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

Almost eight hundred miles northwest of Broken Hill, I came, reluctantly, to a stop at a dune of fine red sand.  It was clean as water, but if I kept going I’d be looking around for a shovel.  

I got out of the car, and tiny flies began buzzing around my head.  I kept brushing them away from my mouth and my nose and my ears and my eyes.  Later, I asked if there was a local name for these flies, which are at least seasonally ubiquitous. The  answer I got was “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 returned to pavement.  This was the Lasseter Highway, named for Harold Lasseter, a prospector who in 1931 died while hunting for a gold vein he said he had discovered some thirty years earlier.  He never did find it again, assuming he had found it years earlier, but by accident on my first visit to Australia I had found Lasseter’s grave.  It was in Alice Springs, where 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 of the dune that stopped me and back towards Broken Hill, the Lasseter Highway links up in a hundred and thirty miles with the Stuart Highway, which traverses Australia north to south, or south to north, more or less from Adelaide to Darwin.  It’s named for John McDouall Stuart (there’s no ‘g” in McDouall),  possibly the first person and certainly the first White person to cross Australia this way.  He survived, and he died in London four years later.  That was 1866.  He was 50. 

West from 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 that stopped me.  The hotels were once again flying the flags of Accor, that French hotel-management company busy at Sydney’s Darling Harbor.  

The hotels 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 at Yulara, usually by air.  Most are corralled into buses and then into those hotels, where rooms start at about a sobering three hundred U.S. dollars daily.  The hotels are 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 and said,  “They’ve ticked off one more item on their bucket lists.”  Funny how quickly that phrase, which comes from the title of a 2007 movie, has embedded itself across the English-speaking world.

A few miles west of Yulara I turned onto a dead-end road.  Signs told me where I could and could not park.  It was midday, the flies and heat were bad, and there was nobody around.  I parked next to a sign telling me not to, got out of the car, and listened to the silence, not just the silence around me but in me.  I like silent places, but sometimes I think I live for that other silence. 

There it was, a couple of miles in front of me: Uluru, formerly Ayers Rock.  

An eminent 19th century sculptor, his order book full, once found himself having to refuse commissions and then getting tired of people asking him to recommend someone else they could hire. Somewhere I’ve read that this sculptor–his name was Antonio Canova–said in exasperation that people hear with their ears.  Rather than judging for themselves, he meant, people relied on what they heard 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 President Kennedy.  I wonder where Judy Miller is now. 

Perhaps here at Uluru I was seeing with my ears.  It’s hard to be sure, because over the years I have seen many, many pictures of Uluru.  Nobody had to say explicitly that the mountain was spectacular; the brute fact that there were so many photographs of it proved that point, or at least proved that lots of people thought it was spectacular.  Maybe I was just going along with them, like I did in seventh grade, when for a couple of slimy weeks I rubbed pomade onto my head in a doomed attempt to get a properly slicked-back ducktail.

On the other hand, the first Europeans to see Uluru were definitely impressed, and they couldn’t have been seeing with their ears.  They were either Ernest Giles in 1872 or William Gosse a year later.  In Australia Twice Traversed, Giles wrote 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.”  He was probably looking at Uluru, but he was then diverted by nearby mountains he called the Olgas.  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 after 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.

A year later, William Gosse definitely saw Uluru, although he didn’t call it that.  As leader of the Central and Western Exploring Expedition, Gosse kept a diary.  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.”  

I don’t know why Gosse chose that name.    It’s true that he was working for the government of South Australia, which in those days claimed sovereignty over the Northern Territory, and it’s true that Henry Ayers–he of the Monster Mine–was at that time enjoying a stint as the state’s premier.  Maybe Gosse was just flattering the boss.  Possibly someone told Gosse he’d better do it if he wanted to keep his job.  Ayers appreciated the attention enough to attend Gosse’s funeral seven years later, when Gosse died of a heart attack at age 38.  Gosse’s more immediate boss attended, too.  He was George Goyder, the same George Goyder who had demarcated Goyder’s Line and been denounced as the King of the Lands Department.   

Gosse did not speak to the local Aboriginal group, the Pitjandjara, and so presumably never learned that their name for the mountain was Uluru.  That name appears in print for the first time 30 years later on a map drawn by Herbert Basedow, a sympathetic geologist on the North-West or Wells Expedition of 1903.  I say “sympathetic” because Basedow went on to publish a book in 1925 called The Australian Aboriginal, and in it he writes of “racial homicide.”  The phrase sounds odd, probably because the word genocide had not yet been coined.

What did William Gosse think of Uluru?  Here’s what he wrote in his diary: 

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.  

There’s no fence or barrier around Uluru.  I don’t know why I expected one: after all, there’s no fence around the cliffs at Yosemite Valley.  In both places you can walk up, take a key out of your pocket, and scratch to your heart’s content. Maybe Uluru’s sandstone isn’t as hard as Yosemite’s granite, but your key won’t do anything.  

So Gosse should have known better than to call Ayers Rock granite.  Even from the point where I parked illegally, the rock’s sedimentary layering is obvious, like thick magazines standing upright on a shelf.  In Gosse’s defense, the rock is a sandstone composed of grains of granite.  The erosional debris from ancient mountains formed a layered deposit in an inland sea, and a mountain-building episode turned the beds almost upright.   Voila!

I don’t know if anyone has counted the number of visitors Uluru had in the years after Gosse’s visit, but as late as the 1950s the Administrator of the Northern Territory declared that there was “no future in tourism in the Northern Territory, least of all Ayers Rock.”  Famous last words.  In 1952, an enterprising tour operator named Leonard or Len Tuit bused a dozen hardy souls 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 happy that Tuit had dug a well. 

Then, in 1958, a pilot named Eddie Connellan, who had previously flown passengers from Alice Springs on aerial tours circling the Rock, got permission to land on a strip half a mile from the Rock’s northeast-facing side.  

Edna Bradley, 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.’” Bradley writes that another Len Tuit employee replied, “Ya won’t get that many.”  More famous last words.

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.  By then, fifty thousand visitors were arriving annually.  A national park embracing both Uluru and Kata Tjuta was established, and, 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, and it was followed in three years with the new tourist center, Yulara.  

In 1987, UNESCO, the United Nations 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, when Uluru joined the party, there were about two hundred and fifty places on the list.  Today there are over a thousand.  Most of them are crowded, thanks in part to the UNESCO designation.  It reminds me of an article published about 1950 by Bernard de Voto.  It was called “Let’s Close the National Parks,” and it was de Voto’s way of saying that crowds were ruining them. 

At sunset, when the rock is especially colorful, hundreds of visitors are brought to a parking lot with room for twenty or thirty buses, maybe more.  I came by and watched hundreds of people congregating politely and chatting to fill the time before the rock achieved its maximum luminosity.   Some of them would get a lot closer to the rock, either on a road circling it or on the still-closer pedestrian path.  It’s about five miles long.  Some visitors jog it.  Others pay a fee, join a group, and whiz along on a rented Segway.   

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. 

I saw a dozen people climbing, despite a sign admonishing visitors not to climb, out of respect for Aboriginal tradition.   A year later, in 2019, the admonition would graduate to a prohibition. What would future visitors miss?  Here’s William Gosse’s answer, again from his diary: 

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 at these places I bumped into the tricky business of understanding Uluru as it was understood by the people who were here first. 

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

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 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 the Wikipedia entry for “subincision.”  Men should do this sitting down.

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 went on to dismiss “the wholesale production of worthless mythological accounts written by the uninformed for the ignorant.”  

Contrary to my expectations, Strehlow wrote that Uluru was not an especially sacred place.  This sounds heretical, so I’m going to let him 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.  

He might as well have written “old tribal insignificance.”

This is a Pilate moment, and it raises the question whether Harney and Mountford were getting the truth or were getting "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, non-venomous carpet snake.  I have no idea why a venomous snake would need a knife to kill a non-venomous snake.  But that aside, who’s right, Harney or Mountford?  I have no trouble believing that both could be right, but I fear neither are.  

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, they agree, 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 deep grooves between sedimentary layers.  I went a couple of times trying to avoid sharing the space with visitors having a noisy time.  I must be a spinster librarian at heart.   

Was I at an important place?  Harney leaves no doubt.  “Mutijula 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 goes on to explain 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.   

It’s time for the Mountford version.  “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… waterhole beneath.”   

I decided that I wasn’t going to get anywhere near the truth of what this place meant to the Pitjanjara.  Sure, about two miles to the east there’s the Aboriginal settlement of Mutitjulu.  I might have gone over there and tried walking around, but Strehlow had told me to expect: “fictitious rubbish.” Besides, the approach road was signed “Off Limits.”  I don’t mind parking where I’m not supposed to park–in fact, I like doing it–but I’m not going to barge into a community that I think we can assume has had its fill of strangers.  I’m still not sure when that term “boy,” applied to an adult Aboriginal man, became unacceptable in Australian polite society.

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 busy eating flies.  They couldn’t eat enough of them for me.

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, 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 now to the Aussies I imagined landing at LAX and 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–it’s still stuck in the Woolworth Paleolithic–and Wichita has half a dozen.  

When they had had their fill of supercenters, I’d tell them that they had to visit Yosemite.  It didn’t really have to be Yosemite, but it had to be one of those places where visitors feel at home when they’re a world away from home.  Places like Sydney’s Gap Bluff.  Or like Uluru.  Places that feel the way I felt a few months ago when summer was turning to fall.  I was lying in bed in my own  house.  The bed was next to a double-hung window old enough to rattle a bit on windy days.  I lifted the window a few inches and for the first time in months felt cold air.  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 and zero is a number.