HEART OF THE SUNRISE - 4WD Touring Australia

Somewhere in sands of the desert,
A shape with lion body and the head of man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it,
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
– W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Uluru and Kata Tjuta tug at the pilgrim’s soul.

What is it about Uluru that draws travellers looking for meaning? There is something in this orange stone that goes beyond the aboriginal sacredness, that goes beyond its ethereal beauty, and pulls on something in our solar plexus directly. Across faiths, across cultures, it has a lure that is impossible to deny, and just as impossible to explain.

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The idea of a journey to the heart of the continent is so ingrained in the Australian consciousness that it goes without saying. But as one travels inward, into the heart of the sunrise, the gravity increases. Uluru seems to be connected to every other point on this island, like a heart to every cell in the body.

Beating blood red in the afternoon, the stone seems to be alive, drawing on energy from every direction, refracting the setting sun’s rays into dark bands across the sky, changing blue into indigo, indigo into a violent purple against the ever-shifting oranges, reds and ochres of the stone, pitted and ragged from a millennia of being slowly and inexorably exposed as the surrounding alluvial plain washes away, one grain at a time, like an ancient pyramid rising out of the dunes one stone at a time.

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Every civilization has some form of pilgrimage burned into its collective unconscious. Jung’s disciples believed that the pilgrimage was an archetype, part of the language of the unconscious. The Zoroastrians travelled from wherever they were to ancient fire temples, the terrestrial dwelling places of Ahura Mazda, god of light and wisdom. Jews, Muslims and Christians all make spiritual journeys across the deserts of the middle east to Jeruselum.

But the most spectacular modern pilgrimage would have to be the Hajj, where Muslims must travel, if able, to Mecca once in their lifetime. Once there, they must circumambulate the Ka’aba counterclockwise seven times.

I can’t help but be reminded of the ‘big lap’. Once upon a time the Australian Dream was easily enough defined as a station wagon in the driveway of a three bedroom home with 2.4 children, a hills hoist in the backyard and Anzac cookies on the bake.

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The Field of Light installation has proven so popular that it keeps being renewed, year after year.

Today, though, our unconscious has taken hold and materialism is slipping away. Meaning is the new money, and for whatever reason, the land seems to be speaking to us in a way that we were deaf to a generation ago. The dream now has become one of shirking off the day to day and embarking upon a journey around the continent, one which runs counter-clockwise in most cases, spiraling into the red centre to visit Uluru. It is an unwritten rule, a new belief without prophets or dogma, but one which we all feel.

Where does it come from if not from the land, as ancient as any exposed on the planet. And this landscape has been curated by the same people for over 40,000 years. The aborigine believed that the land took care of him, and he took care of the land. A unique relationship grew and flourished, and we seem to be rubbing against the edge of something big when we journey inward.

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Or maybe it’s just that the continent is nothing more than a symbol for our deepest unconscious itself. The shore is the edge…where the light meets the darkness, and the further inward we travel, the deeper we go.

I’ve seen the eyes looking on the rock. Some seem to find what they came there looking for, but like the Tao, they can never really explain it. Others seem to be waiting for something to be revealed. And perhaps it will be. Once the journey is over, once the entire trip is taken in context, when they realise that it began as they put the 4WD into gear, not when they crossed through the gates of the park.

Something about Uluru…something draws us from within to the heart of the desert.

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The rock itself is staggeringly huge. Its scale is hard to fathom because you can see it from so far away. To the aborigine, the rock itself isn’t sacred as a whole, but there are aspects of it, indentions in the surface, piles of stone that have fallen off, waterfalls and valleys that bear tremendous import within their cosmogony.

The western visitor doesn’t know any of this. We can’t know it, because knowing the secret would destroy its power. That’s the thing about secrets.

One interesting point worth noting about this place is that quite often tourists take a piece of stone from the base of the mountain as a souvenir. The local park rangers have stories by the dozen of these same tourists writing back, sending padded envelopes with their souvenir enclosed, asking the rangers to return the stone to lift the curse which has befallen them since they absconded with the rock.

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Rising 348m from the vast Amadeus Basin, Uluru was formed from the sedimentation of an ancient mountain range that was slowly washed away by rainwater and glaciation. Sedimentation then compacted the conglomerate over millions of years before the Alice Spring Orogeny flipped nearly two and a half kilometres of stone on its side. Harder and without jointing, which would allow rainwater to split the stone, accelerating erosion, it has withstood the same forces that have leveled the plain around it.

It’s interesting to note that Uluru should, in geological terms, be getting taller. While it is still subject to erosion, the land around it will wash away faster, thus increasing its height over time.

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The unique rounded shoulders shape of the stone can be credited to both the homogeneity of the stone and the fact that it is sitting at 85 degrees, a fairly unique occurrence.

To the aborigine, the rock holds many stories. It was important on several levels to the local people: as a navigational aid, as fertile hunting grounds, as a place to celebrate and camp out for months. When the rains come, they cascade off the sandstone forming deep pools and rich life around the rock, like the green verge on the side of a paved road.

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The climb of the rock is a highly contentious issue today. When the local aborigines were granted ownership of the national park in 1985, there were several conditions including that it would be jointly managed, and that climbing the rock would be allowed.

A mere 29 years into this arrangement the traditional owners seem keen to ban climbing permanently. In the interim, there are at least seven reasons the climb can be closed, including more than a 20 per cent chance of rain within three hours, or cloud in the vicinity of the summit. I have watched them change the sign indicating the climb is closed three times in one day to reflect various reasons for the climb being closed.

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Camped up the road from the big rock, trying to figure out the words for this caption…

What seems to be at stake here, though, is not just the right of the aboriginal to worship Uluru. Like Jeruselum, it is a site that is holy for many groups of people. Westerners may come here for the most selfish of reasons, and yet that alone could not account for the fervor of the traveller who makes it halfway across the continent, or the world, just to gaze upon the orange rock. Unlike Jeruselum, this particular holy site seems to be closed to anyone without native title.

What seems to be at stake is whether a holy site can be owned by one ethnic or religious group. The land seems to speak to anyone who will listen. The land doesn’t see black or white, old or new. It only calls to the pilgrim with the right kind of ears to come, to come and listen and see.

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Situated 25km east of Uluru is Kata Tjuta, a huddle of 36 conglomerate domes sticking out of the same plain as Uluru, just as incongruously, but with a much more weathered appearance, more feminine shapes and, hidden within the folds of rock, some of the deepest secrets in the outback.

It is telling that the level of protection granted Uluru from wayward feet and cameras is nothing in comparison to the layers of control surrounding Kata Tjuta.

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I am told that Kata Tjuta was a sacred site for secret men’s business, while sections of the base of Uluru were reserved for women’s business.

If secrets are what make the aboriginal stories have meaning, then it follows that we probably aren’t getting a very accurate picture, as outsiders, of what anything in the desert means, truly.

Uluru juts out of the plain beating its chest, challenging the sky. It is all vertical lines, a wide orange lingam, nature’s yang represented in a self-forming idol.

Kata Tjuta, on the other hand, is all yin: breast-like curves, anthropomorphic shapes in bas relief, the horizon broken by the shapes of totem demigods.

I have seen a spring bubbling from the rock, giving birth to a green creek full of ferns, trees and animals. The shape of the rock around the spring a perfect scale representation of a reclining female, giving birth, literally, to life in the desert. This is in the Valley of the Winds, though, a section of Kata Tjuta you are allowed to visit, but not to photograph.

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The Valley of the Winds is the kind of place you can lose yourself in. Arms, faces and legs all stretch from the rain-washed face of the stone. Opposites here dance fervishly: light and dark, green and red, desert and oasis. It is the longest walk in this section of the park, but infinitely more rewarding than the abortive Walpa Gorge walk. Where Walpa grants a dismissive introduction to Kata Tjuta, spending the morning walking through the Valley of the Winds is like spending a night with the domes. Secrets unfold around each corner, and it’s easy to see why this place would be sacred to anyone, particularly a people used to living in a landscape that, to the untrained eye, is trackless. Here there are symbols and meaning in every stone.

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But I believe something deeper is going on here. Uluru is the male power centre of the continent, and Kata Tjuta is the female. Two halves, a duality that collects something from the rest of the island and condenses it here. Maybe there are other places on the planet like this. We look at Stonehenge, the pyramids at Giza, the ziggurats in Mexico and Peru, and there is always a sense that they are built where they are, how they are, for a reason.

But anything that man creates is, necessarily, inferior to the instruments that are carved by nature’s hand. Look at the eye, the one organ in nature that brought religion to every nascent evolutionist, the thorn in Darwin’s side.

Here we have Mother Nature’s pyramids, Mother Nature’s stone ziggurats, her Stonehenge. And we have a perfect representation of the duality of the universe in these structures.

I can’t help but think that, given tens of thousands of years, the aborigine must have sensed this. So it’s easy to respect how important these sites must be within that culture. We seem to live in a world, in the west, without culture, but the earth is a slow, patient teacher.

Alone, they are tourist destinations for postcards. But together, Uluru and Kata Tjuta become something else altogether, the yin and yang of the desert, and we seem to be listening more and more to their songs, becoming pilgrims of a new kind of journey.

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FAST FACTS

LOCATION: Uluru lies 335km southwest of Alice Springs and is situated within the Kata Tjuta National Park. Uluru is a sacred site to the Anangu Aboriginal people and is protected as a UNESCO world heritage site. Uluru remains a huge tourist destination, with over 400,000 visitors to the park annually since 2000. Since the 1980s, all tourist accommodation and facilities have been moved from within the park to a hundred square kilometer reservation outside the park’s northern boundary. Visitors to the park must pay $25 which provides them with a three-day access pass.
Kata Tjuta National Park covers 1326 square kilometres and is located 1400km south of Darwin and 440km southwest of Alice Springs. The park is accessed via the Stuart and Lasseter Highways and protects Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Kata Tjuta is also known as Mount Olga and is located 25km west of Uluru.

MORE INFO is available at www.ayersrockresort.com.au

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