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

Praise for Return to Uluru

"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 peoples, their culture, and their way of life."

—Edward Humes, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of The Forever Witness

Mark McKenna sets the highest standard for truth-telling of the kind that Australians so urgently need if they are to live in this country with honor. I feel sure that this book will become an Australian classic, not the first of its kind, but certainly the most powerful narrative I have read of frontier injustice and its resonance in our lives today.

—Marcia Langton, author of Welcome to Country

"Mark McKenna has exposed the wounded heart of Australia. Never has a history of our country so assumed the power of sacred myth. Return to Uluru is a spellbinding story of death and resurrection."

—James Boyce, author of Born Bad

In illuminating one incident at Uluru in the 1930s, Mark McKenna casts a larger light on the culture and ideology of that era—harsh and brutal in so many ways, yet also uncomfortably recognizable.

—Robyn Davidson, author of Tracks

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

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 Reviews

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Copyright © 2022 by Mark McKenna

Published by arrangement with Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Books, in February 2021.

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library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

Names: McKenna, Mark, 1959- author.

Title: Return to Uluru / Mark McKenna.

Description: New York : Dutton, Penguin Random House LLC, [2022] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022017138 (print) | LCCN 2022017139 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593185773 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593185780 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Aboriginal Australians—Australia—Uluru/Ayers Rock (N.T.) | Aboriginal Australians—Australia—Uluru/Ayers Rock (N.T.)—Death. | Police shootings—Australia—Uluru/Ayers Rock (N.T.)—History—20th century. | Aboriginal Australians, Treatment of. | Aboriginal Australians—Social conditions. | Aboriginal Australians—History. | Uluru/Ayers Rock (N.T.)—History—20th century. | Uluru/Ayers Rock (N.T.)—History. | Australia—Race relations.

Classification: LCC DU398.A9 M35 2022 (print) | LCC DU398.A9 (ebook) | DDC 305.899/15094291—dc23/eng/20220420

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017138

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022017139

Cover design by Steve Meditz; Cover images courtesy of the author: (top) a page from Bill McKinnon’s patrol journal, 1934; (bottom) photo taken at Marree, South Australia, 2013

Book design by Nancy Resnick, adapted for ebook by Michelle Quintero

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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For Edwin Ride

CONTENTS

The Story of Kuniya and Liru

PART ONE

THE DEAD HEART?

1. Yokununna

2. More or Less Lonely and Friendly People

3. Dust and Bullets

4. A Domain of the Imagination

PART TWO

INVESTIGATIONS

5. Commonwealth Officers

6. Round Trips

7. I Am Uluru

PART THREE

SONGS OF THE CENTER

8. Shot to Hit

9. Statement from the Living Heart

10. Desert Oak No. 1

Postscript

Note on Key Sources

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Index

THE STORY OF KUNIYA AND LIRU

The Kuniya (python) woman came from far away in the east to hatch her children at Uluru. She carried her eggs strung around her neck like a necklace and brought them to rest at Kuniya Piti on Uluru’s northeast corner. There she left the eggs on the ground.

Kuniya camped at Taputji and hunted in the nearby sandhills. As she left and entered her camp, she formed deep grooves in the rock. These grooves are still there.

One day, Kuniya had to draw on all her physical and magical powers to avenge the death of her young nephew, also a Kuniya. He had enraged a group of Liru, or poisonous brown snakes, who traveled from the southwest to take revenge on him.

They saw him resting at the base of Uluru and rushed upon him, hurling their spears. Many spears hit the rock face with such force that they pierced it, leaving a series of round holes that are still obvious. The poor Kuniya, outnumbered, dodged what he could but eventually fell dead.

When news of the young python’s death reached his aunt on the other side of Uluru, she was overcome with grief and anger. She raced along the curves of the rock to Mutitjulu Waterhole, where she confronted one of the Liru warriors, who mocked her grief and rage.

Kuniya began a dance of immense power and magic. As she moved toward the Liru warrior, she scooped up sand and rubbed it over her body. Her rage was so great that it spread like a poison, saturating the area at that time.

In a fearsome dance she took up her wana, or digging stick, and struck the head of the Liru. But her anger was now beyond restraint, and she hit him again across the head.

He fell dead, dropping his shield near Mutitjulu Waterhole, where Kuniya herself remains as a sinuous black line on the eastern wall. The blows she struck are two deep cracks on the western wall, and the Liru’s shield, now a large boulder, lies where it fell.

Central Australia

PART ONE

THE DEAD HEART?

A traveller may now describe Central Australia as a heart-breaking wilderness.

J. W. Gregory, The Dead Heart of Australia, 1906

Marree, South Australia, 2013

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 that is home to the Aboriginal people, the Anangu. There, we would 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 archaeologist 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.

Inspector Bill McKinnon in the Jubilee Day Parade, Alice Springs, 1951

2

MORE OR LESS LONELY AND FRIENDLY PEOPLE

Bill McKinnon was already accustomed to an itinerant life when he arrived in Stuart, then the administrative capital of the Commonwealth territory of Central Australia, on Saturday, June 6, 1931. On the train from Adelaide, he gazed out the window, thinking how barren the landscape looked. Alighting at the railway station in drizzling rain, he encountered a tiny frontier outpost built from stone and galvanized iron with a population of little more than two hundred people. On the platform to welcome him was Constable Robert Hamilton, a First World War veteran, who, to McKinnon’s surprise, hailed from Nambour, his hometown in southeast Queensland. McKinnon was barely thirty—lean, brash, and tough—a no-nonsense raconteur with a sharp tongue and unyielding determination. He’d arrived as the most recent recruit to a police force of nine men working for the Public Service of Central Australia, a region created with the stroke of a legislator’s pen in 1926. After years of drought and the onset of the Depression, it would remain a separate Commonwealth territory for merely another week, before it was subsumed into the Northern Territory. Two years later, in August 1933—four years after the railway arrived and transformed the movement of livestock and people to and from central Australia—Stuart would be renamed Alice Springs. The new man had arrived and he intended to take charge. Bill McKinnon had found his place in the world. He would spend the remainder of his working life as a member of the Northern Territory Police Force.

In contrast, the first three decades of McKinnon’s life were testament to the mobility of many Australians in the early twentieth century. He was born on June 16, 1902, in a timber shack on his father’s selection at North Creek, Ballina, in northern New South Wales (NSW). His great-grandparents, who had emigrated from the Isle of Skye and the Scottish Highlands, were married on the banks of the Shoalhaven River by the Reverend Samuel Marsden. His family moved to Queensland when his father, lured by cane growing and dairying, decided there was greater opportunity farther north. As the youngest child, McKinnon always believed he was his mother’s favorite. In September 1922, when he sailed for Sydney from Brisbane, his family saw him off: I have never forgotten, he recalled years later, the emotional feelings during those long moments while the ship was moving away from the wharf and starting downstream. My mother was heartbroken.

McKinnon on Bondi Beach, 1920s

In Sydney, he found work as a wireless operator before taking a job in the engine room of RMS Niagara and sailing as far afield as Vancouver. In 1923, a few weeks after his twenty-first birthday, he joined the NSW Mounted Police, only to take off back to Queensland with itchy feet little more than eighteen months later. Over the next four years, he sailed the world on trading ships (once as a tally clerk with a nice chap by the name of Errol Flynn) and worked as a warder in St. Helena and Brisbane jails. He detested his role at St. Helena—a nasty, morale destroying job—where he was under strict discipline from those above him and administered the same strict discipline to the inmates under his control. Violence and self-harm were part of