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The adventures of ‘Hanging Bill’

An elegant book about the pull of Uluru
by
April 2021, no. 430

Return to Uluru: A killing, a hidden history, a story that goes to the heart of the nation by Mark McKenna

Black Inc., $34.99 hb, 256 pp

The adventures of ‘Hanging Bill’

An elegant book about the pull of Uluru
by
April 2021, no. 430

The distinguished historian Mark McKenna has written an elegant and hungry book about the pull of Uluru, that place of mysterious significance to Australians, black and white. Of course, in recent times, the Uluru Statement from the Heart – the heart that had a stake driven through it the moment it was entrusted to the most powerful whites in Canberra – is a complicated domain of passion and polemic. McKenna’s work, pro-Aboriginal and postcolonial in spirit, is itself an addition to the long history of romancing Uluru, albeit with a focus on a hero who seems like an anti-hero by the time this book is done.

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