Moonface & The Rock
The Age
Saturday May 29, 1999
IT WAS a meeting of Australian icons. Bert Newton and Uluru. Moonface and The Rock. And there was Patti, too, constantly at Bert's side, a sort of Olgas to Bert's Ayers Rock.
We were invited to Uluru for the weekend, for the unveiling of a new partnership between Bert and Patti and coach touring company Australian Pacific Tours. It was an enticing prospect: a chance to experience the overwhelming power and beauty of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, and to spend a little quality time with Australia's royal family of television.
On the way there, my wife insisted I should have some small talk ready for when I met Bert and Patti - and given that we flew via Adelaide and Alice Springs and two changes of aircraft to reach Uluru, I had plenty of time to consider my options.
Subjects such as hair weaves, Jenny Craig and football were obviously taboo - as a dispossessed Fitzroy supporter, Bert's reaction to any mention of the footy was unpredictable. I settled on the relative safety of, say, "Have you been up this way before?" or, "So, did you get here today?"
Thus armed, we arrived at Ayers Rock Airport. Bert and Patti weren't there, but there was a luggage trolley wearing a "Bert and Patti Show" sign, and a smiling APT driver named Mal, who would be our splendid guide for the next 24 hours.
At Ayers Rock Resort we were taken, bags in hand, to the poolside, where the contingent that arrived earlier (including Bert and Patti) was waiting, and the working media was promptly whisked away to a briefing. It was 31 degrees and I was still carting my luggage, my camera gear and my it-was-four-degrees-in-Melbourne-at-6am coat.
The briefing had two purposes: to let us know of filming and photographic restrictions in the area, and to impress upon the group the traditional owners' disapproval of climbing Uluru. This is a knotty problem for visitors to The Rock.
As recently as a decade ago, virtually every visitor climbed the monolith, but over time it was made increasingly clear that this practice was deeply offensive to the traditional owners.
The climbing path, delineated by a chain fence that starts about 50 metres above the base of Uluru, traces the traditional route taken by Mala (rufous hare-wallaby) men on their arrival at Uluru, one of great spiritual significance.
There is a multilingual sign at the base of The Rock that asks people not to climb, while acknowledging that climbing is permitted. And they do climb, as many as 250,000 a year, although the local Anangu people say an increasing number of visitors choose not to do so. Those that climb occasionally come a cropper, as the nest of memorial plaques attached to The Rock attests. (On average, one person a year dies - typically by falling or cardiac arrest - on Uluru).
The climbers may not be aware of how silly they appear, huffing and puffing up the steep incline or straddling the chain and holding on desperately on the way down, tug-o-war style, all the while looking like ants crawling over a huge sticky bun. The rock is disfigured by the grey trail the climbers follow (the red oxide that gives Uluru its distinctive color is worn away by the procession of boots and runners), damaged by the long chain and blighted by the sweating procession along it.
But I digress. After the briefing, I had about two minutes to deposit my luggage, guzzle a glass of water and return to the bus for a visit to Kata Tjuta, formerly known as the Olgas. And there was another briefing, this one from Alice Kay, representing Australian Pacific Tours: "Now, we want everyone to smile. Can you all smile? Nobody's smiling!"
Then there was Bert. "I'll just walk along the aisle for the cameras and say 'Hello' and shake hands. If you can just say 'Hello' back." Before I knew it, and sitting as I was on the aisle, I was shaking hands with Bert - "Hello, how are you?" "Hi, Bert" - as he moved swiftly down the middle of the bus.
A theme of the weekend was already apparent. We were there as extras in a special Uluru edition of Bert's Good Morning Australia television show. The sort of people you see in the coffee shop on Neighbours - non-talkers, smilers, nodders, mobile wallpaper, fillers-up of empty space. Canon fodder.
We headed for Kata Tjuta and a viewing platform set up on the dunes. We waited on the bus for Bert and Patti to descend for the cameras and then climbed on a boardwalk above the sand, which was a delicate relief map of tracks and prints made by birds, dingoes, lizards and snakes. I remembered that when I was a kid I had a pair of Bata shoes that made the same sort of tracks in the dirt.
It was the wrong time of day for this spot, which was looking into the afternoon sun, but Kata Tjuta still looked superb, bruise-colored and bold against its backlighting, and stretching hugely across the near horizon.
Bert and Patti did a lot of pointing at Kata Tjuta for the cameras, and Patti planted a kiss on the cheek of Rupert Goodwin, a traditional owner of Uluru and a national parks ranger. For good measure, she kissed him again in case the first opportunity was missed. A group of Japanese tourists looked on, bemused.
We wandered back to the bus after our appointed 20 minutes at the site, and then waited for 10 more for the camera crew and the stars to finish filming and climb aboard. By the time we reached another viewing point much closer to Kata Tjuta the planned walk through the Valley of the Winds had been cancelled for lack of time. Still, Bert smiled broadly and he and Rupert swapped hats.
Back at the hotel, we had barely five minutes to ready ourselves for the Sounds of Silence dinner in the sand dunes. We rushed back to the room, swigged water again and hurtled back to the bus, whereupon we waited for 15 minutes until all were aboard. Bert and Patti were last to rejoin the coach, showered and, it seemed to me, perfectly made-up. "Thanks for being so prompt," said Mal. Well, some of us were.
We drove down a rust-red back road to reach the sunset viewing spot before the light disappeared. I wanted to see whether Bert would go the same color as Uluru. Champagne flutes in hand, and with a didgeridoo playing in the background, we climbed a tall dune with Uluru before us and Kata Tjuta behind.
The Rock was more grey than red, but the waning light somehow turned the foreground, with its ochre soil, yellow spinifex and scattered clumps of green bush, into a luminous palette. To the rear, Kata Tjuta was a bold charcoal silhouette and the heavens were a mix of pink-smeared clouds and cobalt sky. It was a scene of the purest beauty. And for once, Uluru was upstaged.
We followed a boardwalk across the dunes to a clearing on which sat half a dozen tables set with damask cloths, gleaming cutlery and candles. The Sounds of Silence dinner is a highlight of the Uluru experience, eating gourmet food under the brilliant stars of the Red Centre.
We ate kangaroo, emu, crocodile and other indigenous species, drank wine and listened to an astronomer's stories of the constellations, with the lights doused and generator turned off. A far-off aircraft didn't play ball during the "listen to the silence of the Australian bush" bit, but the sky was extraordinary, filled with stars and planets that became a little more explicable through the high-powered telescopes provided.
Australian Pacific Tours' chairman Geoff McGeary introduced the Bert and Patti partnership - in essence, the couple will promote APT in advertising and personal appearances - noting that Bert and Patti were hugely popular among the company's target market, the baby boomer. And then it was Bert's turn.
He took the microphone in his urbane manner, talked of how wonderful it was to be at Uluru, how splendid the deal with APT would be, and told a couple of amusing stories.
Then he introduced Patti, with the tried and tested "she doesn't know about this, but I'm going to ask her to sing a song" line. Well, this was unexpected for all of us. Patti went to the stage and launched into an a cappella version of I Still Call Australia Home. Half way through she forgot the words, and appealed for assistance from the audience, which complied in a self-conscious, half-hearted kind of way. Still, trouper that she is, Patti soldiered on to complete the song in stirring fashion.
Next morning we rose early to go camel riding. After the ritual 15 minutes wait on the coach for the stars we were driven to a camel farm, where about 10 beasts lay tethered together. The GMA crew wanted Patti to lead Bert on one the camels, but in the end the Newtons climbed aboard an untethered Rebel, who didn't seem happy about it in his grumpy camel way, and disappeared around the corner.
There, with Uluru in the background and Patti behind him on his noble mount, Bert did his TV show intro. The man is an admirable professional - he was philosophical, whimsical and witty in turns, and the spiel flowed beautifully. Still, he did a second take, highlighted by swallowing a fly in mid-sentence - even then, he finished his stand-up (sit-down?) without missing a beat.
"I'm going to do a laugh," announced Bert, who promptly guffawed in most realistic fashion for 20 seconds or so. The laugh was to be inserted after an in-studio gag from one of Bert's offsiders. The wonders of television.
Soon we were on our camels, trotting along a red dirt circuit through the bush. A camel called Cooper kept showing his mossy green teeth to me and dribbling disconcertingly. Behind us, I caught sight of Bert and Patti doing a Benny Hill-style run along a track for the cameras.
Back on the bus, participants were now faced with the big question. To climb or not to climb. There were three choices - climb Uluru, walk around its base, or join the Liru Walk conducted by Anangu Tours, a stroll through the bush with some of the traditional owners.
We chose the latter, while most decided to climb, which seemed strange given the passionate pleas (and cogent arguments) not to do so. It seemed a smack in the eye for Rupert Goodwin and the other traditional custodians.
Bert and Patti weren't climbing. They hopped off the bus with us and a handful of others for the Liru Walk. Because we were late (one guess why) there was some confusion about where we were to meet the guides. As we waited, Bert and Patti got back on the bus and it drove off.
The guides turned up, seemed as bewildered as us, and headed off in a 4WD to try to find the coach. The rest of us stood, somewhat resignedly, in the heat and dust and waited. After a while the bus returned, and Bert and Patti descended again.
While I'd had the feeling that we were extras, now I realised that we were invisible. The white guide from Anangu Tours announced, while looking pointedly at Bert and Patti, that somebody was needed to carry the traditional men's and women's implements.
Patti wasn't listening, and one of the other women in the group hopefully spoke up: "I will." She was ignored. "Would you like to carry this?" said the guide, thrusting a basket at Patti. She slung it over her arm, Bert clutched a bunch of spears, and off we went.
We stopped at a rough shelter where traditional owners Charlie Walkabout and Jacob Puntaru showed how to make kiti, a spinifex resin used to fix spear heads and to repair traditional tools. They popped a hair ring on Patti's implacable coiffeur and she tottered off balancing the basket on her head for a few paces; Bert was given a hair belt, into which the spears were inserted.
Jacob turned to Bert, who was sitting on a log. "What's your name?" he demanded. "Bert," said Bert, and Jacob, with a magician's flourish, handed him a key ring with his name on it, to laughter all round.
Further on, Charlie and Jacob demonstrated the uncanny accuracy of their spear throwing, and Bert and Patti were given a turn. Nobody else was invited to have a shot.
We were told two Harley-Davidsons would be waiting back at the road, and my wife and I were asked whether we would like to ride to the base of The Rock. Why not? But when we reached the road, Bert and Patti put on helmets and disappeared on the Harleys. Our Harleys.
A couple of minutes later they were back. It seemed our rides were back on again, but an apologetic PR person sidled up to me: "Actually, Patti would like to ride to the Rock. Do you mind?" Blimey. But then Patti appeared, helmet in hand, graciously handing it over. Nice lady.
We stood at the base of the climb, watching people slip and slither on the rock, and noting a white cap blowing across Uluru's surface (this is how some climbers meet their end, we were told, chasing hats blown away by the wind). We strolled to some small overhangs filled with rock art and stood inside a remarkable cavern that looked like a breaking wave. In the tube at Uluru.
Then it was time to leave. Bert and Patti were being filmed again, this time in the bush near Uluru's base. Patti was crouching at Bert's side as he spoke to the camera. We watched as she swung her right arm, and smashed a cream pie in his face. The old cream-pie-in-the-face-at-the-base-of-Uluru gag. It was really shaving cream, Bert explained when he got back on the bus.
On the way back to Melbourne, Bert and Patti got a quicker connection at Sydney Airport than we did. Our last sight was of them disappearing on to the aerobridge. We didn't even get to say goodbye.
Gary Walsh travelled courtesy of Australian Pacific Tours.
© 1999 The Age
