Return to Uluru by Mark McKenna

Author:Mark McKenna [McKenna, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

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As early as the 1940s, Bill McKinnon’s exploits became the stuff of legend, thanks largely to popular authors such as Frank Clune. Clune—always on the lookout for a good story from Australia’s “wild west”—first met McKinnon then, and quickly anointed him the “pioneer of the Red Center” and the “conqueror of Ayers Rock.” His books mixed travelogue, adventure, and history, and they were written in a racy, dramatic style that proved tremendously popular with readers. Clune’s work had helped to create the mystique of the rock—“the giant jewel of the desert . . . home of the ancient spirits of creation”—and he’d long wanted to write up the story of McKinnon’s camel patrols in the 1930s. McKinnon seemed eager to assist him, even lending him some logbooks so he could read about his exploits firsthand.

In 1957, Clune sent McKinnon a copy of The Fortune Hunters, which he inscribed personally: “To my good friend Bill McKinnon, who told the saga of a camel desert patrol, back in the dark ages.” In graphic detail, Clune chronicled the story of McKinnon’s hunt for the escaped prisoners in 1934 and the shooting at the rock. The book included photographs taken by McKinnon; one showed him unearthing Kai-Umen’s body as his “six prisoners” and trackers Paddy and Carbine stood behind the grave, looking on. Another showed Kai-Umen’s skull on a shovel opposite a photo of McKinnon as a young man at Bondi Beach. Determined to paint a heroic portrait—“Well done, Bill McKinnon”—Clune presented McKinnon’s version of the story in lurid detail, adding his own embellishments and invented dialogue to create a gripping narrative. Predictably, Aboriginal people appeared as hapless “stone age primitives” compared to the “civilized white [police]man . . . [who] had become a human bloodhound.”

In Clune’s telling, McKinnon was the fearless, duty-bound law enforcer who would stop at nothing to ensure that justice was done. Determined to apprehend Yokununna, he’d merely “fired a shot at the floor of the cave as a warning.” How McKinnon felt when he read the story is difficult to say. He wasn’t a writer and he knew that others could tell his story far more effectively than he could. At the same time, he was often annoyed by their factual errors, which he crossed out in the published text, inserting the correct information in pen.

In late 1961, on the eve of McKinnon’s retirement, Douglas Lockwood, the Melbourne Herald’s correspondent in the Northern Territory, published an article on his thirty-year career in the Territory police force. “Inspector McKinnon,” Lockwood claimed, told him “that even after an order from Canberra that [neck] chains must not be used he had to do so to prevent prisoners from escaping.” He insisted that “no cruelty or hardship was involved . . . he even demonstrated this by chaining two natives to a tree . . . one with handcuffs and chain and the other with neck collar and chain.” For good measure, Lockwood quoted McKinnon at length on the events at

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