Uluru

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The plain runs flat and red for hundreds of kilometers, scrub and spinifex to every horizon, and then the ground simply rises. A single mass of stone stands clear of it, sheer-sided, some three hundred and forty-eight meters from base to crown, its flanks grooved and pitted and folded like a thing that has been worked. There is nothing else of its scale for a great distance. To the geologist it is an inselberg, an island-mountain of coarse arkose sandstone left standing while the softer rock around it wore away over hundreds of millions of years. To the Anangu, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples whose Country this is, it is Uluru, and it is not an accident of erosion. It is the work of the ancestral beings of the Tjukurpa, and in many of its features it is their body and their record, the events of the creation held in the rock where they happened.

The Country and its making

Uluru lies near the geographic center of the Australian continent, about three hundred and thirty-five kilometers southwest of Alice Springs, in the arid heart of the Northern Territory. It is the better known of two great formations in the national park that bears their names; the other, Kata Tjuta, “many heads,” is a cluster of steep domes some forty kilometers to the west. The rock itself is a monolith of arkose — a sandstone unusually rich in feldspar — laid down as the sediment of an ancient mountain range, tilted nearly vertical by later earth-movements, and then exposed as the surrounding plain was stripped away. Its red comes from the rusting of iron in the stone’s surface. Most of its mass, like an iceberg’s, lies underground.

Uluru from the air, 2007. Photograph by Marc Feipel, released to the public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

That is the documentary account of the rock’s formation, and the Anangu do not dispute the deep antiquity it describes. But it is not the account that orders their relation to the place. In the Anangu understanding, the land was made in the Tjukurpa — a word that the older anthropological literature rendered, misleadingly, as “Dreamtime,” and that the English of the traditional owners themselves prefers to leave as Tjukurpa or to gloss as the Law. The Tjukurpa is the creation-time when the ancestral beings traveled across a featureless world, and it is at the same time the body of law, kinship, conduct, and obligation that their travels laid down, and it is at the same time a present reality, not a sealed-off past. The Anangu are emphatic on this last point, and they say it against the English term directly: the Tjukurpa is no dream, and there is no word for “Dreamtime” in their languages. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, reaching for the temporal strangeness of the idea, coined the word “everywhen” — the ancestral acts are not merely remembered but are continuously present, re-entered through ceremony and read in the land.

The antiquity at issue is not only geological. The Anangu, like the other Aboriginal peoples of the continent, belong to a presence in this land that the archaeological record traces back tens of thousands of years — a continuity of occupation and of religious life, evidenced at sites as old as the burials of Lake Mungo, that makes theirs among the oldest continuous human cultures known. The desert around Uluru is not empty country to its owners but a fully held one, every soak and rockhole and food-ground named and storied and assigned to people who carry responsibility for it. To be Anangu is to belong to particular tracts of this Country through one’s parents and grandparents and through the Tjukurpa that runs across it, and the rock is the great fixed point of that belonging, the place to which the surrounding country and its songs are tied. The relation is the reverse of the European one: people do not first own the land and then value it; they belong to the Country, and the Country, in the Anangu understanding, holds and addresses them. The deep time the geologist measures and the deep time the Anangu inhabit are not the same kind of time, but they meet in the same stone.

In that creation, beings who were at once human and animal and feature-of-the-land moved through the country around Uluru, and what they did there is held in the rock. The features of Uluru are the marks of specific Tjukurpa events. There is the camp of the Mala, the rufous hare-wallaby people, who came to the rock to hold their ceremonies and whose story is bound into the northwest face. There is Kuniya, the woma python woman, who carried her eggs to Uluru and lived in its rocks, and Liru, the venomous snake; the place where Kuniya fought Liru, and the wounds of that fight, are read in the gouges and the shapes of the southern wall, where the events are written into the stone in a way that those who hold the story can show and tell. These are not the whole of the Tjukurpa of Uluru, and a great deal of what the rock holds is not told here, for reasons that belong to the Anangu and not to the visitor.

A text written in stone, and its restricted pages

To learn the country is to walk it with those who hold it. The Tjukurpa is carried in song and in the names of places in order, in the designs and the ceremonies, and above all in the land itself, where each waterhole and cave and fold of rock is a station of a story. Across the wider desert, the tracks of the ancestral beings run as iwara — paths that link site to site in the order the beings traveled, each station named in a song that fixes the sequence, so that the song, the country, and the Law are a single fabric. Some of these tracks are short and local to Uluru; others run for great distances across the desert and pass through the lands of several peoples, who each hold their own stretch of the same line — the same principle of song-held Law that binds the country of the Yolngu of the far north, and that the engraved galleries of Murujuga carry on stone in another corner of the continent. The rock sits where a number of these tracks converge, which is part of why it is so weighted a place: it is not one story but a knot of them, the meeting-ground of ancestral journeys that arrive from many directions and leave their mark when they reach it. The senior men and women who hold this knowledge teach it on the ground, at the sites, in the proper sequence and to the proper people. A person does not learn the Law of a place by reading it; one is taken to it, told it where it happened, and given over time the right and the obligation to hold and to pass it on. The rock, in this sense, is a record that can only be read in the presence of its readers — a text whose pages are the country and whose grammar is the relation between a person, their Tjukurpa, and the Anangu among whom they stand.

Mutitjulu, the waterhole at the base of Uluru, a permanent source in arid country and a place of Tjukurpa significance. Photograph by Coen Hird, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

Crucial to this is that not all of the knowledge is open. Aboriginal religious knowledge across the continent is stratified, and a great part of it is restricted — held by initiated men or by senior women, not to be shown or told to outsiders, and not to be set down in writing or image at all. At Uluru this restriction is concrete and marked on the ground. Certain faces of the rock are the sites of men’s ceremonies and certain faces of women’s; these are forbidden ground, and the Anangu ask that they not be photographed, because to circulate an image of a restricted site is to put sacred knowledge before people who have no right to it, including the community’s own women, children, and uninitiated men. The request is not a quaint sensitivity. It is the application of the same Law that the rock records — the Law that assigns knowledge to those who may carry it. An honest account of Uluru therefore names what it cannot say: that there is a depth of Tjukurpa here, held by its custodians, which is not the visitor’s to know, and which it would be a kind of theft to reconstruct or to guess at. What can be told publicly — the Mala, Kuniya and Liru, the broad shape of the Law — has been put forward by the Anangu themselves; the rest is closed, and saying so is the truthful thing to do.

This is also why the long history of the rock as a thing to be climbed and photographed sat so badly with its owners. To stand on the top of Uluru is to stand on a sacred body and, in places, to cross a path that belongs to a particular ancestral track. The Anangu did not forbid it for many years, because the protocol of their Law is to ask rather than to command and to feel responsible for the safety of those who come; but they asked, plainly and for a long time, that visitors not climb. The asking, and the long delay in its being honored, became one of the defining stories of the place.

Renaming, handback, and the closing of the climb

Much of what reached the wider world about places like Uluru came at first through a particular and unequal channel. The earliest written accounts of Central Australian religion were the work of explorers, missionaries, and ethnographers — men who arrived in the late nineteenth century with the assumptions of their age, who treated Aboriginal religion as a relic of humanity’s infancy, and who often recorded, and sometimes published, knowledge that was never theirs to circulate. That record is real evidence, but it is evidence about the colonial encounter as much as about the tradition, and it must be read against the grain of the framework that produced it. The authority on the Tjukurpa of Uluru is not the explorer’s notebook; it is the Anangu, and over the past half-century it is increasingly their own voices, in their own languages and on their own terms, that set out what may be told and what may not.

The colonial record of Uluru itself begins late and abruptly. In July 1873 the surveyor William Gosse, the first non-Aboriginal person known to have reached it, named the monolith Ayers Rock for Sir Henry Ayers, the chief secretary of South Australia. Under that name the rock entered the settler imagination of Australia and, in the twentieth century, the itinerary of mass tourism. By the late twentieth century hundreds of thousands of visitors came each year; many of them climbed it, hauling themselves up a chained route on the steep western face, and the image of the red rock at sunset became one of the most reproduced in the country — a national icon detached from the people whose Country it was.

The detachment was not permanent. The land-rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976, opened the way for traditional owners to reclaim title to land they had never ceded. On 26 October 1985 the Australian government handed the freehold title of the park back to its Anangu traditional owners, in a ceremony at the foot of the rock. The Anangu in turn leased the land back to the national parks authority on a long lease, on the condition that the park be jointly managed, with a board on which the traditional owners hold the majority. The handback restored the Aboriginal name to first place — the park is Uluru-Kata Tjuta — and restored, in law, the principle that the country belongs to the people of its Tjukurpa.

Kata Tjuta, “many heads,” the second great formation of the park, sacred to the Anangu and largely closed to off-track access. Photograph by Christoph Settgast, CC BY-SA 2.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

Joint management slowly changed the way the place was held. Signs at the base of the climb, signed by the traditional owners, asked visitors to choose not to climb out of respect for the Law; the share of visitors who climbed fell over the decades. In 2017 the park’s board, with its Anangu majority, resolved that the climb would close for good, and on 26 October 2019 — thirty-four years to the day after the handback — it did. The chains were taken down. The closing of the climb was widely reported as a victory of patience: a request made for decades, refused for decades, and at last honored, not by a ban imposed from outside but by the rock’s own owners exercising the authority that the handback had returned to them.

Uluru’s standing in the world’s heritage was recognized along the same arc, and in two stages that themselves tell the story. The Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 for its natural values — its geology, its desert plants and animals, its austere beauty. Then, in 1994, it was inscribed again, this time for its cultural values, as a living cultural landscape shaped by the Anangu relationship to Country under the Tjukurpa. It was only the second place anywhere in the world to be listed as a cultural landscape, and the listing made explicit what the natural inscription had left to the side: that the value of the place is inseparable from the people and the Law that hold it, and that the Anangu belong to one of the oldest continuous human societies on earth.

A place that still speaks for the country

Uluru’s hold on the wider nation did not end with the handback; if anything it deepened, and turned political. In May 2017 delegates from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations across the continent gathered at the foot of the rock for a constitutional convention, and on 26 May they issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart — a short, deliberate document that called for a First Nations Voice enshrined in the nation’s constitution, a Makarrata commission to oversee agreement-making between governments and First Nations, and a process of truth-telling about the country’s history. “We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart,” it began. The choice of place was not incidental. The statement was issued from Uluru because Uluru is where the deep authority of Aboriginal Australia is most legible to the rest of the country — the center of the continent, the body of the Tjukurpa, the place handed back. A national referendum on the Voice was held in October 2023 and was defeated; the statement’s other calls remained on the table, and the document itself continued to circulate as a charter of Aboriginal aspiration.

What stands at the center of the continent, then, is not a monument and not a ruin. It is a working sacred site, owned and managed by the people whose ancestral beings made it, holding a body of Law that is partly open and partly closed by right, no longer climbed, listed twice over for what it is to the earth and for what it is to the Anangu. The red mass that the settler called Ayers Rock and the tourist photographed at sunset is, to the people of its Tjukurpa, exactly what it has always been — the made country, the record in stone, the place where the creation happened and has not stopped happening. The rest of Australia has spent a century and a half catching up to that, and at Uluru the distance between the two ways of seeing the rock has, slowly, begun to close.

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