Return to Uluru

In 1934, an Aboriginal man named Yokununna died near Uluru, and the full story of how has never been told. Mark McKenna's Return to Uluru revisits that death as a cold case, one that exposes the racism running through white Australia's relationship with the Aboriginal people of the continent's centre.

The trail starts in a storage facility at the South Australian Museum. In Cardboard Box 39 lies a skull, eighty-five years old, with a misspelled name written on the crown. Other boxes nearby hold bones that nobody has ever identified. McKenna asks who this man was and how he came to die, and finds that the answer says a great deal about a colonial outlook that treated Aboriginal lives as barely worth noticing.

The other central figure is Bill McKinnon, a white police officer who became an emblem of the outback. When several of his Aboriginal prisoners escaped in 1934, McKinnon followed them across the country's so-called dead heart and caught up with them at Uluru, the sacred rock. A Commonwealth inquiry later looked into what happened there but left the matter unresolved. McKenna draws on McKinnon's private journals to portray the man himself, and on fresh evidence of his own to get closer to the truth. Along the way he gives glimpses of Indigenous life in the region and shows how white Australians have regarded the centre of their country and the people who live there.

The book is both a close investigation of a single case and a sharp judgment on the white supremacy that has shaped Australian history and has not gone away. McKenna also draws parallels with the racial justice movements now growing in the United States.