Mokare

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Statue of Mokare, Albany, Western Australia

Mokare (c. 1800 - 1831) was a Noongar man, an Aboriginal man from the south-west corner of Australia who was pivotal in aiding European exploration of the area. Mokare had two known brothers Mollian (d.1829), who may have been known as Yallapoli, and Nakina, who with Mokare, was a frequent visitor to the Albany settlement, staying with the government resident, Dr Alexander Collie. He also was recorded as having a married sister.

Possibly first recorded as the charismatic "Jack" recorded by Phillip Parker King in his expedition to King George Sound in 1821, Mokare was from the Minang clan of Noongar. With the arrival of Major Edmund Lockyer in the brig Amity, in 1827, he showed the Europeans the walking trails that the Noongar people had used and maintained over generations in the Albany region. Many of these are today the roads of that region of Australia. He became a close friend of of the surgeon-assistant J. S. Nind, with whom he frequently visited. In December 1829 Mokare guided T. B. Wilson's overland expedition, during which Mount Barker and Mount Lindsay were named as well as the rivers Hay, Denmark and Wilson, and served two months later again as the guide for Captain Barker's expedition over the same area. As there was no competition between Europeans and Aboriginal people for land, women or hunting, the settlement in Albany was particularly peaceful.

Mokare was well-known in his short life for being a peacemaker, and an effective mediator between black and white communities. He was concerned when Stirling took command of the Albany settlement in 1830, as he had heard of the battles and massacres between European settlers and Aboriginal people, and wished Albany to be maintained as a separate settlement. Mokare died on 26 June 1831. The Aborigines and Europeans had assembled at Collie's house and walked to a site selected by Nakina where the Europeans dug a grave and Mokare was interred with a buka cloak and personal artifacts to Nakina's specifications. When Collie himself was dying from tuberculosis in 1835, he asked to be buried alongside Mokare. Their graves are together beneath Albany Town Hall, although the bones of Collie are believed to have been disturbed in the 20th century during work on the Town Hall and re-interred elsewhere.