‘Fooluru’: The other giant rock that’s been duping tourists for years

On the road to Uluru, a young couple towing a caravan pulls off the highway, their gaze fixed on a rust-red monolith rising out of the desert. They spring from the car, batting away blowflies as they turn and grin into a smartphone. This first-glimpse-of-Uluru selfie will light up their socials, only it’s not. The mountain is Artilla (Mount Conner), a doppelganger dubbed “Fooluru” that has been duping visitors since the 1950s, when Uluru began luring tourists to Central Australia.

Wait, is that … Mount Conner viewed from the lookout.

For anyone making the overland pilgrimage to Uluru, it’s an easy mistake to make. Artilla sits roughly halfway between the Stuart Highway – the Northern Territory’s great north-south artery – and the rock. Turn onto the Lasseter Highway – the gateway to Uluru – and the anticipation is feverish. Ninety minutes in, the red dirt and mulga scrub betray the outline of a rock, bigger and grander than any you’ve seen before. A lookout rest area splinters off the highway, complicit in the charade, and you pull over in giddy jubilation.

A couple of tourists are snapping pictures from a strip of bitumen straddling a picnic shelter and public toilet. You join them, just as a tourist coach rumbles off the highway. But fool them and fool you. Uluru is still 130 kilometres away, and you won’t glimpse it for another 45 minutes.

Curtin Springs is a 400,000-hectare cattle station.

For most visitors to the Red Centre, the lookout is as close to Artilla as you get. Despite being older and much larger than Uluru, the mesa – one of the region’s three great tors – lives in the shadow of its famous cousins. Perhaps it’s because Artilla is on private property, whereas Uluru and Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) are in a national park. But more likely because it’s less dramatic, with a slanting tabletop profile that lacks Uluru’s sheer-sided symmetry and monolithic hulk. It’s also far less accessible. The only way to get near Artilla, hunched on the south-east corner of a 400,000-hectare cattle station, is on a guided tour.

SEIT Tours depart from Ayers Rock Resort, with a pickup at Curtin Springs Station. When I jump on board the 4WD minibus, I’m surprised to find a Dutch couple sitting intently up front. For them, the tour – booked from the Netherlands – is more eagerly anticipated than Uluru. Word of our “other rock” has piqued international curiosity.

We take the Lasseter east, veering down a dirt track just past the public lookout. Guide Hayley Pope, a young Sydneysider-turned outback adventurer, bounds out of the minibus to unlatch the gate, and we bump along the dirt. Recent rain has suppressed the dust, and the desert is about as green as a sand ecosystem gets. Bouquets of spinifex and saltbush burst from the earth and desert oaks stand tall and slender above a rabble of mulga scrub. At Lake Swanson, we scour the salt lake’s coconut-ice crust for dead scorpions, snakes and thorny devils. Desert dwelling is thirsty work, and the outback is a cruel trickster.

Visitors near Mount Conner on Curtin Springs Station.Credit: Tourism NT/Curtin Springs Station

Water is a commodity in the outback, and the station exploits its scarcity to muster stock. Bores are strategically switched off to corral cattle into yards, where they have been conditioned to seek water, in lieu of using drovers and helicopters. The station runs about 4000 head of mostly Murray Grey beef cattle, who share the land with mobs of red kangaroos, emus and the odd wild camel. The property is so vast, we don’t see any stock until we near Artilla, the approach road a burnt orange boulevard, crowned by a sandstone citadel.

Up close, Artilla has two distinct layers. A sloping sandstone skirt formed beneath an inland sea 750 million years ago (200 million years before Uluru), and a tabletop cap, hardened with silica, which came about 300 million years later under another ancient sea. “What you’re looking at is a tabletop mesa with essentially sandstone for the most part … and some trees on the very top,” Pope explains. Artilla soars 344 metres above the desert plain, four metres shy of Uluru’s highest point, but has a whopping 32-kilometre circumference, more than triple the girth of the iconic rock.

We take a wide arc around the south-west flank, where the mesa sags in the middle like an undercooked sponge cake. This is where the station’s farming story began. In the 1930s, Irishman Paddy DeConnley took up the first pastoral lease at what was then known as Mount Conner Station. Paddy lived in a dugout before his love interest, responding to a personal ad in newspaper classifieds, convinced him to build a proper house. The remains of the original homestead, built from Carmichael sandstone quarried from Artilla, are still visible today.

Lyndee Severin with Curtin Springs paper, made by handcutting grass to craft pieces individually.

The current-day homestead is further west along the Lasseter Highway and has become a popular stopover for travellers en route to Uluru and Watarrka (Kings Canyon). The Severin family (Peter, wife Dawn and young son Ashley) took over the station lease in 1956. At the time, the station (renamed after former prime minister John Curtin) was at the end of the road. From seeing two tourists in their first year, the family became something of outback tourism pioneers, helping open the region to visitors (Peter was contracted to install the chain rope on Uluru in 1963). Early tourists were initially furnished with tea and scones on the long journey from Alice Springs, and now enjoy a bed, meal and place to refuel. For those who bring their own bed, there’s a free campground next to the roadhouse.

Guide Hayley Pope pours sundowners.

Behind the bowsers is a rustic shop that doubles as the bar, alongside the original Bough Shed (a shelter made from desert oak with a spinifex/mulga thatch), where meals are served on communal tables. There are 27 basic rooms (mine is a demountable repurposed from the Sydney Olympics) and two rows of bird aviaries, patrolled by a “roaming pest control unit” of guineafowl. Splashes of pink bougainvillea, green lawns and cactus stands soften what is principally a working cattle station. There’s a handful of beers behind the bar, red wine is chilled and my meal options (included in the tour) comprise rare, medium or well done. This is cattle territory, after all (there is a more extensive menu for non-tour guests).

I’m both, and by staying overnight am afforded a small window into station life. It’s tough, Ashley’s wife Lyndee tells me, as we sit around the table in the old Stone House, Ashley delicately folding serviettes. The Severins have survived drought, fires, sale yard volatility and a once-in-a-century pandemic that reduced a stream of tourist buses to a trickle. To further diversify the farm, the family – ever resourceful – started making paper from spinifex and native grasses. In the old abattoir-turned studio, Lyndee demonstrates how cuttings are cooked in a caustic solution, rinsed, beaten, pressed and dried. Cattle bangtail strands, bottlebrush needles, paper daisies and even flecks of cow manure are added for texture. The paper is also crafted into jewellery and “wearable couture” by the Severins’ fibre-artist daughter, Amee Dennis, whose work is on display in the gift shop and gallery.

The salt lakes on the station with “that rock” in the background.Credit: Curtin Springs Station

These unlikely gifts of the land help keep the station turning over. But its most difficult challenge might be one of succession. None of the Severins’ six adult children wants to take over the farm. Peter died here in 2021 (his ashes are on Artilla, along with those of three family members), and Ashley and Lyndee are of retirement age. “We don’t want to be anywhere else,” Lyndee says of their home, distinguished by that big mountain on the horizon.

On the road back to Alice, Artilla is up to its usual tricks. A coach full of tourists hovers at the lookout, as they compete with flies for a tray of sandwiches. Did Fooluru have any of them duped? “We usually say whoever sees it [Uluru] first gets a bottle of champagne,” winks the guide. “And if you get it wrong, it’s your shout.”

THE DETAILS

FLY
Curtin Springs is 85 kilometres east of the Uluru town of Yulara, which is serviced by a commercial airport, or a 3½-hour drive from Alice Springs.

STAY
The station has basic ensuite rooms from $240 a night, with meals available from the Bough Shed. Voyages Ayers Rock Resort also has camping and accommodation options for all budgets. See curtinsprings.com, ayersrockresort.com

TOUR
SEIT Tours runs eight-hour 4WD tours of Artilla and Curtin Springs Station, departing from Ayers Rock Resort with pickups at the station. Tours cost from $229 a person and $205 for children, including sunset sparkling wine, nibbles and dinner. See seittours.com

MORE
See northernterritory.com

The writer travelled with the assistance of Voyages Ayers Rock Resort and Tourism Northern Territory.