The hoax that Peter B. English claims to have uncovered is this: that far from returning Uluru to its traditional owners on October 26, 1985, the Federal Government had in fact allowed the Rock to fall into the hands of a makeshift group of Aboriginal campers and transients who had no genuine title to the property whatsoever, but were themselves mere tools in the hands of political opportunists and activists. The Mutitjulu Community did not exist as an entity until 1981 and was merely an updated version of Uluru Community Incorporated, itself going back no further than 1975. As for the members of Uluru Community Inc. having any long-standing association with the area – other than for purposes of climbing aboard the white man’s gravy train – or any verifiable tribal rights to it, the idea is preposterous. What Aborigines there were in the vicinity of the Rock before the Land Rights movement began to flex its muscles were a raggle-taggle band of ne’er-do-wells and alcoholics. As a former manager of one of the motels operating at Ayers Rock in the 1970s attests, ‘ “This talk about the Uluru Community Incorporated would have to be the greatest load of crap I have ever come across!”’ Caustic, the author calls this.

Just who the real owners of Uluru are then – or were then – is a matter to which Peter B. English assiduously addresses himself, the more especially as it might just be possible, if we could find them, that they would not approve of the Rock being handed back to themselves anyway. For Aborigines of this kind he has an unashamed affection: ‘loyal and faithful’, he calls them, and ‘likeable and easy-going’. The favourites for having a genuine claim to ownership are the Jankuntjatjara who were dispossessed in tribal battles in 1917 by the Pitjantjatjara. And it happens to be well known (‘reports are too numerous to be brushed aside’) that ‘Paddy Uluru’, the surviving Senior Elder of the defeated Jankuntjatjara – surviving until 1979, that is – ‘wouldn’t have a bar’ of the region of which he was a likeable and easy-going custodian being given back to anyone. So it is not only the white man whose word and trust and bond the Federal Government has betrayed.