Why Hanson was wrong to climb Uluru
Pauline Hanson’s attempt to climb Uluru before the traditional owners forbid the practice had a touch of farce, but it was also a spectacularly insensitive move on her part, writes Frances Whiting.
Pauline Hanson found herself caught between a rock and a hard place last week.
And not just any old rock, either, but the rock, Uluru, which she elected to climb because she could, and no-one, least of all the traditional owners of said rock for sixty thousand years, were going to tell her she couldn’t.
Except she actually couldn’t. No, camera crew from Nine’s A Current Affair in tow, this particular episode of “The Perils of Pauline” saw Hanson climb about 40 to 60 metres up Uluru before declaring it felt unsafe and she was turning around.
And good on her too for recognising a safety issue, knowing her limits and not pushing on — as many do on all sorts of climbs — in order to reach the top.
But what a pity it was not something far more deeply etched into the rock’s red hide that made her turn around, or better yet, not climb at all.
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Now, Hanson strapped her hiking boots on in response to the announcement that, as of October 26 this year, the rock will no longer be open for business to climbers.
Visitors can walk around it, certainly, gaze up at it in wonder, and sigh at its beauty bathed beneath a blanket of desert stars, but no longer add to the visible, white crack that travels up its red spine courtesy of hundreds of thousands of tramping feet.
After decades of leaving it up to visitors to decide whether or not to climb Uluru, its traditional Anangu owners, backed by the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board have drawn a line in the red dirt — a line that the vast majority of visitors to Uluru have voluntarily elected not to cross anyway.
In the 1990s, roughly three quarter of tourists to Uluru elected to ignore the signage at the base of the rock written by the Anangu requesting visitors not climb due to cultural, environmental and safety reasons (to date, 35 people have died climbing Uluru).
By 2010, that figure had declined to 38 per cent. And between 2011 to 2015 less than 16 per cent of tourists added to that stark white crack along the rock’s spine.
But why have all these people elected not to climb? Why not do just do it? After all, as pro-climbers say “it’s just a rock”, “it belongs to everyone”, “this is my country too, how dare you tell me where I can and cannot go”. Or as Hanson herself said, pre-climb: “It’s no different to saying we’re going to close down Bondi Beach because there are some people there that have drowned. How ridiculous is that! This is an iconic site for all Australians. I can’t see the cultural sensitivity when people have been climbing the rock all these years and all of a sudden they want to shut it down? I don’t get it, I really don’t get it.”
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Senator Hanson, allow me to try to please explain.
Uluru for the Anangu, is the place of the beginning of time. It is the place of ten different ancestral spirits which still whisper within its crevices. It is the place of 40 different sacred sites — places of ritual, of initiation, of creation and dreaming. Deep within its caves and fissures are petroglyphs, thousands of years old, telling the stories of how we came to be. It the place where the ancestors left their mark, with instructions on how to live with the land, the animals and the people; a guide in red rock, to life itself.
In short, for the Anangu, Uluru is Judaism’s, Christianity’s and Islam’s Jerusalem, it is Hindu’s Kashi Vishwanath Temple in India, is the Catholic faith’s Lourdes. It is Mecca, and Mount Sinai and the Mahabodhi Temple for those who believe and worship at those sites. These places are considered to be of such profound sanctity that many of them have very strict rules that must be adhered to when visiting them.
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What to wear, how to behave, where visitors are allowed to go, or what they are allowed to touch. Some of them are not open to visitors outside of the faith that reveres them at all.
Contrast this to the sign the Anangu erected at the base of their most profoundly sacred site.
It reads: Please don’t climb. Uluru is sacred in our culture. It is a place of great knowledge. Under our traditional law climbing is not permitted. This is our home. As custodians we are responsible for your safety and behaviour. Too many people do not listen to our message. Too many people have died or been hurt causing great sadness. We worry about you and we worry about your family. Please don’t climb.”
Since the announcement of the October 26 climb closure — the Anangu possibly and understandably at last fed up with people scrambling over, urinating on, defecating on, and littering their sacred site (one of the most common items of litter on the rock is apparently used nappies) there has been a rush of people scrambling to get there, desperate to tick it off their bucket list and take a few red rock selfies.
And you might think, good on them too. But I don’t, because I believe in the truth behind a lot of old sayings.
I started this column with one of them, and I’ll end it with another — Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Frances Whiting is a journalist with the Courier-Mail.
Originally published as Why Hanson was wrong to climb Uluru