appearance, the upper portion being covered with holes or caves…. I have named this Ayers Rock, after Sir Henry Ayers
.
That’s as lyrical as the story gets. Having named the Rock for the South Australian premier, he was of course obliged to climb it. After “scrambling two miles barefooted, over sharp rocks,” he “succeeded in reaching the summit, and had a view that repaid me for my trouble.” He busily set about naming the surrounding ranges—after the governor and the surveyor-general of South Australia—then scrambled down. One wonders what Ernest Giles would have splashed on the same canvas.
As it is, we are left with a Rock named Ayers, and with the curious Western compulsion to scale every mountain, no matter how arduous the ascent. “The climbing of Ayers Rock was one of his lifelong ambitions,” declares a metal plaque at the mountain’s base, in memory of a Newcastle man who died of a heart attack on the way up. There are a dozen memorials beside it to fallen or coronary-stricken climbers, which makes for a grim caveat emptor to all who begin the ascent.
To most whites the Rock remains what it was for Gosse: a kind of geological freak, an oversized pebble to be gawked at and conquered. But to Aborigines, it is Uluru, the place where totemic beasts met in a Dreamtime Battle of Hastings. Uluru is still etched with the lines of battle. Kuniya, the Carpet Snake, was victorious over another serpent namedLiru, and the Kuniya still lives inside the Rock. The Devil Dingo won control of the summit, while the Hare Wallaby retreated from the field, leaving creases down the mountain’s face. The Aborigines who dwell beneath the Rock—Uluru’s traditional “owners”—still honor these ancient deeds and derive their kinships from them. Uluru is “a kind of continental navel,” writes Thomas Keneally, “the point at which the Aboriginal demigods, the ancestor heroes, half human and half animal, cut the umbilical cord connecting earth to heaven.”
My tutor at Uluru is a Pitjantjatjara man named Tony Tjamiwa. As Grant explained to me at Tennant Creek, there is no textbook of Aboriginal belief. But because Aborigines lack well-defined hierarchies as well, it is hard to find anyone who will speak for the community as a whole. Tjamiwa is one of those rare spokesmen, pressed into service by the crush of curious whites at the Rock.
Even so, it is very slow going. We meet at Mutitjulu, a community of several hundred blacks near the base of the Rock. He understands little of my language and I not a word of his; Pitjantjatjara seems impossibly cluttered with the letters j, g, and k, and delivered in a high-pitched singsong that mushes the words together.
“Ananguku ngura nyangatja Tjukurpa.” He points at the Rock and sketches a serpentlike creature in the dust. “Tjuta tjuku-tjuku.” More scraping in the dust. Our “talks” have almost broken down when a white ranger arrives to provide a rough translation from Pitjantjatjara to English to Pitjantjatjara again.
The concepts Tjamiwa is trying to explain are as foreign as his dialect, which is one reason Aboriginal belief is so poorly understood by whites. Take the central concept of Tjukurpa. Our clumsy translation of it—Dreamtime—suggests a kind of Old Testament fable with Freudian overtones. But to Tjamiwa, the Dreamtime is past and present and future rolled into one. It is not only his history, but also his law, a seamless fabric of knowledge and belief.
Aboriginal art is also opaque to Western eyes. Even the fanciful Giles found little to say about the cave paintings he discovered at the Rock; they were “ornamented in the usual aboriginal fashion,” he wrote, with “parallel lines with spots between them.” Tjamiwa shows me a bush tucker bowl, used to collect berries and nuts. It has an abstract design burned intothe quandong wood—at least it looks abstract to me: swirling lines and circles, much like the lines and circles on other
.
That’s as lyrical as the story gets. Having named the Rock for the South Australian premier, he was of course obliged to climb it. After “scrambling two miles barefooted, over sharp rocks,” he “succeeded in reaching the summit, and had a view that repaid me for my trouble.” He busily set about naming the surrounding ranges—after the governor and the surveyor-general of South Australia—then scrambled down. One wonders what Ernest Giles would have splashed on the same canvas.
As it is, we are left with a Rock named Ayers, and with the curious Western compulsion to scale every mountain, no matter how arduous the ascent. “The climbing of Ayers Rock was one of his lifelong ambitions,” declares a metal plaque at the mountain’s base, in memory of a Newcastle man who died of a heart attack on the way up. There are a dozen memorials beside it to fallen or coronary-stricken climbers, which makes for a grim caveat emptor to all who begin the ascent.
To most whites the Rock remains what it was for Gosse: a kind of geological freak, an oversized pebble to be gawked at and conquered. But to Aborigines, it is Uluru, the place where totemic beasts met in a Dreamtime Battle of Hastings. Uluru is still etched with the lines of battle. Kuniya, the Carpet Snake, was victorious over another serpent namedLiru, and the Kuniya still lives inside the Rock. The Devil Dingo won control of the summit, while the Hare Wallaby retreated from the field, leaving creases down the mountain’s face. The Aborigines who dwell beneath the Rock—Uluru’s traditional “owners”—still honor these ancient deeds and derive their kinships from them. Uluru is “a kind of continental navel,” writes Thomas Keneally, “the point at which the Aboriginal demigods, the ancestor heroes, half human and half animal, cut the umbilical cord connecting earth to heaven.”
My tutor at Uluru is a Pitjantjatjara man named Tony Tjamiwa. As Grant explained to me at Tennant Creek, there is no textbook of Aboriginal belief. But because Aborigines lack well-defined hierarchies as well, it is hard to find anyone who will speak for the community as a whole. Tjamiwa is one of those rare spokesmen, pressed into service by the crush of curious whites at the Rock.
Even so, it is very slow going. We meet at Mutitjulu, a community of several hundred blacks near the base of the Rock. He understands little of my language and I not a word of his; Pitjantjatjara seems impossibly cluttered with the letters j, g, and k, and delivered in a high-pitched singsong that mushes the words together.
“Ananguku ngura nyangatja Tjukurpa.” He points at the Rock and sketches a serpentlike creature in the dust. “Tjuta tjuku-tjuku.” More scraping in the dust. Our “talks” have almost broken down when a white ranger arrives to provide a rough translation from Pitjantjatjara to English to Pitjantjatjara again.
The concepts Tjamiwa is trying to explain are as foreign as his dialect, which is one reason Aboriginal belief is so poorly understood by whites. Take the central concept of Tjukurpa. Our clumsy translation of it—Dreamtime—suggests a kind of Old Testament fable with Freudian overtones. But to Tjamiwa, the Dreamtime is past and present and future rolled into one. It is not only his history, but also his law, a seamless fabric of knowledge and belief.
Aboriginal art is also opaque to Western eyes. Even the fanciful Giles found little to say about the cave paintings he discovered at the Rock; they were “ornamented in the usual aboriginal fashion,” he wrote, with “parallel lines with spots between them.” Tjamiwa shows me a bush tucker bowl, used to collect berries and nuts. It has an abstract design burned intothe quandong wood—at least it looks abstract to me: swirling lines and circles, much like the lines and circles on other
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