On the day Yukun was returned to Uluru, his descendants leapt into the deep, narrow grave to help ease him to rest as their elders looked on, weeping.
The ceremony, at the base of the rock on an unusually cold and rainy morning, helped ease the pain of almost 90 years of unfinished business that began with a Northern Territory police shooting in 1934.
The Pitjantjatjara men in the grave were Yukun’s great nephews and great-grandsons, some of whom had only recently learned that after Yukun was killed by police, his remains were exhumed and taken away to institutions in Adelaide. On Thursday, they interred a small box containing Yukun’s skull, which is all that the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Museum could find of him, despite a long forensic search.
Some of Yukun’s families had travelled 470km from their community of Areyonga (Utju) to receive his remains, in a deeply moving ceremony.
“We are really, really sad and upset. That part of history is really cruel and sad for us,” Joy Kuniya, Yukun’s great-niece, says. “Some people will carry it on for ever. We feel it really deeply.
“The policeman came with his gun, with a weapon, and shot him in cold blood.”
In 1934, mounted constable Bill McKinnon was sent to find the men who had killed an Aboriginal stockman at Mount Conner, in central Australia. Travelling west, McKinnon and his Aboriginal trackers, Paddy and Carbine, came across a group of men hunting, and arrested them. There was a violent interrogation. They were chained and beaten. Confessions were extracted. After about a week the men escaped, and Yukun was shot.
Two of the men were recaptured, one eventually spending 10 years in jail for murder. But four others, including a badly wounded Yukun, headed for the sanctuary of Uluru. The police trackers, following his blood trail, eventually found him in a cave about 40 metres up in the rock, near the Mutitjulu waterhole.
McKinnon told a subsequent commonwealth inquiry he fired into the cave without taking aim at Yukun. He said Yukun died from his wounds several hours later and they buried him there.
The inquiry exonerated McKinnon but expressed concern about his harsh methods. They exhumed Yukun’s remains and one member, Dr JB Cleland, took the body to Adelaide. At some point over the years, Yukun was sent to the University of Adelaide and later the South Australian Museum.
Aṉangu (the word for people in Pitjantjatjara) held a very different story.
Joseph Donald was among the men chased by McKinnon, and was the only eyewitness. One day at Docker River in 1986, Donald told film-maker David Batty what had happened when they got to Uluru:
“We came over a rock and saw our friend who had been shot by those bad men. A 44 bullet went through his chest and tore at his side … He walked towards us. We got him by the arm, poor bugger. We put him in a cave to look after him. He was my brother-in-law. We have the same grandfather.
“I could see the policeman, McKinnon. He got out his rifle and loaded it. Then he fired it at me. He missed me. Then he fired again. I looked up and saw all the rocks rolling down towards me. Then McKinnon started running towards me with two rifles. I was sitting there wondering what to do. Shall I go down? So I jumped down and landed on the sand. I stood up and saw the police running towards me.”
Donald says he hid and held his breath.
“The policemen went into the cave. They found the one who had been shot [Yukun]. They grabbed him by the arm and brought him outside. They asked my brother-in-law [Yukun], where are the other three? My brother-in-law didn’t tell the police where the others were, so they shot him. The police shot him in front of me.”
Other men who survived the attack, including senior traditional owner Paddy Uluru, fled the area and did not return for years, for fear of being killed by McKinnon. When Paddy returned in the 1950s, he brought his young sons Cassidy and Reggie with him, and they saw the rock – their birthright – for the first time.
Now in their 80s, Cassidy and Reggie are in the Mutitjulu aged care home, where Reggie vividly remembers the story his father told him – that they were travelling and hunting when the police came and assumed they were “the ones who made the trouble”.
“They didn’t understand English, they didn’t know what the tracker was saying, they didn’t know what was going on. That tracker kept telling them, pushing them to tell the ‘truth’, that they were part of the trouble group,” Reggie Uluru says. “But the policeman decided to blame them and started to arrest them on the day. They knew he was a bad man, he was a rough man, he had that tracker [Tracker Paddy] with him, he was a bad man too.”
The story is deftly told by historian Mark McKenna in his 2021 book, Return to Uluru. Bringing together the threads of these many histories, McKenna also uncovered crucial new evidence that corroborated the stories long told by Aṉangu – tucked away in a Brisbane garage.
McKenna had made contact with McKinnon’s daughter Susan, who generously gave him access to her father’s papers. The policeman had been a meticulous record-keeper. At the bottom of one trunk, McKenna found a journal in which McKinnon admitted he had “fired to hit” Yukun, a different story to the one he had told the board of inquiry in 1935.
In 2019, McKenna asked the South Australian institutions to search for Yukun’s remains. Since then, he has met families and uncovered more detail.
On the day of Yukun’s burial, he walks down the path to the Mutitjulu waterhole among the descendants of McKinnon and the descendants of Yukun, thinking about how “rare and extraordinary” it is that the book has led them all here.
“To be here again, the third time now, is overwhelming, the significance of the whole story for the families, first and foremost, but also its just incredible for me as a historian and a writer to be able to follow this right thought to this moment,” he says. “And I keep feeling that the whole thing is just bigger than all of us. Trying to take it all in is really going to take some time.”
As well as Yukun himself, there has been a repatriation of knowledge, which has been essential for helping families come to terms with their histories, answer questions and resolve doubts they have been carrying for decades.
At Areyonga, a few days before the ceremony, Hilda Bert cried when she said her mother told her a story about Yukun, a story that she didn’t quite believe.
For almost 30 years Hilda says, she doubted her mother. She was “shocked” when she read Mark’s book and realised her mother had been telling the truth all along.
“Mum told me the story of how her father speared Tracker Paddy as payback for what he did to Aṉangu. She knew what happened at Uluru. I thought she was making up stories,” Bert says. “It makes me cry just thinking about it.
“I knew that story all this time. Mum knew. Her father told her what happened to him. I was shocked because my mother told me that story when I was young and I kept it secret all these years.”
In the lead up to the repatriation this week, many other strands of the story have been brought together, telling a complex history that has resonated in a deeply personal way for hundreds of people, from the direct descendants of Yukun and the other men who fled McKinnon, to the policeman’s own descendants who made their first visit to Uluru – to pay their respects at the service.
This is truth-telling, unfolding in real time.
McKinnon’s brother’s grandsons, Alistair and Ross McKinnon, and Alistair’s wife, Ruth, stood quietly at the back as the ceremony unfolded, at times visibly moved. Along with Aṉangu mourners they filed past the small casket at the beginning of the service and again at the end, to toss a handful of red earth into the grave.
The McKinnons made the trek because “it was the least we could do”, Alistair McKinnon says. They were “overwhelmed” by the moment, and the generosity they had received from Aṉangu present.
“We were unsure how it would go,” Ruth says, “but they were so generous. We are so glad we came.”
Unplanned, at the end of the service a steady stream of Yukun’s relatives came to meet them. There were handshakes and hugs. “Palya,” they said. “God bless you. Thank you for coming.”
But the story is not finished. Aṉangu are thinking about how they will mark the site. Descendants are thinking about future meetings.
“We got to teach our children,” Paddy Uluru’s son Sammy Wilson told the gathering.
“We got to bring our generations here, to learn, to understand what happened here.”
• Guardian Australia would like to thank Central Land Council interpreter Tapaya Edwards, a Pitjantjatjara man from Amata who speaks eight languages.
