Return to Uluru: Metaphysical true-crime caper at the heart of our soul

Return to Uluru is partly concerned with the slow dawning appreciation by non-Indigenous Australia of the power and significance of Uluru. Picture: Getty Images

Sometimes a book arrives at a propitious moment, bringing news we need to hear. Return to Uluru is such a work, even though the story it tells has come as a surprise, not least to its author.

McKenna admits that he set out to write another book entirely. After much scholarly detective work, however – activity at once dogged, painstaking and very lucky – he surrendered to the tidal shift in emphasis his research inspired. Those efforts may fairly be described as a revelation in both senses of the word: astonishing in disclosure; and enlightening in a manner that is profound. The result might well be labelled “metaphysical true crime”.

On one level, Return to Uluruis an effort to furnish a full and true account of a historical incident: the shooting of an Indigenous man by a white policeman at then Ayers Rock in the 1930s. This strand unfolds in the tautly plotted manner of a cold case investigation.

But Ayers Rock is not only Ayers Rock – that immense island mountain in Australia’s central desert “discovered” by William Gosse in 1873 and transformed, throughout the postwar decades, into a global tourist hotspot – it is also Uluru: a veritable cathedral of Indigenous culture where meeting and ritual took place before the first Cro-Magnon raised a stick of charcoal to the walls of Lascaux.

The other aspect of McKenna’s undertaking is concerned with the slow dawning appreciation by non-Indigenous Australia of the power and significance of Uluru.

The rest of us increasingly regard it as a site grander and more meaningful than a mere freak of geologic formation.

In this, the historian reiterates the lesson which the Anangu people, Uluru’s traditional owners, have been communicating all along. The rock is not some neat point of cartographic reference – the near-centre of a Western map of the Australian continent – but the beating heart of a land continuously inhabited for perhaps two thousand generations prior to European arrival

The challenge for McKenna, biographer of Manning Clark and a garlanded historian in his own right, is to yoke this quasi-mystical sense of Uluru to the empirical ­rigour demanded by his field.

He does so by keeping his focus tightly on a single story which takes Uluru as its theatre and crime scene, borrowing the approach of artist and sculptor Alberto Giacometti, whose epigraph to the book explains that “by doing something a half centimetre high, you are more likely to get a sense of the universe than if you try and do the whole sky”.

It helps in this regard that the narrative in microcosm McKenna uncovers is also a riveting account of frontier violence, human endurance and tragic cultural misunderstanding. It was a story the historian knew of when he first travelled to the rock in 2013, intending to write a book about Australia’s centre. Instead, he happened across new material about the killing which cast a fresh light on events.

The bare facts remain contested, even now. What can be said is that, late in 1934, at Mititijulu waterhole at Uluru’s southern end, a policeman named Bill McKinnon fired his gun at an Anangu man who was attempting to elude capture for the ritual killing of ­another Indigenous man. He later died from the wound. A subsequent inquiry found McKinnon innocent of wrongdoing.

 

McKinnon emerges from these pages a powerfully ambivalent figure. He was in his early 30s at the time, “lean, brash and tough” in McKenna’s telling, “a no-nonsense raconteur with a sharp tongue and unyielding forbearance and determination” who was one of 10 members of the recently formed Police Force for the administrative region of Central Australia (later absorbed into the Northern Territory).

For three years, McKinnon had undertaken gruelling service in the force: travelling immense distances to perform his duties, which encompassed everything from delivering supplies to Indigenous station families to rescuing stranded travellers. Along with the pastoralists and missionaries of the centre, McKinnon and his colleagues regarded themselves as the de facto rulers of a region that was still half-frontier.

McKenna takes us in the footsteps of McKinnon’s own enquiry, which covered hundreds of kilometres of ground near Uluru and included a fascinating cast of Centralian characters, and follows the remnant paper trail all the way to McKinnon’s elderly daughter in suburban Queensland. What he discovers in a series of dusty trunks there obliges a profound reorientation in the reader.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.

Return to Uluru

By Mark McKenna

Black Inc, $34.99, 272pp