Honoring Rock Legends
The Age
Saturday July 14, 2001
THEY look like a squadron of soldier ants marching up a red slope against a blue outback sky. The dark figures are ranks of tourists who travel thousands of kilometres across the sea to climb the biggest monolith in the world.
Many white tourists, Australians included, regard scaling Uluru, or Ayers Rock, as one of the many international ``must do" pilgrimages.
And don't the local marketers love it. Walk around Yulara, the resort area close to the Rock, or through the streets of Alice Springs, about 500 kilometres away, and you will see the paraphernalia from ``I climbed the rock" T-shirts to gaudy tea towels.
To the Aborigines of the Mutitjulu community, Uluru forms a special part of their self explanation; it's their ``tjukurpa" or dreaming.
They regard the many groves, waterways and canyons that meander around the Rock's enormous base with varying degrees of spiritual significance.
There are men's sacred spots, women's sacred areas and places of special family importance. The shady recesses and their messages help Aboriginal children to make sense of their relationship with the land, the plants and the animals.
Their parents have never been able to see the point in struggling up the steep slope to the Rock's 348-metre summit for ``the best possible view of nothing".
Scaling Uluru is not regarded as standing on sacred ground, but the local community, known as the Anangu people, do not like people climbing the Rock. But being non-confrontational types they won't come out and say no. Instead, they are encouraging visitors to learn more about Anangu beliefs, traditions and culture rather than risking lives for a photo opportunity.
The locals avert their gaze and say they have suffered extreme discomfort and embarrassment every time someone is killed, either by falling from the Rock's steep, slippery slopes or from suffering heart attacks during or after the climb.
Their collective hearts have gone out to the families of 35 people who have lost relatives at Uluru since the days it became accessible to tourism about 50 years ago. Aborigines feel responsible, as custodians of the land, for anyone who visits this remarkable place.
Inside the Aboriginal cultural centre elder, Tony Tjdmiwa, writes: ``That's a really important sacred thing that you are climbing ... you shouldn't climb. It's not the real thing about this place. The real thing is listening to everything. Listening and understanding everything we are informing you.
``Don't climb. And maybe that makes you a bit sad. But anyway that's what we have to say. And all the tourists will brighten up and say: `Oh I see. This is the right way. This is the proper way. No climbing'."
Uluru-Kata Tjuta park manager Brooke Watson said the possibility of permanently closing the Rock to climbers would be considered by all parties responsible for administering the area over the next three years.
``People don't understand what a difficult and treacherous thing it is. It puts an enormous strain on your heart. The traditional owners have given permission for people to climb, but they would prefer that you didn't," she said.
While most tour groups have been counselled against rock climbing, many overseas outfits have struggled to come to terms with the impending change.
One Australian travel company that has revamped its approach is AAT Kings. It has launched a new five-day package tour from Alice Springs to the Rock, then nearby Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) and on to the spectacular Kings Canyon and back to Standley Chasm.
The new tour is notable because it relies more on Aboriginal culture than pure sightseeing, photography and self-indulgence. Not that there aren't plenty of spectacular things to see and do.
But instead of climbing the Rock, travellers will be taken on guided walks around its 9.4-kilometre girth, beginning in the early morning.
So in lieu of expending energy, visitors will acquire knowledge.
The guides - some of whom are expected to be employed soon from the Anangu people - stop often to identify bush tucker from trees and grasses. They explain the uses of different trees and plants and identify wild tobacco, honey, bread seeds and special berries used to make jam.
Scars and clefts in the swirling rock face all have particular places in the Anangu Dreaming, and the guides will make your head spin with the detail and complexity of the legend.
You will visit quiet waterholes and caves and see fading finger paintings under wave-like rock formations. You will hear Dreamtime stories of Mala the wallaby, Kuniya the female python and Liru the poisonous male snake. At dusk, the classic red images of the arkose sandstone monolith glow purple while you sip champagne and feast on a kangaroo barbecue.
The guides say the Rock looks surreal glowing red, but it is often more spectacular during a storm when it is shrouded in cloud, with lightning forking across rock folds and water cascading down its gullies.
While you walk alongside the monolith, it is hard to imagine it being part of an ancient geological life cycle formed by continental upheaval, erosion, climate change and the interface of inland seas. Uluru is really one big, layered mudcake of sedimentary stone.
Preposterously, scientific testing would have us believe that more than two-thirds of it lies submerged beneath the red earth.
THE first white person to reach Uluru, explorer William Christie Gosse, would never have believed it. He found the monolith on July 19, 1873, and named it after Sir Henry Ayers, governor of South Australia. Now more than 300,000 people visit the outpost in remote central Australia from all over the globe.
About 40 kilometres from Uluru are the Olgas, now known as Kata Tjuta, which is Aboriginal for ``many heads".
Explorer Ernest Giles named them after an obscure Russian duchess, and presumably in honor of her figure.
The massive basalt-granite domes are almost more eerie than the Rock, rising red from the plains seemingly out of nowhere.
There are several warm and windy walks to be taken through the gorges. The most picturesque winds its way beneath towering cliffs to the Mutitjulu Waterhole.
On returning, if a traveller looks closely near dawn at the scree and low scrub that scratches out a living on the side of the domes, the dark shapes of wallabies can be found nibbling at the shoots of new grass.
After spending time at the resort compound at nearby Yulara, where visitors can choose from a range of super expensive or more modest accommodation, and wash the red dust off in the pool, a bus will take them 400 kilometres down the highway to the Watarrka National Park. Along the way, cast an eye out for Mount Connor, an Uluru-like mountain range.
Once at the park and before trekking into the majestic Kings Canyon, the well-heeled and vertigo tolerant traveller should spend $90 for a 15-minute helicopter flight over the gorge.
Below, the crevasses and chasms and the curiously shaped domes resemble a mini-version of Western Australia's Bungle Bungle ranges.
Once done with the aerial perspective, the fit and energetic can make the climb to the rim of Kings Canyon for spectacular views of the park.
The walk, which takes two to three hours, passes through narrow passes and deep gorges filled with waterholes and huge, ancient cycads.
Time and the wind have played havoc with the sandstone and the rounded rock shapes are enchanting. The less athletic can stick to ground level and move up the paths that line the boulder-strewn canyon floor.
A big bus ride back to Alice Springs, a night on the town and another day exploring Standley Chasm, named after a woman who taught Aboriginal children to read and write, tops off an adventurous but thought-provoking time in Australia's dead heart.
Paul Robinson travelled courtesy of AAT Kings.
© 2001 The Age
