The Mysteries of Ayers Rock - Northern Territory, Australia - News Article Locations on Waymarking.com

THE MYSTERIES OF AYERS ROCK
By THOMAS KENEALLY; Thomas Keneally's new novel is ''A Family Madness'' (Simon & Schuster).
Published: March 16, 1986

Australians have a habit of calling it simply The Rock. It becomes clear after a time what rock they are talking about - the vast single stone, larger than an island, that lies at Australia's heart and that until recent times was as infrequently visited by Europeans as Timbuktu or the South Pole. Since the late 19th century it has borne the name Ayers Rock, but for the Pitjantjatjara tribespeople and their kinsmen in the Great Western Desert it has another name, Uluru, a name of towering antiquity, a name from before the ice ages.

The Rock is what geologists call an inselberg, and its basically red conglomerate stone changes appearance from the rich pink of dawn to orange at noon to a radiant ocher at sunset. But that is the least of its enchantments. There are myths and magic embodied in Uluru, and mysteries written across its face. The Rock and its surrounding desert, oddly spectacular as they are, will reward most those who are susceptible to mystery in the strictest sense, mystery as it occurred in the body of ancient ritual deriving from Tjukurapa, the Dreamtime - before which, in the aboriginal view, the earth did not exist.

Ayers Rock lies close enough to the geographic center of Australia to make it the supreme symbol of that hinterland known as the Outback. In a continent as large as the continental United States, it is therefore a suitable objective for a traveler, being a vast and satisfying node to behold. It has always been my fancy to think of it as a kind of continental navel, the point at which the aboriginal demigods, the ancestor-heroes, half human and half animal, cut the umbilical cord connecting earth to heaven. Any traveler will certainly fall prey to similar fable-making there, by the red-orange bulk of Ayers Rock, under an immense sky of electric blue. That is an extraordinary aspect of the Rock. You can stand in Yosemite and, despite its magnitude and its splendor, know that it is all a geological wonder wrought by glaciers. But you cannot stand by Uluru without feeling it is the greatest of mythic beasts, without becoming in this desert place a brother to Ahab on the flanks of Leviathan.

The Rock is now just past the first flush of its accessibility to outsiders. It lies in the Northern Territory, some 200 miles southwest of Alice Springs, the model for Nevil Shute's novel ''A Town Like Alice.'' Until the building of a reliable airport and the arrival of four-wheel-drive transport, the only certain line of communication between Alice and the remoter regions was provided by camel trains managed by Afghan drivers, the last of whom you can still find living out retirements on the front verandas of their bungalows in town. The early vehicles that took visitors west from Alice depended on matting, which the passengers would lay across the sandy patches encountered on the way from one sizable cattle station or ranch to another, and so on to the center, the Rock.

In the Northern Territory the term ''sizable cattle station'' is no hyperbole. Average stations are well over 1,000 square miles in extent. Angas Downs and Curtin Springs, situated between Alice and the Rock, each cover about 3,000 square miles. Any traveler fortunate enough to talk his way onto one of the larger cattle stations and stay as a guest will find a remarkable way of life flourishing there. He will encounter a community of aboriginal and white stockmen (the Australian word for cowboys), bookkeepers, mechanics and cooks, even a station schoolteacher. He will observe those tall, calm, nerveless beings Australians call aerial musterers, who round up cattle in helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft, working with doors off and so close to the ground that the altimeter or the eye can hardly tell they're airborne. At the core of the station community stand the cattleman and his wife, living the sort of life that has always reminded me of the knockabout puissance of the medieval nobility, their mental habits those of any frontier people, bristling with mistrust of all those who live in cities. If you are just passing through, the roadhouses at Angas Downs and Curtin Springs will give you the chance to see the working of enormous mobs of cattle and are one reason the traveler should approach the Rock overland, through that country of spinifex and scrub. Having arrived at the Rock, you can go strolling in the desert with one of the members of the Mutitjulu community, a group of Pitjantjatjara and Yankuntjatjara tribespeople who live in the rock's shadow. I once took such a stroll with an elder of the Yankuntjatjara tribe called Toby Naninga, an aging man who has since died and whose spirit, in tribal belief, has returned to its place of origin, to the northeast, near Angas Downs. At the time of the excursion, a photographer and I were in pursuit of a wide-angle photograph of the area for a book we were putting together. As the photographer fussed at his tripod, the old man introduced me to the nectar that drips from the fronds of the grevillea bush, to edible tubers just below the red sand, to the insect galls on mulga wood underbrush, the interiors of which had a gamy sweetness. Toby could find wood grubs and the protein-rich witchety grub. He knew, with the experience of millenniums passed on to him as a child, at the base of which shrubs his hero ancestors had hidden the water.

After a little time with someone like Toby, you might begin to see the Rock for what it is, a cunningly inverted lake. Since the rate of evaporation here is over 12 times the rainfall, Uluru's runoff lies deep-set in the sand or held in the roots of desert scrub, though standing water can be found at Maggie Springs, home of the Water Python spirit of the Yankuntjatjara.

IF YOU ARE THE SORT of person who relishes systems of fable as ramified as the Iliad but still dominant in the society from which they spring, you will love the Rock. On the north surface of Uluru are a series of caves and striations that Europeans call the Skull. Members of the Mala, or Hare Wallaby, group (both Pitjantjatjara and Yankuntjatjara belong to it) believe that the patterning represents the camp made by their hero ancestors in the Dreamtime, when they came to Uluru from the Haasts Bluff region, some 200 miles north, to initiate their youths. The Dreamtime, or the Dreaming, is the era in which these heroic forebears created the known earth by their travels and adventures along trails that cross and re-cross the desert. Many of these paths coalesce to a crossroads at major features of the landscape, such as Uluru.

The grooves and caves to the right of the Skull mark the camps of the fathers and uncles of the initiates. In the uncles' camp lived the eagle chick, which would be used to provide feathers for the ceremony. Other caves represent the camps of old men not involved in the ceremony, and a series of flat rocks to the east stand for the camp of the Hare Wallaby women.

Whenever the tribes of the area gather at the Rock for initiation ceremonies, they still camp precisely in this pattern, written in such large symbols on the surface of Uluru. The final initiation rites of Mala men have, up to recent times, taken place in a cave around the corner of the Rock, a cave now lightly fenced and dependent on the good will of visitors for its in-tegrity. It is known that inside the Mala cave the walls are stained with an oxide, the blood of the Mala hero ancestor. Old men still pour out their blood from self-inflicted arm and chest wounds, since they realize the continuance of the known earth, granted them by their traveling ancestors, depends upon it.

In the northwest corner of Uluru, separated from the body of the Rock, is an immense pillar that Europeans call the Kangaroo Tail. In tribal perception this is the ceremonial pole (naldawata) stolen from the midst of the Mala camp by a devil dingo. The dingo is a species of dog believed to have come to Australia with the aboriginals across the land bridges and shallow seas that existed between Australia and Indonesia before the melting of the glaciers toward the end of the last ice age. The particularly savage canine who stole the naldawata had been sung into being by the elders at Docker River, 150 miles farther west in the mountains now called the Petermanns, and sent into the camp at Uluru to punish the Mala group for refusing to supply eagle feathers to their Docker River cousins. The devil dingo put the Mala, and their guests from the southwest side of Uluru, the Carpet Snake people, to flight. There are enormous writhe marks and paw-shaped caves at the base of Uluru that represent the escape route of the Hare Wallaby and Carpet Snake people, their panic quite legible in the rock.

THE MALA CEREMONIAL group are still aware of that devil dingo, which they believe dwells somewhere on the crest of Uluru. Now, as in the Dreamtime, the Mala people perform their initia tion ceremony without a naldawata, and the Docker River people avoid the use of eagle feathers in their initiations, wearing ashes instead.

It is claimed by some anthropologists that the Olgas, 22 miles to the west of the Rock, are of even more powerful mythic significance than Uluru. These strange mountains are delightful to visit and wander among. They are mysterious yet homely. Seen from a distance they resemble gigantic potatoes spread on a kitchen draining board - an image reinforced by their aboriginal name, Katatjuta (many heads).

Neither Uluru nor the Olgas rival the great art sites at Obiri and Nourlangie Rock in the Top End of the Northern Territory, where there has always been a greater range of ochers and dyes, and where the artists, living in an area of tropical abundance, would have had more time to engage in the sympathetic magic of depicting the animals and spirits that inhabited their region. In the Center, families and clans lived not on tens of square miles replete with fish and game but on thousands of miles of desert, having to travel farther to achieve the same standard of life. Nonetheless the Olgas do abound with petroglyphs and paintings and arrangements of stone meant to be visible mnemonics of ritual and ancestral activities. The aboriginals of Uluru believe that some of the paintings in the Olgas are not the work of human beings, so it would seem that they were painted at some prodigious reach of history by the first wave of aboriginal immigrants passing southeast across the continent. And Uluru itself has the force of a massive, dazzling work of art, full of powerful symbols to which even the visitor can gain some access.

UNTIL THE PAST year, accommodations near the Rock were provided by primitive motels, each fringing a dining room and a bar. The visitor could chat with truck drivers carrying supplies of beer, fuel oil or toilet paper westward over dry riverbeds to remote aboriginal settlements or to the grandly isolated Giles weather station in Western Australia. You might also find off-duty Northern Territory police and hear from them barely heightened stories of aboriginal law (which coexists with European law), tales of ritual punishment or the tragedies of those reckless travelers who perished of thirst on the edge of the Gibson Desert or on the cruel and graphically named Sandy Blight track.

The old motels are now abandoned and there is a new resort complex about 13 miles west of the Rock, designed to serve the increasing number of visitors to Uluru. Although the resort is modern in design, its galvanized iron roofs, curved verandas and prominent rainwater tanks are reminiscent of early outback buildings. Last October, less than a year after their completion, the resort's two hotels were nearly filled to capacity during the ceremony marking the Australian Government's transfer of freehold title to the Rock to elders of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankuntjatjara tribes who live in the Mutitjulu camp.

IN RETURN FOR THE TITLE transfer, the Mutitjulu people leased the Rock back to the Australian Government for 99 years to operate as a national park run by a management committee consisting of tribal elders and white officials. A light plane from Alice Springs buzzed over the ceremony with a streamer that declared ''Ayers Rock for All Australians!'' - expressing the fear of some Australians that the aboriginal owners would attempt to restrict tourist access to certain sacred sites in Uluru and in the Olgas.

As sacred as the Rock is to the Pitjantjatjara and Yankutjatjara, white Australians also approach it in a spirit akin to that of pilgrimage. It was well into this century before Australian education and culture ceased to look to the northern hemisphere for its models. Those of us who were told in Australian classrooms that a Dead Heart lay at the core of our continent have come to value Uluru as a living, central presence.

FOR THE ROCK AND THE desert are not nullities. They have astonishing beauty and subtle habits, the desert seeming to overflow with an Old Testament plenty, the Rock shedding its skin evenly, through the process called spalling, like a live serpent. And, it becomes apparent, this environment has permitted the aboriginals a more than adequate life for some tens of thousands of years. All the aboriginal names for sections of the Rock refer to organic life, not to death. For example, it is at the point called Webo, or tail, the place where the Kangaroo Rat Hero let his tail slope away to ground level, that the traveler begins his ascent of the Rock.

It is obvious that white Australians approach Webo and Uluru itself affirmatively and, for such a casual race, with something like reverence. But what influence will the new tides of visitors, Australian and foreign, have on the Rock and its area, on its sacred sites, both so potent in magic and so vulnerable to intrusion. Do you deal with the problem by fencing a site, as in the case of the Mala cave on Uluru's southwest face? Or do you eschew fences and depend on the outsiders' ignorance of what the most important sites are, on the general if vague good will of the visitor? There is no doubt that the elders at Mutitjulu are aware of the delicacy of the balance between the tourist's hunger for the grand and aesthetic on one side and, on the other, the essential rites upon which, in the tribal view, the health of the cosmos depends. How will the Dreaming of Uluru stand up to all the traffic?

The visitor is nonetheless made welcome, not only to the physical dimension of the Rock, but to its mystery as well. Like an uninitiated Pitjantjatjara child of, say, 5 years, we can be given basic instruction in the countless items of fabulous and ritual advice that mark Uluru and the Olgas, making a visit there something akin to a visit to another earth, the aboriginal planet."

Type of publication: Newspaper When was the article reported?: 03/16/1986 Publication: New York Times Article Url: [Web Link] Is Registration Required?: no How widespread was the article reported?: international News Category: Arts/Culture

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