The death of Yokununna: Frank Bongiorno on Mark McKenna's 'Return to Uluru'

Mark McKenna explores Australia’s history of violence, dispossession and deception through one tragic incident In 1933, the geologist and explorer Cecil Madigan tried to identify the “centre” of Australia. It was a question that had long exercised explorers of the outback, but still lacked a definitive answer. Madigan sought to solve the riddle using a map of Australia cut from sheet metal, and a plumb bob. His conclusion was that the centre was about “257 miles south of Central Mount Stuart”. A more technologically sophisticated effort in 1988 found that Madigan’s estimate was not far out – just 11 kilometres. As Mark McKenna demonstrates in his new book, Return to Uluru, these efforts have been part of a long-running obsession among white Australians to possess, physically, imaginatively and intellectually, the nation’s “Red Centre” and “Dead Heart”. Uluru, once known as Ayers Rock, has been central to such thinking, and McKenna is surely correct in suggesting that it, and not Canberra, has become “the spiritual centre of the Commonwealth”.