by Jamie Maslin
I turned the ignition on and began to drive towards Uluru, focusing again on it, my head clearing in the process.
Mandy sulked in the back.
As the rock grew closer, the more magnificent it became. Skirting along its side, I found myself craning my neck upwards, my attention darting from the road to the visual treat towering above. From afar, Uluru almost appears smooth, but up close that all changes. In places the surface is like a frozen liquid, contorted into waves and hollows; in others it is speckled with deep pock marks and lined with furrowed fissures; others still are weathered into huge channels and gullies. It is far more varied in form than it appears in photographs and is awesome in every way.
I pulled up by a small parking lot at the beginning of a walking trail that circumnavigated Uluru. We both got out for a quick look and to touch the rock, but didn’t have time to walk the track this evening; that would have to wait for the morning. The park closed soon, so I suggested to Mandy that we head back to the sunset viewing platform and watch as the rock slowly transformed from orange to red. She agreed.
We weren’t long back at the lookout, when Mandy began to hit on me again. Now more than ever I just wanted to watch the sunset illuminating Uluru, but she kept persisting. Eventually she insisted that we head off to find a camping spot outside the National Park. This could have waited until after the sun had slipped away, but despite being reluctant to depart early, there wasn’t much that I could do. It wasn’t my vehicle so I had little choice in the matter, unless I said farewell to Mandy, which would mean waving goodbye to my lift towards Darwin too. I considered this option but was reluctant to lose a ride of 800 miles. It would also be a long walk out of the park if I couldn’t get another ride this evening. Since I planned to be up before sunrise in the morning, I could do without the added exertion now. And so we headed off to try and find an unofficial campsite, with me driving and Mandy sitting up front. After much fruitless searching we happened upon an empty section of land that looked suitable enough, but just as I started to pull up Mandy reached over and began massaging my neck.
“Mandy, I’ve got a girlfriend!” I protested, coming to a halt and turning off the ignition.
“Ahh, what’s the matter with you!” she nearly shouted back at me.
“Right that’s it, I’m out of here,” I said. “I can’t be putting up with this shit for the next few days. Thanks for the lift, but this is at an end!”
She didn’t take it well and began to cry.
“I don’t know why I bother, you try and help someone out and then this is how they repay you,” she whimpered.
“What are you on about? I appreciate the lift but you keep fucking hitting on me! What part of that don’t you understand?!”
She wallowed in self pity and generally made no sense in a conversation that went round in circles until she finally agreed to drop me in the small service town of Yulara, situated about 11 miles from Uluru itself. By the time we arrived it was dark.
As Mandy drove off and disappeared into the night it was a relief to see her go.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Town Like Alice
The first magical glimpse of Uluru by astonished European eyes was had in 1873 by William Christie Gosse, who happened upon the mighty monolith while leading an expedition to find a route from central Australia to the west coast. “This rock is certainly the most wonderful natural feature I have ever seen,” wrote Gosse.
In many respects Gosse’s historic discovery was only possible thanks to the astonishing prior achievements of Scottish explorer, John McDouall Stuart, whose expeditions first mapped a route through the desolate center of Australia, from which other explorers could then set off. The magnitude of Stuart’s undertaking and achievements is difficult to overstate, for the terrain he crossed is some of the most inhospitable on the planet, and before him next to nothing was known about Australia’s interior; no maps of it existed.
Stuart’s expeditions broke the mold in both their planning and execution. His planning exemplified the bushcraft philosophy of the more you know, the less you carry. In contrast to other expeditions of the day, Stuart traveled extremely light. Just about everything he and his small party of men carried was essential to the trip. Although that might sound a rather self-evident way to plan for such an undertaking, it couldn’t have been more different from the approach of Stuart’s contemporaries, in particular his competition, Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills. Like Stuart, Burke and Wills were also attempting to travel the country from south to north, an achievement sought by the government of the day to establish a telegraph line.
Unlike Stuart’s pack-light and travel-fast approach, Burke and Wills took the pack-ridiculously and end-up-dying-painfully approach. Items Burke and Wills’s ill-fated expedition deemed of such essential importance as to take on a four thousand mile return hike across uncharted territory include: three-quarters of a ton of sugar, dandruff brushes, rockets, sixty pounds of curled horse hair, six tons of firewood, a heavy oak table with accompanying stools, a stationary cabinet, and that old imperative that no self-respecting expedition party would be seen without, a Chinese gong. But my favorite items on the Burke Wills manifest are, “Nipples, assorted 4 dozen,” and “Kangaroo Thongs.” Whether kangaroo thongs were thongs made from Kangaroo hide for the exclusive use of the explorers, or whether they were thongs made for kangaroos, perhaps to be slipped on said creature to spice up a lonely night in the outback, I couldn’t tell you. There is, of course, another alternative, that they are something wholly innocuous of which I am unaware, but given my thus-gained knowledge of Australians, this seems unlikely.
Within a year of setting off, Burke and Wills’s expedition—which consisted of twenty-seven camels, twenty-three horses, and nineteen men lugging between them some twenty tons of kit—was down to only two camels and three men. Just one man would successfully complete the expedition. Both Burke and Wills died in the desert. But they were hardly alone in meeting such a demise at the hands of the unforgiving outback or in their penchant for expeditionary over-packing. Perhaps the best example of the latter comes from Thomas Mitchell, a man who in 1830 explored over three thousand miles of parched Australian outback lugging with him a couple of wooden boats that never saw a lick of water. “Although the boats and their carriage had been of late a great hindrance to us” he wrote, undeterred by the experience, “I was very unwilling to abandon such useful appendages to an exploring party.”
But back to the hero of our tale, John McDouall Stuart, who knew better, or, more accurately, learned better. Stuart devised his pack light and travel fast method after being attached to a failed expedition of 1844 led by Captain Charles Sturt, who saw fit to take along with him into the outback a flock of two hundred sheep, as well as six drays and, of course, a boat—he was convinced, like many of Australia’s early explorers, that the country’s interior would contain an inland sea. Having witnessed how not to do it, Stuart formulated his own approach. In addition to traveling light and fast, the other striking feature of his expeditions was that instead of plowing on along a desired route and hoping to find water on the way—as most other expeditions did—Stuart let the presence of water itself dictate his route of travel.
He became an absolute master of sourcing a drink from nature, and did so in super dry, merciless landscapes where others would have only found death. Stuart would rise early before the heat-haze of the day distorted vision, and from the highest point meticulously survey the landscape with a telescope, looking for the slightest hint of water. This might be a particularly vibrant-looking tree or bush, the presence of pigeons or finches, even animals such as kangaroos that sometimes dig for water. But it was his discovery after scaling a small hill one evening that Stuart credits to his eventual success in pushing north. Here, in the most inhospitable part of the continent where it might not rain for years, Stuart was confronted by the most improbable sight: a bizarre line of small hills with water bubbling out of their summits. Thes
e were mound springs, a permanent supply of ground water that rises to the surface under pressure. Most of the water feeding the mound springs of central Australia originates from the highlands in the northeast of the country, and travels westwards underground through aquifers at a rate of around three to ten feet a year, taking about two million years before it bubbles up again. This has led to their precious liquid being described as “fossil water.” Because of its creeping speed through aquifers, the water holds within it high quantities of dissolved solids which over time have concentrated around the springs, forming the distinctive mounds for which they are named.
The mound springs proved of such strategic importance to Stuart that they eventually allowed him to break though the interior of the country and continue on to the tropics of the north, to finally reach the sea. His monumental achievement in surveying the center of the continent led, in 1872, to the completion of a telegraph line that ran nearly two thousand miles from Port Augusta in the south of Australia to Darwin in the north. Today this route is roughly followed by the single lane road I took north out of Port Augusta, named, in Stuart’s honor, the Stuart Highway.
Stuart’s achievements paved the way for future expeditions within the center that set off from the telegraph line, including William Christie Gosse’s the year after the line’s completion, which “discovered” Uluru—from a European point of view, of course, as the site had been used for at least ten thousand years by the local Aboriginal people. Gosse wrote of his discovery, “This rock appears more wonderful every time I look at it, and I may say it is a sight worth riding eighty-four miles of spinifex sandhills to see.” He named the site Ayers Rock in honor of the chief secretary of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayers, a name that stuck until 2002 when it was officially given the dual name of Uluru / Ayers Rock.
I set off for Uluru long before sunrise, striking my camp at a large caravan park in Yulara a little after 4:30 a.m. When pitching up the night before, the park office had been closed, allowing me to slip in without paying the extortionate seventeen dollars a night fee—a smidge expensive, methinks, for a six foot square patch of grass. As such, I had every intention of slipping out again without paying, and did so over a low fence next to a road—just in case the entrance was manned at this time in the morning to check on the few vehicles likewise departing.
Hitching in the dark can be problematic, so I set off along a curving, mostly unlit, road on foot, heading towards the National Park in the not unlikely event that no one stopped for me. Luck though, must have been on my side, as not long into my hike a lone set of headlights appeared in the distance behind me. Soon the car to which they belonged began to slow, gradually taking its time to pull over in what seemed an assessment of whether I was a safe bet or not to pick up. It would have been clear where I was going; just about anyone up at this hour was off to do the same thing: watch Uluru from the sunrise viewing area.
My new lift was Didier, a vacationing Frenchman driving a rental car. Minutes later we entered the park together and pulled up at the viewing area’s full parking lot. A good hundred people were already waiting here, hoping to see the dawn work its wonders on Uluru. Expectations for something spectacular were high, with all gathered having no doubt previously seen remarkable photos of Uluru cast a magnificent crimson by the rising sun. Alas, it wasn’t to be. A cloudy horizon led to a subdued and subtle sunrise.
Didier and I set off for the rock itself.
The trail around Uluru starts at the same point as a climbing route up Uluru begins. Climbing the rock is a contentious issue. Although climbing is not banned outright by the traditional Aboriginal owners of Uluru—the Pitjantjatjara and the Yankunyjatjara, to whom the site was officially returned in 1985—they do strongly request that you don’t climb. Uluru is a highly sacred site to them and they intensely object to tourists walking all over it, desecrating the surface. Unfortunately, people often go to the toilet up the top, polluting the water holes below, and I even met a girl on my first trip to Australia who boasted of having sex at the summit.
Culturally, the Aboriginals’ objection to climbing Uluru lies in their traditional obligation to look after visitors’ well-being, and their belief that if someone injures themselves or dies climbing—to date thirty-five people have lost their lives this way—then that person’s soul is trapped in the area, somewhere it does not belong. This causes extreme sadness and mourning in their community. The route the climb sets off from is also of great spiritual significance to the local Aboriginals, as it follows the traditional route that their mythical ancestors, the wallaby men, are said to have followed on their arrival at Uluru.
I had no intention of climbing Uluru, but one of the most common arguments you hear to justify doing so is, “I respect the Aboriginals’ beliefs, but they’re not my beliefs.” To me, that’s a lame excuse. At its essence the debate is all rather simple. If I were a guest in someone’s home and they politely asked me to refrain from doing something with or to a possession of theirs because they found it highly culturally offensive, then I would. Their house, their rules. And the same should apply to Uluru.
Didier and I set off together along the trail around Uluru, snaking our way around the side of the rock which was every bit as glorious as the day before. The walk was delightful and lent a whole new perspective to Uluru and its myriad features. We passed ancient rock paintings, natural watering holes, cliff formations in the shape of breaking waves, huge tiered bowls eroded into the rock’s surface over millennia by giant waterfalls, caves, ceremonial sites, and plenty more besides. On nearing the end of the six mile circular trail, Didier leaned in and tenderly touched Uluru’s surface.
“I’m agnostic and don’t believe in spiritual things,” he said. “But you can almost believe the rock has energy.”
I knew what he meant.
We parted company soon after, with Didier heading to the nearby airport and me setting off for Uluru’s sister site, Kata Tjuta, formerly known as the Olgas. Kata Tjuta is a series of spectacular dome-shaped rock formations that rise 1790 feet above the surrounding plains, making them, in places, 650 feet higher than Uluru. Despite sixteen miles separating the two sites, they are conjoined underground, being different protruding sections of the same vast curved layer of sandstone. Both are around 100 million years old and referred to by geologists as bornhardts. The presence of Uluru and Kata Tjuta towering above the plains is accounted for by them consisting of more resilient rock than their surroundings, which, over millions of years, have eroded away at a faster rate than the rock has. The individual fault lines and weaknesses of Uluru and Kata Tjuta have led to them wearing down in distinctly different ways, giving both a unique appearance and personality. To the Aboriginal owners of the land, these patterns of erosion are full of meaning. They tell the story of their concept of creation, in particular the actions and journeys of ancestral beings across the landscape, how these ancestral beings created the world and the marks they left on the landscape as they went. Others tell of the connection Aboriginal people have to the land, animals, plants, each other, and their ancestors.
Within minutes of waiting on the road I got myself a lift from a female Aboriginal tour guide called Mini. She wasn’t going to Kata Tjuta but a settlement in its general direction, so offered to drop me at the turning for it. On the way I asked her about traditional Aboriginal methods of lighting fire.
“I can’t tell you about it,” she said. “It’s a man’s skill, so they’re not my stories. We operate tours where you can learn the skills of the men on one tour, and the skills of the women on another.”
The tours teaching women’s skills apparently specialized in the gathering side of things, with attention paid to wild edible foods or “bushtucker.”
“Is there much bushtucker around here?” I asked, looking out across the seemingly barren plains.
“Jamie, we’re driving through a supermarket,” replied Mini.
I would have liked to learn a bit of this, but we reached the jun
ction a minute later.
My next ride was quick coming and arrived in the form of a vacationing Russian couple, Olgar and Valery. When Olgar pulled off, he did so on the wrong side of the road (Australians drive on the left) which luckily for him was empty. Valery yelled at him in Russian, eliciting a jolting moment of realization in which Olgar swerved back to the left-hand lane. Neither spoke much in the way of English so it was a quiet ride, in which I marveled at the rounded orange forms of Kata Tjuta growing larger as we approached.
Kata Tjuta consists of thirty-six rock domes, reflected in the Aboriginal meaning of its name, which translates as “many heads.” The first European to see Kata Tjuta was Ernest Giles on his inaugural expedition, which set off in 1872. He reached Uluru soon after but was pipped at the post of being the first white man there, missing out on the accolade by a matter of days to William Christie Goose. But then, on the upside, he did furnish the world with an unsurpassable memoir passage detailing a rather novel meal he partook when half dead from starvation and dehydration, and practically blind from scurvy. His description sums up better than any other I know, the hardships suffered by Australia’s early explorers and of the absolute unforgiving nature of the outback:
I heard a faint squeak, and looking about I saw . . . a small dying wallaby . . . I pounced upon it and ate it, living, raw, dying—fur, skin, bones, skull, and all. The delicious taste of that creature I shall never forget. I only wished I had its mother and father to serve in the same way.
A large section of the hike around Kata Tjuta was closed today for safety reasons due to the searing temperatures, leaving only one area open to explore—“the windy gorge.” After agreeing to meet Olgar and Valery back at their car in an hour, I struck off along the trail by myself. Rising up on either side of the thin stony track were huge rounded orange cliffs accentuated by a cloudless deep-blue sky. Just like Uluru, a peaceful and timeless atmosphere enveloped Kata Tjuta. I felt an odd sense of belonging here, as if I could stay put forever, simply contemplating these enigmatic rocks and their wide open, expansive surroundings.