The wildly contrasting histories of a fatal outback police shooting inside a cave at Uluru

The death of an Anangu man named Yukun in the 1930s is at the centre of an outback tragedy involving race, murder and injustice. 

Now, almost a century later, Yukun’s remains have been returned to country. 

Warning: This story features the names and images of deceased Indigenous people.

It’s a rainy morning at Australia’s spiritual centre, Uluru.

As water cascades off the red rock, painting it with black lines, an historic burial is taking place at the base of the monolith.

The remains of an Anangu man named Yukun are being laid to rest in a traditional burial ceremony.

However, this isn’t like any other burial ceremony seen at Uluru.

Almost 90 years earlier, a policeman tracked down and shot Yukun in the shadows of the rock.

Since the death, two distinct stories of what happened have swirled around the red centre and, like many territory tales, the issue of race and racism is at the centre of the story. 

The fateful day

It was October 13, 1934, and Yukun was hiding in a cave, not far from the storied Mutitjulu waterhole, at the base of Uluru.

Police were investigating the murder of a local station hand who had broken tribal law, capturing a group of Aboriginal men.

The police officer who had been hot on Yukun’s trail called out to him from outside the cave.

What happens next has been the subject of a generations-long debate, but what has never been disputed is that the officer shot and killed Yukun.

His body was buried by the waterhole, and the police officer who fired the fatal shot returned to Alice Springs to report the incident.

A subsequent inquiry in September 1935 determined the shooting was legal, but not warranted.

A time of tension

In 1930s outback Australia, tensions between police and Aboriginal people were high.

The 1928 Coniston massacre had seen more than 100 Indigenous people murdered at the hands of territory police. All of the officers involved were exonerated in a subsequent inquiry.

And the local constabulary had been removing children from their families and placing them in far-flung missions as part of what would become the Stolen Generations.

Historian Mark McKenna described race relations at the time as “fraught”. 

“This was a very, very brutal, tough environment,” he explains. 

“Many of the whites [thought] they had to demonstrate their power and might to show who was in control.

“That’s the way some of them responded to that sense of vulnerability: with violence.” 

It was in this tense climate where the worlds of Yukun and a young territory cop named William (Bill) McKinnon would collide.

McKinnon had come to Alice Springs — then known as Stuart — not long after turning 30 years old.

A position with the Northern Territory Police Force presented the opportunity to make a decent wage and embark on a frontier adventure.

McKenna studied the life of McKinnon for almost five years.

In 1934, when McKinnon received word that a murder had taken place 100 kilometres east of Uluru, at Atilla, he was sent to investigate.

With two Indigenous trackers and a caravan of camels, McKinnon set off on what would be a three-month journey across the desert.

By September, 1934, he captured six Aboriginal men he claimed ought to be questioned as potential suspects.

One of them was Yukun, another was his brother-in-law, Joseph Donald.

“Essentially they are innocent … Yukun was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” McKenna explains. 

Things quickly went awry for McKinnon. About three weeks after rounding up the men, they escaped and raced towards Uluru.

In the five-day pursuit of the men across the desert towards Uluru, McKinnon’s trackers wounded Yukun.

A trail of blood led the officers to a cave close to the Mutitjulu waterhole.

In McKinnon’s version of events, Yukun threw a rock at him while hiding in the cave. McKinnon then responded by firing a bullet into the cave. 

Yukun then threw another stone, and McKinnon fired a second shot, telling the inquiry that it was made “without taking aim”.

It is this shot that killed Yukun.

When McKinnon returned to Alice Springs, he lamented the bungled arrests but maintained his shooting of Yukun was justified.

However, with allegations of police violence against Aboriginal men, coupled with the shooting, Commonwealth officials established their inquiry.

Yet the lawman who stood accused, Constable McKinnon, was also welcomed as part of the inquiry’s entourage, acting as a guide and cook as it toured the desert gathering evidence.

“There’s a question to be raised there about what that means for the impartiality of the inquiry,” McKenna says. 

When the inquiry handed down its report, McKinnon was found guilty of violence against the men, but cleared over the shooting. 

“Effectively, he was exonerated, as far as the death of Yukun [was] concerned,” McKenna explains. 

McKinnon went on to become a highly-respected officer and the subject of outback folklore.

A prolific diarist and amateur photographer, McKinnon’s tales from the frontier were published in city tabloids.

He became a senior inspector in 1951. Two years before he retired, he was awarded a medal on behalf of the Queen for long service and good conduct.

After a lottery windfall, the retired officer moved to Queensland, but McKinnon’s legacy lived on throughout the red centre.

Today, his picture adorns the walls of a remote roadhouse.

In the eyes of many old battlers from the bush, McKinnon is a mythical figure — an adventurer, an explorer and a hero.

However, very few people knew the full story of what happened the day he shot Yukun.

The community that knew, but were never heard

About 200km east of Uluru, a small community called Areyonga sits in a grand valley near Kings Canyon.

Anangu people call it Utju, which means “in the nest” in the Pitjantjatjara language.

It’s here where generations of Yukun’s family have carried the trauma of his death.

Joseph Donald was captured with Yukun in 1934 and, when he returned to tell his family what had happened, the story was different from the one the inquiry was told. 

Donald told relatives that McKinnon had dragged Yukun out of the cave and shot him at point-blank range.

In an interview with filmmaker David Batty in 1986, Donald places his index finger between his eyes and says: “They shot him here.”

He adds that, rather than merely shooting him “without taking any aim”, as McKinnon had claimed, the police officer had instead murdered Yukun.

Donald was so disturbed and heartbroken by the experience, he spent the rest of his life mourning his brother-in-law’s death.

No other family member of Yukun has spoken publicly about the incident — until now.

“I want people to know the truth … we need to tell the truth,” Abraham Poulson says.

He is the grandson of Joseph Donald, and the closest family descendant of Yukun.

He’s nervous, and clearly still affected by the trauma his family has been carrying.

“Joseph Donald told us the story … he was a witness who was travelling with him and saw it.” 

Abraham says his grandfather told him that Yukun had nothing to do with the murder McKinnon was originally investigating.

He says his great uncle had been rounded up by the officer simply because he’d been with some other men who were of interest to the police.

“I know that they were from the bush, travelling around, hunting,” he says. 

“And there [along the way], others made trouble.”

Abraham, in Pitjantjatjara, recounts the escape of the six men and Yukun’s subsequent capture in the cave near the waterhole.

Again, it differs from McKinnon’s version of events.

“Those people, they were the wrong ones, the innocent ones,” Abraham says. 

He pauses, and then explains that when Yukun was shot, three other men evaded capture — in effect, he sacrificed his life to save his mates.

“From inside [the cave], they heard a gunshot,” he says. 

“[The police] dragged Yukun’s body down from the cave. 

“The policeman [looked for] the three men, but they escaped another way. They got up and ran off to the west.” 

Abraham pulls out a photocopied version of the inquiry report into Yukun’s death and says: “These are lies.”

Sammy Wilson — a senior custodian of Uluru — knows the Anangu story of Yukun’s shooting well through his bloodlines.

“We wondered why he was shot. We’ve been searching for the answers,” he says. 

Sammy’s grandfather, Paddy Uluru, was another innocent man who managed to escape the cave as Yukun died.

“All of our years growing up, uncles would tell us the story about what happened.” 

The author who cracked the case

McKenna — as a historian and author — had always been fascinated by the case of Yukun and was eager to get to the bottom of what happened.

He managed to track down the McKinnon’s daughter through an Albert Namatjira painting that had been donated to a Queensland gallery.

McKinnon’s daughter was full of praise for her father and was all-too-willing to show McKenna a box of diaries that her father had kept.

She had no idea her dad had been harbouring a dark secret.

After foraging through the old documents, McKenna found the most important piece of evidence uncovered in the story so far: McKinnon’s diary entry, written the morning after the shooting of Yukun.

In it, as part of a handwritten sentence, he states: “Fired to hit.”

McKinnon, the heroic, adventurer cop, had intentionally killed the defenceless Yukun and was never brought to justice.

“At that point, I knew he’d been lying to the Commonwealth Board of Enquiry in 1935 [as it was then known],” McKenna says. 

“It was hard to take in.” 

McKenna had also discovered that McKinnon had a history of violence towards Aboriginal people and, even after the incident at the waterhole, he’d been cited for brutality.

“Really, there needs to be a reckoning on the part of white Australia,” he says.

Another one of Joseph Donald’s descendants, Joy Kuniya, says there are many similar stories in Indigenous Australia.

“Yukun wasn’t the only one,” she says. 

“Everyone, everywhere — they were treated this way. 

“We would like to see police working together in the community, sorting the problems … and doing the best thing in [the] community.” 

As senior custodian of Uluru, Wilson drew parallels between Yukun’s shooting and ongoing Indigenous deaths in custody.

“The same thing happened here nearly 100 years ago and nobody was even talking about it,” he says.

“[Aboriginal people] need to talk so that [others] can understand us, for our future generations.”

While white Australia exalted the feats of McKinnon, Aboriginal people in Central Australia shuddered at the mention of his name.

Yukun’s return home

On the 88th anniversary of Yukun’s death, the cloudy skies and a sombre mood framed Yukun’s burial at the site where he was killed.

“Today was a bit sorry for me,” Abraham Poulson says. “I was thinking about what they did … back in the day.” 

Part of his family’s sadness is that his body was buried and then — unknown to them — exhumed before being transported to Adelaide in 1935. 

Yukun’s skull was found in box 39 at Adelaide University in recent years.

At the burial ceremony, university spokesman Richard Logan apologised to the family. 

“His remains were kept in an institution, not as a man, but a specimen,” he tells the crowd.

“This is a shameful story.”

No one knows the location of the rest of Yukun’s remains.

Kuniya, a stoic woman, was joined by descendants of those who escaped McKinnon to mourn.

“We, as a family, are proud that his body is coming back to the land [where] he used to hunt and used to live,” she says.

“But the other sad thing is there is only one part, and we don’t know where the rest of the bones [are].

“It’ll be really sad for us to search and look for it again.”

In another significant step towards reconciliation, Alistair and Ross McKinnon — the sons of Bill McKinnon’s brother — were among the mourners. Abraham and Joy embraced the pair after the burial.

“It’s stomach-churning, really, when you understand the detail that we didn’t know,” Ross McKinnon says, “to realise our direct ancestor played a part in those acts of the past.”

The McKinnon brothers had heard family stories of “the outback character” and their great-uncle’s time policing around Alice Springs.

“Certainly [we had] some awareness of his treatment of Indigenous people in Australia,” Alistair McKinnon shares.

Both brothers attended the ceremony in the hope of reconciling with Anangu families.

“I think the history that hasn’t been told, needs to be told,” Ross McKinnon says.

“And, if people have links to that, [we] need to be brave enough to own that.

“All those bits that we’ve left out, omitted, edited, need to be put back into the stories that we tell.”

After the ceremony, Poulson gestured to a dead tree, which stands opposite the cave where Yukun was shot. 

“This tree is a witness,” he says.

“[Today] I brought Yukun back to Uluru.”

Credits

• Reporter: Elias Clure
• Producer: Raveen Hunjan
• Translation: Joy Kuniya, Tarna Andrews, Tapaya Edwards and Robert Borgas
• Photography and videography: Jerry Rickard, Ron Foley, Elias Clure
• Designer: Chan Woo Park
• Digital production: Jenny Ky