, buried in a Liverpool cemetery.

Ken Colbung was told the news at the Home Office yesterday, after he had made the special trip from Australia.

The Home Office refused a licence to exhume the head of the early 19th century Aboriginal leader Yagan, because it would have led to the disturbance of other graves, it said, against the wishes of relatives whose babies had been buried in the same plot.