A new industry was about to rise in the Red Centre.
In 1948, a truck driver named Len Tuitt graded a dirt track from Alice to the Rock and began bringing tourists in his own vehicle. He sank a bore into one side of the monolith to supply guests with water. Another important early visitor from the world beyond was Bill Harney, who in the 1950s became the first Government Ranger for the newly created Ayers Rock National Park. Harney’s 1963 guidebook, To Ayers Rock and Beyond, marked the advent of the era of mass tourism to the site. The rise of affordable air travel also contributed. In 1961, 4000 tourists visited the Rock.6 Nowadays, the annual total is in the order of 300,000.7
R’s post-conference dinner was held at the Alice Springs Desert Park. Bright young postgraduates and postdocs from all over the world pumped the hands of professors, slamming down beer and exchanging business cards in the twilight. When the meet and greet was finished, we sat at a circular dining table under an open sky, the white tablecloth trailing in the sand. Food was slow to come out of the kitchen, so the after-dinner speaker, Professor Tom Griffiths from the Australian National University, was sent out early to distract the hungry crowd.
‘Now I know you’re all famished and you’ve been lectured at for the last three days,’ he said. ‘So I’ll try to keep this to less than an hour.’
A few groans went up, but nobody complained once he started. Griffiths is an environmental historian. Australia’s ecological history, he argued that night, as he does in several of his books, could help us get past the intractable postcolonial argument of settlement versus invasion. Longer environmental perspectives could diminish both apologist and apocalyptic understandings of European colonisation in 1788. That year’s events were part of a series of environmental encounters and transformations. Australia’s unique environment – the poorest soils in the world, a scarcity of water unparalleled on any other continent, plants that require fire to thrive, and high biodiversity – needed to be brought to the foreground of our historical narratives, he argued.8 One perspective on Australia’s contact history was to see it as an effort to understand and to cope with this particular landscape. Eventually, he said, the oldest continuous culture on earth and the first modern people to industrialise would have to work together.
Like Hiram Bingham in Peru, the 30-year-old British-born explorer William Gosse came upon the landmark for which he’s remembered on his way elsewhere. His party of ‘four white men, three Afghans, and a black boy’ set out from Alice Springs on 21 April 1873, hoping to find an overland stock route to Perth.9 He had sighted the Rock from a distance on an earlier expedition, but the salt marshes of Lake Amadeus prevented him reaching it. Finding and naming ‘this wonderful feature’10 was the one consolation in an otherwise unsuccessful seven-month slog.
Gosse comes across in his journals as a sober, diligent character. He gives detailed descriptions of the country through which he passes – with coordinates – for the benefit of the Surveyor General of South Australia and the Crown Lands Office. Still, beneath the unemotional tone, it is easy to detect his disappointment in the land. His report is full of gloomy descriptions: ‘nothing fit for occupation’, ‘good country very limited, not more than thirty square miles’, ‘spinifex and sandhills, and dense mulga flats, destitute of water’.11 Whereas many explorers’ diaries of this period subsume the actions of the travelling party into an all-conquering narrator’s ‘I’, Gosse is attentive to the suffering of his travelling companions, their camels and their horses: ‘I think it must be in a great measure owing to the sand and spinifex that they are so distressed…their legs are raw and fly-blown.’12 He is also a curious and gentle observer of Indigenous presence in the region: ‘Two natives came for water, and after our making signs they came up to us, but seemed terribly frightened. I fancy they have heard of whites before.’13
It is only when he comes upon the Rock that Gosse grows excited:
Saturday, July 19. Camp in Spinifex Sandhills. Barometer 28.12 in, wind south-east…When I got clear of the sandhills, and was only two miles distant, and the hill, for the first time coming fairly in view, what was my astonishment to find it was one immense rock rising abruptly from the plain; the holes I had noticed were caused by the water in some places forming immense caves…I have named this Ayers Rock, after Sir Henry Ayers.14
In the Northern Territory, inconsistent signage for Uluru still reflects conflicting community views. Ayers Rock /Uluru became the Territory’s first officially dual-named natural feature in 1993. In 2002, the order of the names was officially changed to Uluru / Ayers Rock at the request of the regional tourism authority.15 Nevertheless, outside the park, on land controlled by often less than progressive Territory governments, it’s still possible to find signs for Ayers Rock, named after the eighth Premier of South Australia. Inside the park, on Anangu land, Uluru has been uniformly adopted.16
R and I left Alice Springs early on Saturday morning in a white Hyundai Getz that would have clearly demarcated us as city slickers were it not identical to half the other cars on the road. The conference in Alice Springs must have done wonders for Avis’s bottom line that weekend. But it was eerie to be part of a procession of identical white insects crawling across the desert. Nowadays, with the Stuart and Lasseter highways sealed all the way from Alice to the Rock, any old vehicle can make the journey. Also on the road that morning were dozens of motorcyclists, who roared past in clusters of three or four at a time, beards blowing, while the engine of the Getz whined at being pushed to 130 kilometres an hour. Our trip, it turned out, coincided with the culmination of the Long Ride, a charity event that saw more than 400 motorcyclists from around the country converge on the Rock to raise money for prostate cancer. Though not quite in the continent’s geographic centre, Uluru has certainly, since the 1980s, become a symbolic centre, a meeting place for everyone from ecologists to bikies. In 2000, the Olympic torch relay began there.
We arrived at the camping ground of the Yulara Resort around midday, having covered 450 kilometres before lunch. There, we were allocated a patch of red earth between the campervans and trailers to pitch our tiny two-person tent, ‘tadpole’, which R had bought for her fieldwork in the Mexican cloud forest.
‘Good luck finding a spot away from all the bloody bikes,’ growled the overworked woman at reception, handing us a label for our tent and a pair of tickets that certified we were paying customers, and therefore allowed to buy alcohol at the resort.
‘Don’t go giving these away to anyone who shouldn’t have ’em,’ she said.
She wasn’t, of course, referring to the bikies.
Greater separation between tourists and the Indigenous community of Mutitjulu has been one consequence of the 1985 handback to traditional owners. Gone are the days when visitors could wander through the township, indiscriminately snapping photographs of locals. In the early 1980s, the tumbledown tourist settlement near the Rock was demolished, and all accommodation, from camping to five-star luxury, was shifted 20 kilometres north, to Yulara. It’s no longer the case that Uluru is ‘the one place on the map where visitors and the land’s original inhabitants are almost bound to come face to face’, as the Australian writer Rodney Hall observed in 1988.17 Today, the community has more privacy. It is entirely possible that daytrippers to Uluru – especially those who fly in and out of Ayers Rock / Connellan Airport and are ferried to and from the site in tour buses – will not cross paths with an Indigenous person. During his first visit to the Rock, Gosse made a beautiful sketch of birds wheeling around its honeycombed eastern face. The first photographs, however, were taken by William Tietkens in 1889. Baldwin Spencer’s photos, taken a few years later in 1894, are clearer. These early black-and-white images offer ecologists and environmental historians crucial evidence of how the land looked prior to European incursion.
In The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage reproduces three of the earliest photos of Uluru, alongside three contemporary photos taken from the same locations.18 Changes to
vegetation in these images of the land before and after European settlement demonstrate how it deteriorated from the 1870s onward, as millennia-old Indigenous fire regimes were disrupted, and cattle were introduced.
The country around Uluru is just one case study in Gammage’s monumental project of documenting Indigenous land management in Australia prior to 1788. He visits and photographs sites around the country, comparing their present-day ecology with the earliest available drawings, plans, photographs and written descriptions. Correlating masses of historical, anthropological and ecological evidence, he makes a compelling case that Indigenous people once managed the whole of Australia as a vast continental estate. There was no wilderness in Australia, Gammage insists. Through systematic and controlled burning of plants, Indigenous people provided for adverse seasons, guarded against dangerous bushfires, and moved grazing animals predictably around the country. The Biggest Estate on Earth, Henry Reynolds writes, ‘must be the final blow to the comforting colonial conceit that the Aborigines made no use of their land’.19
R and I sat at a picnic shelter, shooing flies and eating a thrown-together lunch of tinned tuna on crackers. To avoid resort prices, we’d carted food supplies for the weekend in an ice-filled Styrofoam box in the boot of the car. The Rock was tantalisingly near, only a few hundred metres behind the scrub. But since we’d arrived in the middle of the day, further exploration would have to wait until the temperature dropped. Visitors are given ample opportunity to hear Anangu perspectives on the Rock inside the mudbrick Cultural Centre, kutu warara pitjama. Inside, we sat on the carpet of a darkened cinema and watched David Roberts and Don Murray’s astonishing 1986 film, Uluru: An Anangu Story, co-produced with members of the nearby community of Mutitjulu. Here, an Indigenous ‘we’ addresses a plural, non-Indigenous ‘you’. ‘We want to tell you the story of this place…Our relationship to Uluru is very different to yours.’20 Narrated and performed by community members, the film cuts between the land-rights struggle before handback, Anangu Dreaming stories and an Indigenous perspective on contact history. It is depressing how quickly the film moves from first contact – a single white missionary giving Aboriginal boys lollies – to diabetes, mission rations, assimilation, pastoral incursion, dispossession and frontier violence (of which we hear powerful first-person testimony from community members who lost family members).
But in many ways, the hopeful conclusion is more depressing still, given what has happened since. ‘What has given me so much joy,’ says one middle-aged woman, a traditional owner, ‘is that now I have my grandmother’s land back. I’m never going to leave this place. I’ll remain here on my grandmother’s land forever.’21 Thirty years on, the jubilation of handback seems a terribly long time ago. At Uluru today, there is still only one Aboriginal-operated tour company, and Aboriginal staff represent a tiny minority at the Yulara resort complex. Meanwhile, the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in terms of life expectancy, health, educational outcomes, income and rates of incarceration remains vast. Poverty and dysfunction still scar many remote communities. During the celebrations of handback’s thirtieth anniversary, the paternalistic Northern Territory Intervention was quietly extended. Originally established for ‘a limited period until the situation is stabilised’,22 in the words of its architect Mal Brough, it will now remain in place, in modified form, until at least 2022.
R and I emerged from the cinema disoriented, blinking in the blazing afternoon. It was still too hot to walk around the base of the Rock, so we drove the circuit road with the air-conditioning blasting, stopping regularly, refilling our water bottles from the cask in the boot, taking the shorter trails as we went. Later in the day, we waited for sunset at the carpark, eating melted gummy bears and gazing across bullock grass and spinifex as the sky darkened slowly. While we waited, I read David Malouf’s short story ‘Mrs Porter and the Rock’ aloud for her. Reading together was a tradition of ours, but she didn’t like this story as much as I did. When we were discussing it afterwards, I realised much of my enjoyment relied on recognising specifically settler-Australian cultural types and tropes. Mrs Porter, a middle-class Anglo-Australian woman of the generation who came of age during the Depression, has been dragged reluctantly to the Rock by her wealthy, over-educated baby boomer son. In her stubborn refusal to even look at the landmark, I recognised the dynamic between my grandparents’ and parents’ generations, the kind of conversations they might have had if they’d travelled here together. Mrs Porter ‘resents the suggestion, transmitted to her via Donald, that she had been missing out on something, some other – dimension. How many dimensions are there? And how many could a body actually cope with and still get the washing on the line and tea on the table?’23
Her attitudes are the product of an older, narrower Australia that hasn’t disappeared by any means, but which you might not encounter if, like R, you arrived in the country in the late 2000s and lived in a capital city. And as for Mrs Porter’s end, wandering disoriented and alone in the dunes: for that conclusion to make sense, the reader needed a sense of the settler-Australian trope of the interior as a place of madness and death. I could explain the cultural context for Malouf’s story to someone from elsewhere. But when it came to the cultural context for Uluru, I was as lost as Mrs Porter.
The handback of Uluru to its traditional owners remains one of the symbolic high points for the Indigenous land-rights movement in Australia. When Ayers Rock National Park was created in 1950, Uluru was extracted from the surrounding Aboriginal reserve, and title was vested in the Director of the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service. As Uluru was developing into a major tourist destination, Indigenous Australians’ demands for recognition and land rights were also building momentum. Most famously, the 1967 referendum amended two overtly discriminatory sections of the Australian Constitution, at last recognising that Indigenous people should be counted ‘in reckoning the number of people of the Commonwealth’.24 Nevertheless, the Northern Territory government, the mining lobby and many settler Australians remained bitterly opposed to any suggestion the Rock should be returned to its traditional owners. In 1976, Uluru was specifically excluded from the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights Act, meaning no native title claim could be made. The traditional owners persisted in their request for freehold title and a joint management plan of the kind that had already been successfully instituted at Kakadu National Park:
We accept that our land is of interest to people all over Australia and from overseas and we are happy for them to visit and see our place. We agree to our land including a National Park. We cannot accept however, that someone else in Canberra can hold the papers to our land. It is not his country – it is ours.25
With the arrival of Bob Hawke’s federal Labor government in 1983, the Commonwealth finally agreed to grant the Anangu freehold title to the land on the understanding it would be leased back to Parks Australia and managed in tandem. The official handback ceremony took place on 26 October 1985.
Hundreds of Indigenous people and sympathisers descended on the Rock that day to see Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen hand the title deeds back to Anangu elders. The ceremony was not without discordant moments. As the Governor-General rose to speak, a plane flew overhead trailing a red banner: ‘Ayers Rock for all Australians’, to boos from the crowd. But the atmosphere was overwhelmingly positive. In his speech, the Governor-General struck a balance between emphasising the importance of Uluru to its traditional owners and acknowledging settler Australians’ connection with it:
Today we stand not merely in the centre of our continent, at its very heart, but beside what has become one of our national symbols…For many Aboriginal people, this place has still deeper meaning and deep spiritual significance, a significance whose roots go back to time immemorial. And now, today, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Aboriginal land trust becomes the custodian of this heartland of Australia. The Trust, by the deed which is to be handed over today, acquires inalienable freehold title under Austr
alian law to this place which is so special to its members. And at the same time, recognising, too, the special significance of Uluru to all Australians, and the appropriateness of it remaining as an Australian National Park, the Trust will today lease it back to the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service as a National Park.26
My memories of the Rock are part of a composite picture of the whole trip, blurred by speed. R and I certainly didn’t experience the sense of timelessness some visitors report. If anything, our time-sense felt foreshortened, intensified. Only in a wilfully ignorant postcolonial society that hasn’t earned the prefix could a person believe it possible to learn something about 70,000 years of Aboriginal culture in four days. Shortness of time defined the whole nature of the experience. Leading up to the trip, we’d both crammed extra work into our calendars to clear space for it; during the trip we were always conscious of getting back in time for our return flight, and of the work commitments waiting for us at home; afterwards, we just wished we’d had more time. This is how much modern travel feels. And, I fear, much of modern life.
Sociological studies of tourism portray it variously as a pursuit of inauthentic pleasures, as secular pilgrimage, as a space for sexual permissiveness and as an opportunity to escape home identity.27 Increasingly, however, it is viewed as a form of symbolic capital accrued as a status marker in post-industrial societies. I hate that this might be true of me. But it’s hard to deny when I think of the hungry, restless, empty way I backpacked through my twenties. In 2009, the Argentine writer Andrés Neuman travelled through 19 Latin American republics on a book tour. His deadpan account of the trip parodies the notion of travel writing in the jet age by focusing mainly on neutral spaces like airport waiting lounges and hotel rooms. It was translated into English as ‘How to Travel Without Seeing’.28 That seems like a good description of our trip to Uluru. Wouldn’t it be better for us and for future generations if we could learn to be happy at home? If we burned less jet fuel, and spent more time pottering in the garden? Probably.
Requiem with Yellow Butterflies Page 12