Uluru - a plea

There are few things more hypnotic than watching a desert highway flicker out, like a shaken rope, as it stretches out into the limitless distance. Moreover you can be pretty sure that no cop in his right mind is going to be sitting out on this blood-boiling forty-five degree outback day. So you keep the needle hovering at a steady 130km/hr and listen to the wheel purr over the hot sticky tarmac.


A map of the Outback shows just a relatively small section of desert between The Alice the Erldunda roadhouse. It is actually close to three hours driving but that is nothing in the scale of Australia. If you carry on south from Erldunda there would be very little to make you twitch the steering wheel before you reached Coober Pedy and the edge of the desert in about another ten hours. Swing right after you have refuelled at the roadhouse though and the Lassiter Highway will soon lead you to one of the undeniable wonders of the world. When you are two hours down the Lassiter Highway you start to see Uluru (once known as Ayers Rock) rise, like a great red whale, from the flat desert horizon. Uluru is the most photographed and instantly recognisable rock in the world. Yet nothing can prepare you for the sight of the world’s most gigantic monolith as it begin to rise up until its almost sheer red walls loom 348m over you.


This was actually my second visit to a place that was still then universally known as Ayers Rock. The Aboriginals long ago asked that people respect the traditional name of their sacred site. This place is called Uluru they say – not Ayers Rock. They have been pointing this out, to the best of my knowledge, for well over a decade. Sure it takes a little to accustom people to knew names but we grasped the changes to Myanmar and Mumbai fast enough and have realised that we shouldn’t call tsunamis tidal waves. Yet even the Australian authorities continue to signpost ‘Ayers Rock’ rather than Uluru even on the sacred land around the rock itself.


When I first arrived seven years ago and I was surprised to see so many tourists still hiking up what everybody knew even then was the most spiritual site of the local land-owning Aboriginals. I figured that people probably climbed because they had been shuttled in at speed and nobody had taken the time to point out that the local Aboriginal community respectfully asked people to ‘please not to climb.’ In most other (reputedly) culturally sensitive countries such a request from the traditional owners of a sacred spot would be sufficient for an immediate ban on climbing.


Today there is a huge board right at the base of the rock in which this request to refrain from climbing is detailed in 16 languages…and still whole crowds of jack-booted Nazi tourists goose-step by (metaphorically speaking) en-masse to make the climb to the summit. Their defence would presumably be to point out that they have travelled halfway around the world to enjoy this once-in-a-lifetime experience.
This is like telling your host: “Well, I’m sorry but you shouldn’t have invited me to your house if you didn’t want me to practise ju-jitsu on your grandmother.”

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