Day 15 - Uluru

Sunday, 13 June 2021

Reading a Kindle on a winter camping trip is easier than a real book, despite my preference for the latter. In the chill of night, you can keep most of your body under covers, one mittened hand holding up the device. One click with a thumb and you’re onto the next page.

After finishing a novel, I return to reading Paul Kingsnorth essays. His commentary on our modern world is thoughtful, nuanced, edgy, insightful, and brilliantly written. His treks with indigenous people of Papua New Guinea help him understand their world view, which is that all of life is sacred. They pause on a precipice of a vast forest and the group of men who are their guides start to sing. A hymn to the forest. Why do they do it? It’s a prayer of thanksgiving, connection, adoration. Just like we do in church, or at least used to.

In our essentially secular western culture, Kingsnorth says, the “sacred” is either romanticised or derided as trendy, insincere, a put-on. Sort of a fake pretension that new age people do for fun or show.

These thoughts mingle through my head as we hike the 10.6 km loop around the base of Uluru. When we started out we met a sign saying Pilaru and a picture of a camera with an X through it. Please respect this sacred space; no photography. We were dumbfounded, not so much by this odd imposition upon normal western tourist activity, but the fact that nearly everyone (and there were lots) we met on the trail was carrying a camera or had a phone ready to hold up to the beautiful scenery. Yet another sign disregarded.

Why, I mused, in the Aboriginal mind, were photographs of sacred places a sacrilege? Was it because the spirits that resided in the rock didn’t like their images taken? Or more likely, because a group of gawking tourists viewing their sacred shrine through the lens of their cameras – was this the profanity? People weren’t really being present, weren’t seeing, holding the sacred place in reverence. This view made sense to me. I feel that in many of our grand churches. Taken over by tourists and their cameras (and often their chatter), it’s hard to get a sense of wonder and awe – and reverence.

We angle around the north face of The Rock. We’re now away from the mob of people, most of whom don’t like to venture too far from their cars. If you’re fit and willing, you can usually get away from the maddening crowd just by taking the long hikes. The trees part and I cast my eyes again upon the amazing, majestic, nearly smooth red surface of the rock face. I’m pretty good at right-brain visualisation, but I don’t think it took an artist to see the huge mural etched in black against the red rock. The geologic wear upon the rock means there are parts here and there that are falling out, off, or tumbling down. The Rorschach images they leave behind are amazing and amusing. Many “beings” do indeed live in this monolith.

But this was extraordinary. A side-on profile of an Aboriginal elder, his strong dark features, pointed beard, black bushy hair flowing behind him. It resembled the compelling rusted steel sculpture of an Aboriginal elder that adorns the foreshore of Bunbury near where we live (below). Strong. Determined. Wise beyond measure.

Here, it was a symbol of the ancient people who stewarded this land for millennia before white men and their tourist mentality came to reside here. You’d almost thing the black fellas climbed up there and etched it into the rock. But clearly, it’s something that emerged from the rock itself. As though the land and its people had merged in mutual respect and acceptance.

To me, this was sacred. We were honouring the signs and didn’t take an image of the mural. But every time I glanced at it, I was struck by its power. It made perfect sense then that you’d never photograph (i.e. debase) such an image.

We learn later that the No Photography signs apply only to certain places that are considered sacred to the Aborigines, not the whole of Uluru. Hence these photos:

The native Grevillias are in full bloom and dripping with sweet nectar.

Yulara is the epitome of our western overlay onto the land and its history. Hotels, apartments, cottages, restaurants, cafes, bars, shops – you name it, it’s here for our entertainment and pleasure. Including expensive tours that can give you the SOS – Sound of Silence – in case you don’t have enough nerve to go out onto the land and hear it yourself. Or the Field of Lights, which gives you the ground-based, electric version of what you could see at night if you just looked upward – away from the city lights.

But Yulara also has a campground, and I stand in line for 20 minutes waiting to see if by chance there might have been a cancellation that we could snag. We already checked online and everything was booked out. Fortunately, someone at the resort got the bright idea to scour the land in back of the campground with a bulldozer and call it the Overflow Area. For $30/night we could camp anywhere back there among the half-dead straggly tress. No water, no electricity, the toilets were a fair hike, but we got use of all the campground amenities, including the showers and laundry. It suited us just fine. As did the beautiful thunder cloud and rainbow that settled on the horizon just as we sat down for our twilight dinner.