by Arthur Groom
W. H. Liddle, of Angas Downs, had told me to expect an expedition by four-wheel-drive trucks from the Geelong College; but there was no sign of any recent visitors; and Tiger declared that no one had visited the Rock since his own visit fourteen months before.
We set out to circle the Rock on foot. The boys were high-spirited. Tamalji went tearing across the boggy flats, leaping and whooping, and creating running echoes along the red walls; then he disappeared into the mulga to northward on the track of a pappy-dawg. It was Njunowa’s first visit to the Rock, and he followed Tiger at first in wide-eyed excitement, until I asked him to scramble high up to pose against the main wall. He agreed the first time, protested the second time, and was too tired the third time, after which I gave him up as a photographic model. We stood before the great Old Woman’s Cave, over three hundred yards long, a hundred feet high, and undermining the Rock on its northern face. Known as Itjaritjaringura to the natives, it has for countless centuries been a legendary ‘dreaming-place’ of a woman who sprang from an ancestral burrowing animal of the mole family, no larger than a mouse, to be found in the surrounding sandhills.
I felt like an ant at the door of a cathedral, until Tiger scrambled ahead of me over sandstone boulders, and we entered the great cave. Tiger located old rock paintings, and campfires that had blackened the cavernous roof. Curtains of thin sandstone hung down. I reached up and tapped one with a small stone. It rang out like rich china.
Tamalji walked in from the surrounding mulga and joined us at the eastern end of the Rock. He had missed his pappy-dawg, and was quite disgruntled until he found a bush of native figs; and the three boys rapidly consumed a great number while I wandered on to negotiate a natural moat. The southern walls of the Rock sweep in and out in deep bays or indentations up to two hundred yards deep; and down into each bay a stream trickles strongly from invisible rock-holes. Immense boulders had fallen and piled high. The boys wormed in and out in search of elusive pappy-dawgs, but found nothing. They were more interested in the possibility of financial reward for scalps than in the grandeur of the place.
Various writers have described Ayers Rock as difficult of ascent, when in reality it is a trained mountaineer’s job on the east-south-east corner, a rough and steep scramble up at least two places on its southern side, and nothing else but a strenuous and spectacular uphill walk on its western side. On the northern side, the sheer cliffs and hollowed base prevent any reasonable attempt at ascent.
We tackled the easy western route, called Tjinteritjinteringura* by the natives. It is a bare rock ridge, not much steeper than a staircase, rising from a broad beginning to a narrowing ridge of sandstone, surfaced with the rough stucco pink common to the whole Rock. Tamalji soon gave his wild whoop and screaming laugh, and ran barefooted all over the place. His balance was amazing. Tiger grunted and groaned. ‘Me getting old in legs,’ he gasped; but he was determined. In desperation he turned to me. ‘You feel all right? You not feel like properly old man?’ But I was feeling splendid, and raced after Tamalji, who had taken the steep climb in his teeth. Tamalji was defying all known laws of extreme exertion by gulping several mouthfuls of ice-cold water from each round rock-hole. The man had the energy of a demon, and still found breath to laugh in wild abandon.
Njunowa gasped his way up the Rock for perhaps a hundred yards, then flopped on the Rock and rolled out flat on his back and lay spread-eagled for our return. Mount Olga’s many domes rose above the sea of sandhills; but there were other mountains beyond, a strange, encircling concourse of rocky silhouettes and distant shapes of the far Petermanns to westward, and the Musgrave Ranges in a chain of peak after peak to southward. Some of them had never been trodden by white men. Two days’ travel to westward was the lonely grave of prospector Henry Lasseter, who died of dysentery and starvation on 30 January 1931; buried crudely by friendly natives of the Petermann Ranges, reburied by old Bob Buck, Central Australian wanderer, who now lives at Doctor’s Stones in the eastern end of the James Range, south-west of Alice Springs.
There was no trace of Lake Amadeus to the north. It was hidden in its salty hollow only six hundred feet above sea level. The summit, crest, sides, ridges, ravines, shelves, and terraces of Ayers Rock are pitted with hundreds of the rounded rock-holes, capable of holding from a few to several thousand gallons of crystal-clear water from any light passing shower. The recent four inches of rain had filled every hole, until each pool overflowed to the next in a scintillating chain of flashing light.
Tamalji beat me to the top by a furlong. His time for the ascent was about thirty-five minutes. Tiger was still a dot turning the shoulder a quarter of a mile down. A small pile of broken sandstone has been placed on the summit, and the usual summit tin and bottle of names are there. I took out the pieces of parched and frayed paper. I have been on many a mountain summit, and seen many a cairn of stones and bottle filled with names; but none excited me more than those accounts of the past few who have travelled hundreds and in some instances, thousands of miles, to ascend Ayers Rock. In this lonely land it seemed to give the names written in ink and pencil definite reality and personal presence. Goodness knows where they all are now; but here are the names:
7/3/1931. W. McKinnon.
19/2/1932. W. McKinnon.
July, 1933. W. Fuller.
28/5/1936. H. N. Foy, Mrs Foy, Tom McFadden, Stan Tolhurst, Gus Schaller, Bill Morgan, Sydney Walker, Bob Buck, Denis Haycroft, Rupert Kathner, Kurt Johannsen, S. Mulladad.
Nov. 1939. V. Dumas, F. Clune, E. Bails.
7/8/1940. C. P. Mountford, J. E. Sheard.
14/8/1940. C. P. Mountford, J. E. Sheard.
30/6/1946. Lou A. Borgelt, Cliff Thompson, Tiger, Metingerie.
Tiger arrived and flopped straight into a pool to cool off. ‘My legs get properly tight!’ he grumbled, and thumped his cramped thighs. ‘Tamalji run about too much like big euro!’
Ayers Rock stands through the ages, seldom visited; and most of those who see it now, fly out from Alice Springs in one of Eddie Connellan’s small planes. A speck drifting in from the north-east, a droning above the desert sandhills, a roaring, echoing circling once or twice of the Rock – for there is no proper landing ground – and off again, leaving behind startled rock wallabies, and emus racing from the mad noise in the sky. Most of the natives have deserted its cliffs and caves, and ‘moved in’ to Ernabella and Hermannsburg Missions. Many of them are up at the Areyonga outpost, and turn south on the long walkabout to Oolra, less and less while civilization teaches them the ways of the white man. There is talk of a tourist road to the Rock, and more talk of a proper landing field and a hotel for visitors. At present the Rock is protected from the average visitor by virtue of its position within the Aboriginal Reserve, and no white person is allowed there without written authority and sufficient reason for it to be granted. The Rock is in a similar position to many of Central Australia’s wonder spots. Some day it may be discovered again by someone with power to unlock the gates of close protection about it now; and unless its protection is made permanent before access is considered, the day will surely come when people will paint their names on its pink walls, steal the native pounding-stones and relics about it; shoot its many birds and unusual animals, and root up the unique plants at its base.
Tiger was worried about camel poison bushes, apparently a duboisia, which grow on the plain south of the Rock. We shepherded the camels to north-west, and watched them closely. My original plan was to leave them and walk with shoulder-packs to Mount Olga’s domes, somewhat more than twenty miles to westward. But Tiger was emphatic: the camels must go with us. Njunowa was more than relieved. The idea of a long walk to Olga and back did not attract him at all, and he did not relish the thought of a lonely wait at Ayers Rock.
That night Tamalji unearthed the remnants of the stinking kangaroo killed more than a week before, and cooked it once again on the coals. He was again the savage, naked, chanting, eating as his forefathers had eaten, chewing his pituri wad when it wasn’
t parked above his ear like a grocer’s pencil. I kept to windward, and handed out tinned fruit, raisins, prunes, tomato sauce, and the last of the oranges to augment the feast; but all these things were put aside until the smelly kangaroo was reduced to a few bare bones. Eventually, Njunowa rolled flat on his back and lay curved up like a poisoned pup. Tamalji went over to the corned-meat bag, fingered the remnants of the salted meat from Tempe.
‘Stink!’ he remarked, grimaced, and spat viciously. His English was improving; but from then on it would have to be tinned meat, goanna, or witchetty grubs.
A late moon came up and outlined the dark silhouette of the Rock, and when it had risen sufficiently to cast a halo at the high crest, I walked quietly away from the camp, turned north out of the shadow, and continued between the patches of bog. The colour had dissolved completely, but the shape, height, depth, and shadows of cave and cliff were even more impressive; and there was the suppressed bickering of quarrelsome birds roosting high up in the terraces of the Brain. Unseen animals plopped and moved away in the grass. I moved quietly towards the Old Woman’s Cave, but its uncanny depth and a soft moaning of wind drove me quickly back into the moonlight. It was a weird, uncanny walk, but since I had started it I decided to go right round the five miles of the base. It meant ploughing once again through bog and long grass in the extended shadows of the southern side and south-western corner. The most impressive features of the night walk and stumble through bog were the skyline silhouettes of the Rock itself against a few brilliant white flecks of cloud; and particularly so, when back near the camp, I moved in towards the western wall to look at the slit of indirect light between the main sloping wall and a long slab of sandstone, separated by about two feet of space, and sloping upwards for at least three hundred feet. It is a great column, parted from the main mountain, known as the Kangaroo’s Tail.
I stood there for some time and saw a black, fluttering shape against a small drift of cloud. It was not a bat; but probably a night-bird off in silent search of prey.
_______
* Willy Wagtail.
CHAPTER XXI
THE FIRST WONDER
OF AUSTRALIA
Of all the Central Australian monoliths and tors, peaks, and distant ranges the Mount Olga collection of domes is the most misleading. It is mapped twenty-two miles west of Ayers Rock; and from the base of Ayers its domes are clear above the sandhills, light blue in the morning, dark purple against the red of sunset at evening.
We set out for it at sunrise, and I walked as usual away to one side of the camels. Some miles out I crossed the unmistakable imprint of wheel tracks, years old. Someone had evidently attempted the journey by motortruck. Goodness knows when it will be repeated. The sandhill country between Ayers Rock and Olga is not as impressive as that to northward about Lake Amadeus. The easternmost domes of Olga rise no more than five hundred or six hundred feet, and in reality hide much of the grandeur from the traveller approaching from the east. The old camel pad skirted a mile southward, and just before midday I stood alone on a small plain about two miles from the first battery of domes, to admire something more promising in the shape of a great red elephant rising to nearly a thousand feet. The body, head, and trunk were quite clear. It was perhaps half a mile long.
The camels caught up, and Tiger informed me: ‘Camping-place long way round yet.’ We plunged into rough, scratchy mulga, and continued by a winding route over country covered with loose stones the size of cricket-balls, which upset the camels’ placid equilibrium. This was followed by soft soil and some bog as we moved in closer. Tiger added: ‘We not camp in Wulpa* (Walpa, Walpina) Chasm. We go up close this way – more quick to look about before dark. We leave camel at good camp and walk right round.’ I agreed, and we worked up a narrow rocky gully close beneath a vast wall of conglomerate that once had been a deep red, but was now covered with a mottled grey and green coating of old moss, streaked with the black seepages of storm-water from the heights. The smallest dome could have crowned the world’s greatest cathedral, and the greatest was a red immensity of rock that would have completely dwarfed the same edifice. They were composed of millions of tons of pudding conglomerate, just as though a giant power had hurled rounded balls of stone, from a few inches to several feet in diameter, into a softer mass; and there they had remained, although many thousands had broken away and were lying about the supporting slopes and gullies. There were fallen masses, larger than city buildings, rounded by slow erosion, but containing a make-up of thousands of smaller, component, rounded parts. The conglomerate did not appear to have the solid strength and oneness of the Ayers Rock sandstone, nor was the general approach from the surrounding plains and sandhills as spectacular.
We unloaded and hobbled the camels, boiled the billy, and had a quick lunch of damper and tinned beef; and then Tiger led the way with all the importance of a trained guide. I followed him up a conglomerate gully, through acres of tiny pink-and-white lilies, up a stony ridge covered with daisies, and into a wide saddle about two hundred feet above the camp. Tiger stood aside dramatically.
‘There – now you see – this one my country, properly,’ he said proudly. ‘When I been little boy, I runabout here, long time. My father, my mother walkabout here. This one properly Kuttatuta.’
Not one great bluff of domed rock rose out of the hidden valley now exposed – at least six giant, parallel monoliths of dull red, with the slope of a seventh partly hidden some miles to northward, rose between a thousand and fourteen hundred feet. They were exactly in line, facing the east, and obviously hidden greatly to a distant observer by a further battery of domes, lower and rounder, a mile or so to eastward. On a minute scale, one could model the main battery of Olga bluffs by putting six long, round-topped, red loaves of bread on a table, side by side, separated by a quarter of an inch of space, and increasing the dimensions to fourteen hundred feet high, one mile long, three hundred yards thick, and from fifty feet to fifty yards between each loaf.
Tamalji gave one of his loud screams, and while his echoes ricochetted down the valley before us, from bluff to bluff, hawks and eagles winged and screeched from the heights straight above. We scrambled down into the hidden valley and found a stream still running strongly from the rains; and within a further couple of hundred yards were opposite the great chasm dividing the first and second monolith. The second chasm, between the second and third domes, was deeper and larger, with a narrow slit of daylight through its coloured shadowy length of a mile, no more than a hundred feet wide for most of the way, and fully a thousand feet deep. There was a continuous boom and rumble, softening now and then to a murmur. I felt as though the domes were moving in agony.
‘This one Wulpa (Walpa, Walpina) Chasm,’ Tiger announced. ‘He go right through – long, long way through. Water everywhere up there. Water summertime – properly spring. Rough place in there. Wind never stop. That’s why we call him Wulpa.’
We stood awhile before what was surely the organic heart of Australia, with tremendous life and power. Surely all the winds and moods and storms of the continent find birth in the Olga chasms, to move out north, east, south, and west. Tamalji yelled loudly up into Wulpa, and I was glad to move on. The combination of moaning wind far off, and Tamalji’s blood-curdling yell, was more than eerie.
The third chasm bent to the right a quarter of a mile in. Its course was clearly defined by beams of slanting sunlight; but much of it remained in deep-purple shadow. Towards the crest of each monolith, where the cliffs curved over, each dome carried a horizontal gallery of depressions or large niches in the wall, evenly spaced, as windows in a castle. One could easily imagine the faces of an imprisoned people looking down the sheer walls.
From each chasm a stream of clear, icy water emerged beneath fallen debris and flowering bushes, to join the main stream running away to northward. I tried to figure the amount of run-off from the great domes even during a minor rainstorm. The total would be millions of gallons, which had to seep out gradually through th
e rubble at the base of each dome.
Half an hour before sunset we had completely encircled the main Olgas, and were on the western side, looking up into the western end of Wulpa Chasm. The lowering sun penetrated the chasm, lighting its length and depth with startling realism. There was little if any moss on the western side, and the walls were stark red and bare, except for a tiny bush or two perched precariously high on the curving shoulders. It is doubtful if more than one or two of the main Olga domes are scalable. The sides are straight, and the ends too steep to place much faith in the treacherous conglomerate.
That night I listened to the wind howling through Wulpa. It was not pleasant at all. It was just an irritating moan, rising and falling, continuing through the night, chopping and changing. The wind punched its way down our gully to batter us; then it would calm awhile, and return from another angle to blow ashes and sparks all over the camping gear. Sleep was impossible. I sat up half the night and saw the moon rise over Ayers Rock and light up the Olgas gradually. The noise of the wind rose to greet it; and the Olga chasms howled as though in violent protest at our trespass. It would take very little imagination to fall victim to hysterical fear; but the three boys slept soundly enough, curled up each in one blanket with small fires between them, and a low windbreak of mulga branches round them.