Return to Uluru: The Hidden History of a Murder in Outback Australia

by Mark McKenna Narrated by David Linski

Overview

"THIS WEEK'S HOTTEST NEW RELEASES: Murder befouls the outback...   [A] gripping work of true crime." -USA TODAY

Return to Uluru explores a cold case that strikes at the heart of white supremacy-the death of an Aboriginal man in 1934; the iconic life of a white, "outback" police officer; and the continent's most sacred and mysterious landmark.

Inside Cardboard Box 39 at the South Australian Museum's storage facility lies the forgotten skull of an Aboriginal man who died eighty-five years before. His misspelled name is etched on the crown, but the many bones in boxes around him remain unidentified. Who was Yokununna, and how did he die? His story reveals the layered, exploitative white Australian mindset that has long rendered Aboriginal reality all but invisible. 
 
When policeman Bill McKinnon's Aboriginal prisoners escape in 1934, he's determined to get them back. Tracking them across the so called "dead heart" of the country, he finds the men at Uluru, a sacred rock formation. What exactly happened there remained a mystery, even after a Commonwealth inquiry. But Mark McKenna's research uncovers new evidence, getting closer to the truth, revealing glimpses of indigenous life, and demonstrating the importance of this case today. Using McKinnon's private journal entries, McKenna paints a picture of the police officer's life to better understand how white Australians treat the center of the country and its inhabitants.
 
Return to Uluru dives deeply into one cold case. But it also provides a searing indictment of the historical white supremacy still present in Australia-and has fascinating, illuminating parallels to the growing racial justice movements in the United States.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

05/09/2022

In this gripping account, Australian author McKenna (From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories) sheds new light on an act of racial injustice nearly a hundred years ago. Even into this century, Bill McKinnon, who died in 1997 at age 94, was known as a lauded policeman whose exploits as a frontier camel patroller in Australia’s outback were the stuff of legends and books. But the reality, McKenna discovered, was much darker and became a flash point for changes in the government’s treatment of Aboriginal people. In 1934, McKinnon led a patrol to the sacred landmark called Uluru in pursuit of six escaped Aboriginal prisoners. While three managed to flee, two more were apprehended, and one, Yokununna, was shot and killed by McKinnon in what he claimed was self-defense. Though an inquiry exonerated McKinnon, his treatment of native tribesmen came under scrutiny. But it wasn’t until McKenna discovered the officer’s original logbooks in 2016 that the truth came out. It was cold-blooded murder. The author vividly details the history of white settlers’ sins against the Aboriginals and the legends of the sacred sandstone formation that’s both the center of Australia geographically and spiritually. This eye-opening exposé of an official whitewash delivers the goods. (July)

From the Publisher

THIS WEEK’S HOTTEST NEW BOOK RELEASES... This gripping work of true crime explores a decades-old cold case: How did an Aboriginal man named Yokununna die at one of Australia’s most recognizable landmarks, and what does his death reveal about white Australians' treatment of Aboriginal peoples?”
—USA Today

“Both a crime story and a kind of allegory in which the moral ambiguities of race relations, settler colonialism and Aboriginal indigeneity are condensed and discussed in a vivid moment of violence and tragedy that was denied and lied about for many decades… An admirable, toughminded and absorbing book.”
—The Times Literary Supplement

“An outstanding work of historical detection and riveting storytelling.  Mark McKenna picks up the threads of a cold case and follows their twisty turns to the heartbreaking truth of violent white settlement in Australian Aboriginal country.  If truth is necessary for reconciliation, McKenna’s vivid account is a vital milestone on the journey.”
—Geraldine Brooks, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March and the international bestsellers Horse, People of the Book, and Year of Wonders

“A vividly told, necessary story of the horrors embedded deep within the colonial history of Australia. Mark McKenna uses the tale of a murder in the 1930s to illuminate the complex history of a sacred place; the harms perpetrated by colonizers and the resistance and resilience of the Indigenous people to whom it belongs. It is an honest, sometimes grim, but ultimately uplifting history.”
—Jennifer Raff, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas, author of Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

“Richly detailed and superbly conceived, Return to Uluru is a gripping tale of murder and injustice set in the vast heartland of 1930s Australia.  But it is also much more than that.  For in reconstructing what happened in a small cave alongside the dazzling natural wonder Europeans called Ayers Rock, Mark McKenna has provided us with a still relevant portrait of the ongoing clash between indigenous peoples and the so-called modern world.” 
—Scott Ellsworth, author of the National Book Award longlisted The Ground Breaking

“Mark McKenna’s fascinating and infuriating narrative of frontier injustice delivers a heady blend of true crime mystery, masterful historical research, and an eloquent call for reconciliation and social justice. With a story as resonant in North America as in McKenna’s Australian homeland, Return to Uluru convincingly outs the “heroes” of frontier expansion for what they truly were: architects of atrocities who quite literally were allowed to get away with murder, so long as their victims were Indigenous people, their culture and their way of life.”
—Edward Humes, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of The Forever Witness

“The violence of racism, hate, and cruelty permeate the global legacy of colonialism, and Australia is a prime case study. In Return to Uluru, Mark McKenna combines a historian’s discernment with craft, compassion, and purpose to paint an unambiguous picture of a horrible wrong from the past and why it matters today. Upending the standard frontier narrative, McKenna offers a white man’s biography in the context of the hate, harm and violence that infused it. But it is not the life story of that man that captivates us. It’s the telling of a series of events ultimately revealed, and best understood, via Indigenous voices, that creates the power and resonance in this book. By framing the events and lives in the context, and words, of The Uluru Statement from the Heart, there is a truth-telling about colonial history. For those readers who are not familiar with Uluru, the Anangu and the realities of what we call “Australia” today, this book is a necessary education and a heartfelt invitation to know and to care.”
—Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University, author of The Creative Spark

“Honest and thought-provoking, this book takes a hard look at some uncomfortable truths in Australia’s history. Recommended for anyone wanting to examine racism, colonialism, and their continued effects.”
—Library Journal

“Gripping... This eye-opening exposé of an official whitewash delivers the goods.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A killing in Australia sheds light on a long history of violence against Aboriginal people…  A thoroughly researched, well-told story of a true crime that can never see punishment.”
—Kirkus

Library Journal

04/01/2022

In 1934, an unarmed Aboriginal Australian man named Yokununna was shot and killed by a white police officer, William McKinnon, in the caves of Uluru (Ayers Rock). Through the lens of this murder, McKenna (history, Univ. of Sydney; An Eye for Eternity) examines the history of Central Australia and the treatment of Aboriginal people by white colonizers. This thorough investigation looks into racism past and present and Aboriginal peoples' efforts to restore Uluru to a sacred space. McKenna holds nothing back in his account; it's a refreshingly honest and blunt look at history. Likewise, this book provides a close-up examination of how historical racist laws are impacting present generations of Australians. This history is specific to Australia, but American readers have much to gain from it; there are many similarities to the treatment of Indigenous Americans and Black Americans throughout history. VERDICT Honest and thought-provoking, this book takes a hard look at some uncomfortable truths in Australia's history. Recommended for anyone wanting to examine racism, colonialism, and their continued effects.—Carleigh Obrochta

Kirkus Reviews

2022-04-26
A killing in Australia sheds light on a long history of violence against Aboriginal people.

In a scenario that will be familiar to students of Native American repatriation, Australian historian McKenna opens with the skull of a man killed in 1934, his head consigned to a museum in Adelaide. The skull belonged to Yokununna, a leader of an Aboriginal people who made their homes at Uluru, the place once known as Ayers Rock. “Australian white supremacist culture bears responsibility for this history,” writes the author. “But there was one white man who played a leading role in it.” Bill McKinnon was a police official who cut his teeth murdering untold numbers of New Guineans, then helped continue the tradition of terrorizing Aboriginal people as “millennia-old blackfella sacred sites became whitefella outposts.” In Alice Springs, one such outpost, he oversaw a police force infamous for drunkenness and brutality. Called on to investigate a revenge killing that, while extrajudicial in “whitefella” eyes, was within the bounds of Aboriginal custom, he arrested six men. They escaped, and McKinnon followed and shot one of them—the one who, nearly a century later, would be identified by that skull. McKenna had rare access to the policeman’s extensive archives, and he shows how McKinnon had the habit of keeping photographs and notes that detailed not just crime cases, but also his grocery purchases (“Bought three pineapples and a bunch of bananas…threw one pineapple away”) and other minutiae. Meanwhile, other White Australians who investigated his killing of Yokununna arrived at a different view of the case. One “contemplated the possibility that Yokununna had sacrificed his life so that his friends could flee [and] thought it an act of heroism,” while the great Australian anthropologist and linguist Ted Strehlow gathered Yokonunna’s story as it was remembered by his people, adding it to a vast repository of “stories of violence.”

A thoroughly researched, well-told story of a true crime that can never see punishment.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176071337
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/09/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1.

Yokununna

In November 2019, I visited the South Australian Museum in Adelaide to see if a certain man’s skull was among the collection of human remains held in the museum’s Keeping Place. A number of archival collections had been checked and a forensic anthropologist was attempting to match the man’s skull with the unprovenanced remains thought most likely to belong to him. He had been murdered in 1934. But the forensic anthropologist could only positively identify the skull.

Museum officials Anna Russo and Professor John Carty and I decided that we would travel together to Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock), a huge iconic monolith more or less in the center of Australia, to inform Sammy Wilson, chair of three community organizations—Mutitjulu Community Aboriginal Corporation, Uluru–Kata Tjuta Board of Management, and the Central Land Council—that the indigenous person whose skull this was had been identified. He was in fact the granduncle of Sammy Wilson. His name was Yokununna.

Before we headed for Uluru, Anna and I drove to the large factorylike building in a nearby Adelaide suburb where the museum houses the human remains in its collection. Years of chasing down the events surrounding Yokununna’s killing at Uluru in central Australia had led me to this nondescript repository of horrors. We entered a vast space with little natural light and walked through several rooms, signing in as we moved from one area to the next. When we reached the room where Yokununna’s skull was stored, I noticed a number of wooden boxes stacked in the corner, draped in the Aboriginal flag.

The provenance of these human remains had been established, and now they were waiting to be collected by elders and returned to Country. Nearby, medium-size cardboard boxes containing Aboriginal remains that were moved from the University of Adelaide in 2017 were stored on four shelves.

Yokununna’s skull rested in Box 39. Anna took the box from the shelf and laid it on the table; she turned on an overhead lamp, put on white cotton gloves, carefully removed the skull, and placed it on tissue-like paper. With the stark white light bearing down from above, the words etched in capitals on the crown were clearly visible: yockanunna [sic] complete skeleton. As Anna explained, this naming was unusual. Perhaps the skull was so labeled because Yokununna’s remains were crucial evidence in the 1935 Commonwealth Board of Inquiry into Yokununna’s death.

We noticed the missing initiation tooth and the crazing on the skull’s surface: a thin, spidery web that indicated it had spent considerable time in the ground before exhumation. The slight yellowing of the bone was probably caused by tissue residue or the chemicals that may have been used to clean the skull. Eighty-five years after Yokununna’s death, his remains were still subject to the invaders’ gaze; still the captive object of inquiry and examination. Anna placed the skull back in the box and we washed our hands before walking into the next room.

There, stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling, were more unprovenanced remains that had come to the museum from Adelaide University—mandibles, hip bones, collarbones, vertebrae, and countless others—filed in numbered cardboard boxes. Perhaps Yokununna’s postcranial remains were here, but testing the contents of every box would be an expensive and prolonged process. It was also possible that Professor John Cleland, who headed the board of inquiry into Yokununna’s death, or someone else could have handed them over to the university’s medical school for teaching purposes, in which case they would have been discarded long ago.

Above me, on the very top shelf, standing upright and wrapped tightly in plastic, were casts made of the heads of Aboriginal men and women by the archeologist and ethnologist Norman Tindale from the 1930s. The thickness of the plastic that encased them made it impossible to discern any features.

This grotesque mausoleum—evidence of the racism and violence committed by the state against Australia’s indigenous people over so many years—existed in a permanent limbo. With their origins unknown, the human remains cannot be returned to Country. Yet they cried out for a Keeping Place that would pay them due cultural respect. As for Tindale’s scientific monuments to inhumanity, the subjects’ communities will guide journeys back to Country and make sure these traces of their ancestors’ spirits return home safely. They cannot be destroyed—that would erase the truth. Nor can they be placed in public view, for that would only perpetuate the injustice. We drove back to the museum, discussing the next steps in the long journey back to the families at Uluru.

Seen for so long as barely human, Aboriginal people had suffered the same fate as stuffed animals exhibited in the Adelaide museum. They were shot, collected, studied, objectified, and categorized, a people and their cultures marked as primitive curiosities, destined to be dispossessed by their usurpers. Yokununna’s remains were one among thousands.

Aboriginal remains were collected by the South Australian Museum from the late nineteenth century, but the practice began from the moment the British arrived in Australia in 1788. Private and state institutions throughout Australia and overseas hold vast collections of human remains and ethnographic material, which, in the name of scientific racism and an allegedly superior British civilization, were either traded, raided from resting places and burial sites, souvenired during the frontier wars, or stolen from Aboriginal people across the continent. By the early twentieth century, the South Australian government declared that “all native remains found on Crown lands” were to be brought to the museum in Adelaide, a policy that continued until the 1960s. Today, the museum board “cares for almost 5,000 ancestral remains, both Australian Aboriginal and from overseas nations.” Of the 4,500 Aboriginal ancestors, about 3,700 are from South Australian burial sites. Since the late 1980s, the museum has worked with Aboriginal communities to repatriate remains and the Tindale casts.

Australian white supremacist culture bears responsibility for this history. But there was one white man who played a leading role in it.

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