Episode 4 (Australia, Part 4 of 4)

The transcript of this episode is available at Buzzsprout.com/1970784.
For photos of the places discussed, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

                                                             Episode 4 

                                               (Australia, Part 4 of 4)

Eight hundred miles west and north from Broken Hill, I came to a stop at a dune of fine red sand.  It was clean as water, but if I kept going I’d be praying for a shovel.  

I got out of the car.  Almost at once, tiny flies began buzzing around my head.  I kept brushing them away from my mouth and nose and ears and eyes.  Later, I asked somebody what people around here called the flies.  He didn’t want to say, but I pried it out of him, and he finally said, “Little bastards.”                                              

I walked up to the top of the dune, but the view was more dunes, so I got back in the car and drove the mile or so back to pavement.  This was the Lasseter Highway, named for Harold Lasseter, a prospector who died in 1931 while hunting for the gold vein he said he had discovered some thirty years earlier.  By accident, I had seen his grave in Alice Springs on my first visit to Australia.  A ton of sandstone had been carved into the shape of a man squatting in the dirt.  You could hardly see his face, lost under a slouch hat and behind an immense beard reaching from his cheekbones down to his big belly.  In his hands there was a gold-miner’s pan.

To the east, the Lasseter Highway links up in a hundred and thirty miles with the Stuart Highway, which traverses Australia north to south.  It’s named for John McDouall Stuart (there’s no ‘g” in McDouall), possibly the first person—certainly the first White person—to make that journey.  Stuart survived and died four years later, in 1866, in London.  

To the west of the dune, the Lasseter Highway downshifts in about thirty miles to the unpaved Great Central Road, which leads west in nine hundred miles to the gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie.  There are easier ways to get there, including scheduled flights from Perth.

With one exception, the Lasseter Highway has no hotels or settlements along its entire length of one hundred and fifty miles.  The exception is a cluster of five hotels a few miles from the dune where I had stopped.  This was Darling Harbor all over again, with these hotels, too, flying the flags of Accor, the French chain.  They were part of a master-planned tourist center called Yulara, which also has a gas station, an IGA grocery, a bookstore, and several souvenir shops.  Almost a thousand visitors arrive daily by air at Yulara, where they are corralled into the hotels.  I found no bargains, with entry-level rooms starting at three hundred U.S. dollars a day.  The place is often sold out weeks or months in advance.  When I left a few days later, a flight attendant looked over the sea of silver hair in front of us.  She said, “They’ve ticked off one more item on their bucket lists.”  She had been to Yulara many times and knew what the visitors had come for, but she had never stepped off the plane.

The thing that visitors come for would be surreal if you had never heard of it and then found it for yourself.  That wasn’t possible now, but I did come alone.  That makes a big difference.  I may be grumpy, but I say a pox on groups.

A few miles west of Yulara I turned left onto a dead-end road.  Signs warned motorists where they could and could not park.  It was midday, the flies and heat were bad, and there was nobody around.  I parked in front of a sign telling me not to, got out of the car, and listened to the silence, not only outside but inside.  I mean that the word stream stopped.  I like quiet places, but sometimes I think I live for that interior silence. 

There it was: good old Ayers Rock or, better, Uluru.  Thinking back on that moment, Antonio Canova comes to mind.  An eminent 19th century sculptor, he got tired of people asking him for recommendations.  I doubt that I can find the source of this quote, but I believe he once said that people see with their ears.  Bingo: rather than judging for themselves, they rely on what they hear from others.  It reminds me of a girl I knew at Berkeley who was buzzing with excitement an hour or two after by chance finding herself, just for a moment, a few feet from Jack Kennedy.  I wonder where Judy Miller is now. 

Perhaps I was seeing with my ears.  After all, I had been told by words and pictures that Uluru is breathtaking.On the other hand, the first Europeans to see the rock were also stopped cold, and they couldn’t have been seeing with their ears.  They were either Ernest Giles in 1872 or William Gosse a year later.  If Giles saw Uluru, he saw it from a distance.  In Australia Twice Traversed, he recalls that "after a long and anxious scrutiny through the smoke and haze, far, very far away, a little to the west of south, I descried the outline of a range of hills, and right in the smoke of one fire an exceedingly high and abruptly ending mountain loomed.”  Giles was more effusive about the Olgas, a cluster of mountains about twenty miles west of Uluru.  Seeing them up close, he called them “one of the most extraordinary geographical features on the face of the earth, like the backs of several monstrous kneeling pink elephants.”  

Giles named the Olgas for the Duchess Olga, a sister of Czar Nicholas II.  She was a serious mineralogist, so naming the mountains for her was not as absurd as it sounds.  Still, the Olgas today are almost always called by their Aboriginal name, Kata Tjuta.

William Gosse, on the other hand, definitely saw—and named—Ayers Rock.  As leader of the Central and Western Exploring Expedition, Gosse kept a diary.  In it he wrote: “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…  I have named this Ayers Rock.”  Gosse, after all, was an employee of the government of South Australia, which in those days claimed sovereignty over the Northern Territory, and Henry Ayers of the Monster Mine was enjoying his fifth and final stint as the state’s premier.  

It does not appear from his diary that Gosse spoke to the local Aboriginal group, the Pitjandjara, or learned that their name for the mountain was Uluru.  That name appears in print for the first time in 1914 on a map drawn by Herbert Basedow, a geologist on the North-West or Wells Expedition of 1903.  (Basedow, by the way, was more than a geologist, and in his book The Australian Aboriginal, published in 1925, he wrote of “racial homicide.” This was decades before the first appearance of the word genocide.)

The Gosse diary continues: 

This is a high mass of granite, the surface of which has been honeycombed and is decomposing.  It is 1,100 feet above the surrounding country, two miles in length east and west, and one mile wide.  This seems to be a favourite resort of the natives, judging from the numerous camps in every cave.  The caves are formed of large pieces breaking off the main rock and falling to the foot.  This rock is certainly the most wonderful natural feature I have ever seen.  

Gosse was thirty-one when he saw Uluru and thirty-eight when he died of a heart attack.  Henry Ayers attended his funeral.  So did Gosse’s more immediate boss, George Goyder, the surveyor-general who had demarcated Goyder’s Line.                      

There’s no fence around Uluru.  You can walk up to it, take a key out of your pocket, and scratch to your heart’s content.  No problem: Uluru is hard and smooth.  The key won’t do anything.  

Perhaps Gosse should have known better than to call it granite, because even from the point where I parked illegally, the rock’s sedimentary layering is obvious, like thick magazines upright on a shelf.  In Gosse’s defense, the rock often does look and feel like granite.  Like true granite, for example, it casts off onion-like exfoliation shells.  Not only that: though Uluru is sandstone, the sandstone is composed of grains of granite from long-gone mountains.  The erosional debris from those mountains formed a layered deposit in an inland sea.  A mountain-building episode turned the beds almost upright.      

Until the 1950s, Uluru had few White visitors, and the Administrator of the Northern Territory went so far as to declare that there was “no future in tourism in the Northern Territory, least of all Ayers Rock.”  In 1952, however, an enterprising tour operator named Leonard or Len Tuit bused a dozen hardy tourists about 300 miles from Alice Springs to a camp he set up just east of the rock and near what is now the Aboriginal settlement of Mutitjulu, posted as off-limits to park visitors.  His guests slept in tents and were grateful that Tuit had dug a well to supply a bathhouse. 

In 1958, the government withdrew Ayers Rock from the South West Aborigine Reserve and designated it as a special reserve.  A pilot named Eddie Connellan, who had previously flown passengers from Alice Springs on aerial tours circling the Rock, got permission that year to land on a strip half a mile from the Rock’s northeast-facing side.  Edna Bradley, working as a waitress at Tuit’s camp, recalled that “the pilot proposed a toast: ‘To the future of aerial tourism.’  Then he looked around the room, ‘Ya know, this could be a goer.’  He sat down, nodded his head and said, ‘You know we’re really going for the international tourists for this.’  ‘Ya won’t get that many,’ said Malcolm….”  Malcolm was another Tuit employee.

Tuit sold his camp in 1960, and it was rebuilt as the Red Sands Motel.  The neighboring Boomerang opened eighteen months later, followed by the Inland Motel and the Uluru Motel.  In 1977 the reserve was renamed as the Uluru (Ayers Rock-Mount Olga) National Park. 

By then, fifty thousand visitors were arriving annually. Fearing the growth of a tourist slum, the government shut down the airstrip, canceled the ground leases for the hotels, and demolished them.  A dozen miles to the north and outside the park boundary, a new airport opened in 1982.  Three years later, the new tourist center of Yulara opened.  The government transferred ownership of the park to the Aboriginal Uluru-Katatjuta Land Trust, which then leased the park back to the park service for ninety-nine years. 

In 1987, UNESCO, the United Nation Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, added Uluru to its World Heritage List.  That list had begun in 1978 with the designation of a dozen sites.  By 1987, there were about two hundred and fifty places on the list, and today there are over a thousand.  That’s a lot, but the UNESCO designation is tantamount to a billboard saying COME LOOK!  It reminds me of an article published about 1950 by Bernard de Voto.  It was called “Let’s Close the National Parks” and was de Voto’s way of saying that crowds were ruining these places. 

The great majority of the passengers arriving at the Yulara airport don’t want to drive, so agencies provide buses and offer two-night tours scheduled to the minute.  At sunset, when the rock is especially colorful, hundreds of these visitors are delivered to a viewing spot restricted to buses.  It has room for twenty or thirty of them, maybe more.  I came by, parked (as you expect) illegally, and watched hundreds of people congregating politely and chatting to fill the time before the rock achieved its maximum luminosity.   

It’s possible to drive on a paved road around the Rock. The road is routed at a respectful distance.  Energetic visitors walk the pedestrian path that circles the rock closer to it.  It’s about five miles long.  Some make the path into a jogging track.  Others pay a fee, join a group, and whiz along the path on rented Segways.   

I saw a dozen or more visitors ignoring the signs pleading with them not to insult Aboriginal culture by climbing Uluru.  Edna Bradley, the waitress from the 1950s, recalled that climbing the rock had been difficult and that people in Len Tuit’s camp had said, “‘What they should have here, is something to hang onto, like a chain.’  But others said that would be terrible, ‘just imagine how ugly it would look.’”  The chain was installed in 1964.  Repeat after me: bet on the money. 

In 2019, the admonition against climbing graduated to a legal prohibition. What would future visitors miss?  Here’s William Gosse’s answer, from his diary for July 20, 1873: 

I rode round the foot of rock in search of a place to ascend.  Found a waterhole on south side, near which I made an attempt to reach the top, but found it hopeless.  Continued along to the west, and discovered a strong spring coming from the centre of the rock, and pouring down some very steep gullies into a large deep hole at the foot of the rock.  Seeing a spot less abrupt than the rest of the rock, I left the camels here, and after walking and scrambling two miles barefooted over sharp rocks, succeeded in reaching the summit, and had a view that repaid me for my trouble.  

The pools from which Gosse attempted to climb are today called Mutitjulu and Kantju, and with these names we bump into the tricky business of understanding Uluru as it is understood by the people who were here first. 

The visitor-friendly version begins with Bill Harney, who in 1958 was appointed as the park’s first “keeper.”   Harney writes: 

two old men were brought to join me on my first sojourn at the 'rock'.  They had been born and initiated there over fifty years before.  As we wandered along the base of the mountain, they decided to tell me its story.  I would say nothing, for asking too many questions would upset their thinking.  After a time, we would pause at a certain place in front of or below a rock, the sight of which symbol refreshed their memories and soon they would begin chanting in a low voice which slowly increased in volume as they remembered it. 

Other people have written similar accounts.  Charles Mountford, a geologist who grew fascinated with Aboriginal culture, writes in his book Ayers Rock of “Moanya, stern and reticent, but always willing to instruct me in the lore of his people.”  

The obstreperous Ted Strehlow now enters the conversation.  A professor of linguistics at Adelaide University, Strehlow was born in 1908 to Lutheran missionaries from Germany.  He grew up near Alice Springs with local children for playmates, and so he spoke a local language as a mother tongue.  Contrary to Harney and Mountford, Strehlow writes bluntly that instruction in Aboriginal beliefs is restricted to initiates who have undergone mutilations the thought of which would make most non-Aboriginal men change the subject.  If you’re doubtful, check “subincision” on Wikipedia.  I suggest sitting down first.

In 1969 Strehlow wrote that “ultra-inquisitive intruders are commonly fobbed off with untrue stories,… as can be readily seen in the large amount of fictitious rubbish that is already being retailed by tourist guides (and others) to an unsuspecting and gullible public.”  Strehlow goes on to dismiss “the wholesale production of worthless mythological accounts written by the uninformed for the ignorant.”  

Strehlow went further and dared to write that Uluru was not an especially sacred place.  This sounds heretical, so I’m going to let Strehlow explain himself at length.  It’s a good two paragraphs:

...it is wrong to imagine that only The Centre's more striking natural features had ever been places of sacred eminence for the surrounding tribal territory.  It is much nearer the mark to state that, until the coming of the white population the whole of Central Australia, in a very real sense, was a sacred land for its original inhabitants. 

In Central Australia, every landscape feature was associated with some mythological episode or some sacred verse.  Hence mythology was validated by the geography of the whole countryside… not merely by a few major waters or prominent mountains.  Some of the greatest episodes commemorated by the Central Australian traditions are, in fact, associated with sites in which no modern sight-seeing tourist would be interested….   [Certain places…] that few tourists would bother to notice, outranked by far Ayers Rock, despite the spectacular scenic magnificence of the latter which rightly evokes the admiration of all white visitors, regardless of its old tribal significance.  

So were Harney and Mountford getting the truth or "rubbish"?  Here, at about ten o’clock on a map of the rock, is an exfoliation shell that “symbolises the Dreamtime ana (digging stick) of the Inma ritual.”  That’s Harney.  Along comes Mountford and writes that the same rock is a knife that a poisonous snake used to kill a young carpet snake.  Which is it?  I have no trouble believing that it could be both, but I fear it might be neither.  Circling Uluru and with competing texts in hand, I got more and more confused.  

I went over to Mutitjulu, formerly called Maggie’s Spring.  The waterhole is easy to find, because it has a big parking lot and signs advertising Segways.   At the base of the rock there’s also a multi-ton rock fragment that, according to both Harney and Mountford, is the nose of a venomous snake.  It was cut off, Harney and Mountford write, by the snake’s angry mother.  It certainly looks like a nose, and it hasn’t slipped more than a few feet from its original home.                                       

An easy path leads from here to the spring, which lies at the base of one of Uluru’s erosional wrinkles.  My biggest challenge was finding a time to visit when I didn’t have to share the path with visitors having a good time.    

Was I at an important place?  Harney leaves no doubt.  “Mutijula [sic] is an important rock hole…. To the Uluritdja, the mountain symbolizes their tribe and held the essence of life in the rock pool… sacred to the ‘all knowing and everlasting’ serpent, Wanambi.”  Harney explains that when the water failed, the people of the Rock would come to its base.  They would beg for “meat,” and the serpent high up atop the Rock would disgorge water from its body.   

Mountford, unfortunately, tells a different story: “The aborigines believe that, when the water is getting low, they can, by standing at the head of the gorge and shouting “Kuka-kuka” in a loud voice, entice the spirit of the dead Kunia man, who is resident in the upper rockholes, to send a stream of water to the Mutitjula waterhole beneath.”   

I decided that I wasn’t going to get anywhere near the truth of what this place meant to the Pitjanjara.  True, about two miles to the east there’s the Aboriginal settlement of Mutitjulu.  I might have gone there, but Strehlow had as much as told me what to expect.  Besides, the approach road was signed “Off Limits.”  I don’t mind parking where I’m not supposed to park, but I’m not about to barge into a community that I’m guessing wants to be left alone.  That’s just the Golden Rule.

Black lichen around the pool showed that the water level was two feet below its seasonal maximum.  The stream channel coming down from the top of the rock was dry but black with lichen.  Patches of greenery suggested that there were several pools between the top and the bottom, and flocks of small and very fast birds were zooming back and forth at various levels.  They were wonderfully agile and seemed to be lunching on flies.

I walked over to a place where the base of the rock flared like a cake whose frosting is melting.   I don’t know how erosion has produced that skirt, but I found myself patting the rock—technically, it’s an arkose sandstone—the way I might pat a friendly dog.  It was a warm day, but the rock felt cool and tremendously ponderous. 

I think back to the Aussies I imagined landing at LAX and choosing to meet the United States by going straight to Wichita.  They’d see a major aerospace industry, because Wichita is the birthplace of Cessna and Beechcraft.  The city is also the home of Pizza Hut, which is huge in Australia.  The world’s first Pizza Hut is now a Wichita museum.  The Aussies might also like to visit a Walmart supercenter.  Australia doesn’t have any yet, and Wichita has half a dozen.  

When they had had their fill of Americana, I’d tell the Aussies to be sure to visit Yosemite.  It wouldn’t absolutely have to be Yosemite, but I’d want them to see that the United States, too, has places where visitors can feel at home when they’re a world away from home.  It’s like the way I felt a few months ago when summer was turning to fall.  I was lying on a bed next to a double-hung window old enough to rattle a bit in its frame.  I lifted it a few inches and for the first time in months felt cold air on my face.  There was a similar moment this morning, when I woke to discover that the world had turned white.  I got up to turn the furnace on, then went back to bed for half an hour.  I lay there feeling the icy air and trying to decide if snow has a scent.  I decided that it does, just as silence has a sound.