Return to Uluru

May 9, 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.

January 28, 2021
‘Perspective is everything,’ writes historian Mark McKenna in Return to Uluru, his mesmeric history–true crime hybrid. When starting the book, McKenna expected to tell an expansive history of central Australia, but instead stumbled upon a smaller and painfully potent narrative. He foregrounds the life of Bill McKinnon, a long-serving Northern Territory police officer who shot and killed an unarmed Indigenous man, Yokununna, at Uluru in 1934. We follow McKenna as he skilfully pieces together what happened that day and the resultant trial, which obfuscated the truth. Thanks to McKinnon’s meticulous life-long self-documentation—he was a self-styled ‘policeman photojournalist’—there’s plenty of source material to pluck from, which McKenna uses as the bones for a grisly narrative. Behind it all is Uluru itself. With the precision of a historian and the lyricism of a storyteller, McKenna explores white Australia’s hubristic relationship to the rock—from blustering European explorers to tourists furious at the 2019 closure of the Uluru climb. In the same vein as Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu or Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man, Return to Uluru suggests shifting our perspective on the past can help us better comprehend our present. As the nation drags its heels on adequate truth-telling and injustices against First Nations people continue to be perpetrated, books like this help expose the source of the rot. Kim Thomson is a freelance writer and editor.

June 10, 2024

McKenna's (From the Edge: Australia's Lost Histories) latest details one of Australia's coldest cases: the murder of an Aborigine man in 1934 by a white police officer at one of continent's most sacred spots. At the South Australian Museum's storage facility, McKenna comes across a long-forgotten skull in a cardboard box. This begins his search for truth. Through the use of letters, diaries, newspapers, and interviews, McKenna provides a glimpse into an unsettling side of Australian history. White supremacy, colonialism, and the objectification of Aborigine people all played a part in this tragic murder. David Linski narrates this nearly century-old true crime tale, providing a sympathetic, yet straightforward, reading of the investigation. Listeners may see similarities with the history of civil rights in the United States, including the treatment of Black Americans and Indigenous peoples. VERDICT A timely and well-researched look into the aboriginal history of Australia, with parallels to other modern civil rights movements. Readers who appreciated Sierra Crane Murdoch's Yellow Bird or David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon will be drawn to this chilling look into Australian history.--Elyssa Everling

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