RETURN TO ULURU

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.