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.