Uluru: to climb or not to climb?

As the ban approaches, tourists are climbing Uluru in droves. Fair game or sheer hooliganism? The truth isn’t so black and white.

Uluru. Picture: Justine Walpole

They have come to ask it questions. Where am I going? Where have I been? Why did that happen to me? From afar they are minga. That’s what the ­traditional owners call them. The ants, climbing in single file up the western face of Uluru. They have come from Japan and Sweden, Korea, Italy and France and they have brought their stories with them, their sacred and personal ­histories; their meaning. They have come from China and Norway, Egypt, America and Geelong. Two ­sisters, Claire Hirst and Jane Goodear. “I’ve come for my 40th birthday,” Claire says. “I wanted to climb Ayers Rock.”

Claire was here last year with her husband and kids but access to the rock climb chain that snakes 348m to the summit was closed due to bad weather. She vowed to return because the climb meant ­something to her. A connection to her country; a conquering of her fears; an embracing of ­Australia’s very much alive dead heart.

Claire and Jane stand before a sign at the base of the rock. “Please don’t climb,” they read. “We, the Anangu traditional owners, have this to say: 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.”

Claire considers these words. “I know,” she says, briefly conflicted. “I know. But I will walk it respectfully and I know the traditional owners would wish that we didn’t but…”

She looks up the face of the rock. The giant and bizarre monolith is reflected in her sunglasses; this alien thing that rose in a plain of spinifex nothingness to remind the Gods and the makers for the past 550 million years that Earth was worth the effort. To see it up close is to know your place in the story of life and to know the ancient truth: that you are at once hearteningly miraculous and terrifyingly minuscule.

Your eyes trace what the Anangu call scar lines, black lines up and down the rock face formed by accumulated rubber from the soles of running shoes and hiking boots purchased from city department stores from Paris to Pittsburgh to Perth. You ask the rock questions and it asks you questions back. Do I belong to you? Do I belong to the Anangu? Do I belong to the wind and the rain and all the days yet to pass here on Earth?

“I don’t know,” Claire says. “It’s just such an amazing thing. This is something that I have always wanted to do. And it’s now or never. The climb is closing next year.”

In November last year, members of the management board of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park unanimously voted to close the rock to climbers in a decision that Central Land Council director David Ross described as “righting a historic wrong”. Board chairman Sammy Wilson, grandson of the late Paddy Uluru, widely recognised as the rock’s ­principal traditional owner, crystallised six ­decades of rock climb debate in a single ­sentence when he said the rock was sacred to his people and “not a theme park like Disneyland”.

Opponents of the closure reeled. It was nanny state, risk-averse tokenism; a recreational death knell that will echo from the country’s centre to its finest tourism peaks and ranges lining its shimmering coasts. Sydney geologist Marc Hendrickx, the rallying voice behind the Right to Climb Ayers Rock movement, lodged a Human Rights Commission complaint alleging racial ­discrimination. “The actual risk is National Parks using these claims of sacredness to close down access when the real reason is to do with risk aversion,” he says. “That sign at the entry to the climb is a farce. There’s a whole range of issues in closing that climb and one of the biggest is that Parks Australia are very risk averse. The idea of people getting injured up there and the prospect of them being sued scares the absolute shit out of them.”

News reports claim climber numbers have ­skyrocketed at Uluru from 50-140 a day to 300-500 a day as visitors across the world rush down under to tick a bucket list box before the chain comes down on October 26, 2019 — coinciding with the 34th anniversary of the historic returning of Uluru to traditional owners.

“Now or never,” Claire says to her sister, clutching the backstraps of her daypack. Jane looks up the sharply sloping rock face. “It’s just so steep through that middle section,” she says. “I’m just picturing me and that chain and it’s not ­happening for me.” In July a 76-year-old Japanese man collapsed on the climb and died of heart ­failure, becoming the 37th person to die on Uluru since the chain was installed in 1966.

Jane shakes her head. “I’m not going,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

Claire smiles, visibly fearful. “I’ve got to do it,” she says. “If I don’t climb it now, I think I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”

The sun beats down on Claire’s red Victorian cheeks. It’s mid-afternoon but the Uluru heat — bouncing off the throbbing red rock — is suffocating, depleting. “I think I better get started,” Claire says. “All right, gimme a hug and kiss,” Jane says. The sisters have a long embrace. “Oh my God,” Jane says, looking once more up the steep rock face. “Do. Not. Fall. OK.”

Claire shakes her head, walks tentatively to the rock base. She assesses the gentlest route up to the climbing chain, takes a deep breath and plants the rubber sole of her walking shoe on the rough red rock of old Uluru. She climbs.

Cultural heritage officer Shaeleigh Swan. Picture: Justine Walpole

Silence in the sacred waterhole. The heat, the landscape, the curve of that big red rock sliding into twinkling Mutitjulu Waterhole at its base on the western side of Uluru; it all combines to form a sense of something big and daunting that you feel but can’t express so you reduce it to English words invented to express the inexplicable: spirit, soul, magic. “That feeling,” says Shaeleigh Swan, a 29-year-old indigenous Parks Australia cultural heritage officer from Alice Springs country. “That’s the feeling. You can go to an area and you can feel its significance. You’re feeling exactly how it felt several thousand years ago. It feels like a home.”

The feeling is as real to Shaeleigh as a Bible she might hold in her hand. The Anangu, she says, regard that feeling and this rock and the land around it as a living “being”. It’s not Dreamtime, she says, it’s the very real story of creation. ­“Tjukurpa,” she says. “Our tjukurpa is our creation stories. It’s how Ayers Rock came to be. It was ­created. People can misinterpret what we mean when we say ‘Dreamtime’. I’m dreaming, like we’re thinking of something only in our heads. But tjukurpa is here. This is creation right here. It’s physical. That’s what we see today.”

Non-Anangu are only given the children’s ­stories of this place. Ancient markings and strange dry-erosion rivulets snaking across the rock face speak of those stories: the battle between kuniya, the sand python, and liru, the poisonous snake, and the blood that stained the land, turned rock to red. There are darker stories Shaeleigh can’t know because she’s non-Anangu; stories that can’t be shared with the wider world. Men’s business and women’s business. Stories of death and disease and self-sacrifice. The local Anangu might point knowingly toward that unsettling and vast human skull-shaped indentation on the north face but they won’t share the stories attached to it. So how do they express the depth of a sacred and complex 40,000-year-old feeling — a connection shaped by stories they cannot share — in a single “please do not climb” sign that possibly 50,000 or more climbers a year (collecting climber data has, historically, been woefully inexact) choose to ignore?

“The Anangu aren’t like the Maori, a warrior race, that might come and threaten with spears and say, ‘Don’t climb!’” says Steven Baldwin, the national park’s operations manager. “They’re very different. It’s a very respectful culture.” They didn’t shout demands to tourists wanting to climb the rock; they made gentle requests. But still the ­people came and still they climbed.

Steve Baldwin, park operations manager. Picture: Justine Walpole

“You give, I give,” says Shaeleigh. She bumps her own fists. “Together. You could make that choice. You could choose to understand and that’s about having a mutual respect. A lot of those ­creation stories are about respect. Respecting the country. Respecting each other.”

“When you say to tourists, ‘It’s a sensitive site, you can’t be clambering over the rock’, their eyes glaze over,” says Baldwin. “Particularly the ­Europeans. What we do more commonly is say, ‘What you’ve just done is like abseiling off Notre Dame’, and they’re horrified and they recoil. It’s a simple analogy but it works because 99 per cent of it is education.”

Ambling out of the waterhole, Baldwin shares some more modern stories. Here is the former campsite where Azaria Chamberlain was killed by a dingo in 1980. Over there is where an aeroplane landing strip once ran past sacred sites. “In the ’50s and ’60s they thought nothing of bulldozing through sensitive sites and putting a runway in on the other side of the rock,” he says. “When you flew in previously you landed, literally, 50 metres from the rock, literally alongside the rock. The hotels, the accommodation, the pubs were sitting a couple of hundred metres from the rock.”

Baldwin recalls a key moment in the area’s ­history when a police officer shot and killed an Anangu man who had fled to the Mutitjulu ­Waterhole. “That’s relevant because, basically then, everyone scarpered,” he says. “[The Anangu] took off. They left the area and they moved to the outstations and, really, they didn’t start coming back until after the handback.”

In 1985, the title deeds to Uluru were handed over to the Anangu traditional owners who then signed an agreement leasing the land back to the Australian Parks and Wildlife Service for 99 years. Now more than 250,000 people visit the rock each year, paying a $25 entry fee for the privilege, some 25 per cent of which goes back to the Anangu people living in the park in a dry community that tourists aren’t allowed to visit.

A tourist would struggle to read anything about Mutitjulu Community in the front desk brochures of Ayers Rock Resort. It was reports of child abuse and social destruction in Mutitjulu in 2007 that prompted the Howard government to invest $587 million in the Northern Territory intervention. Local emergency services workers will tell you there have been improvements since then but sometimes it’s hard to tell with the frequency of domestic violence callouts to the community. Those same longtime frontline workers will tell you over a quiet coffee that some Anangu in the community consider the figurative cotton wool blanket the Canberra suits have wrapped around Uluru is over the top and bordering on a beat-up.

There are dualities all through this glorious land. Secondary narratives and contradictions. Tourists can buy didgeridoos and boomerangs in the local art museum as reminders of their visit, but the Anangu will tell you quietly and respectfully that their ancestors did not play didgeridoos like that, nor throw boomerangs of that shape. There are strict sacred site guidelines for photographing Uluru for publication yet tourists splash images of it across Instagram and Facebook every day. Resort fact sheets emphasising the importance of respecting the sacred land share shelf space with “Uluru Segway Tour” brochures featuring a cartoon man in a superhero cape and underpants deliriously zooming around one of the few sites in the world to be dual-listed by UNESCO for outstanding ­natural and outstanding cultural values.

Mark Hendrickx. Picture: Steve Baccon

Here’s geologist Marc Hendrickx giving his ­version of Uluru history in his book, A Guide to Climbing Ayers Rock: “In 1991 the Board and Parks Australia said the Climb was a sacred site, yet in the 1970s we were told by the principal owner of the Rock, Paddy Uluru, that the physical act of climbing was of no cultural interest. His brother, Toby Naninga, stated in a television interview in 1975 that aside from Warayuki, the men’s initiation cave, and the nearby Ngaltawata Pole, tourists could go ‘anywhere else’. In the 1940s, Anangu man Tiger Tjalkalyirri guided tourists up the Rock and was filmed splashing about in rock pools and horsing about on the summit, enjoying their ­company. Who are we to believe; members of a Board far removed from a traditional nomadic life, or those past elders who were more closely connected to their land and their law?”

Paddy Uluru’s grandson, Sammy Wilson, says comments made by his late grandfather half a century ago should always be contextualised. “He was always frightened of whitefellas because they had guns,” he told The Australian in October.

Hendrickx has his own personal stories of Uluru; moments in time he considers sacred. Like everybody else, he speaks of the rock through emotional connections to it. In July, he climbed Uluru with his daughters, Zoe, 13, and Dana, 11. They carried a Tupperware container holding a log book Hendrickx called “The Last Log Book”.

“There used to be a log book up there that people would take photographs of themselves signing, up until about 1985 when Parks Australia removed it,” he says. There’s a different kind of log book in Uluru now. It’s called the “I Did Not Climb Uluru Register” and it rests on a table in the park’s Cultural Centre, filled with explanations in countless languages of why people chose not to climb.

“We love it here but we did not climb” — Andreas and Janice, Switzerland.

“Since we came here and know more information, we might not climb Uluru” — Yari, Taiwan.

“Didn’t climb it, TOO BIG!” — Lynda.

The Hendrickx family left their log book up on the rock for climbers to sign and the book’s 134 pages were filled in a matter of days.

Gazing out from the summit across her sprawling and complex country, Hendrickx’s youngest daughter Dana turned to her father.

“I feel alive, Dad,” she said.

“There’s a word for that,” he says. “It’s called exhilaration. Dana will want to take her own kids there and experience the very same thing. It’s part of our Australian heritage. This is the desert heart of the country. It’s a national park and it belongs to everyone. It doesn’t matter what land it sits on. It’s a shared experience.”

Near the rock’s western face, a trio of young Italian men in tank tops and backwards caps bound out of a van and up the rock toward the climb chain. They don’t stop to read the park’s safety signs or the Anangu’s gentle request not to climb. A Japanese man passes them on his way down. “Once in a lifetime,” Ken Tamura says in broken English. “But… difficult.”

By the climb warning signs, a guide addresses a group of red-faced, perspiring European tourists. “The Anangu have been known to travel hundreds, sometimes thousands of kilometres to go to the funerals of these people that have died climbing the rock,” the guide says. “The last one was a couple of months ago. He was a bit of an old fella, had a heart attack halfway up.” He points across the face of the rock. “Around that side, there’s five plaques representing the first five that died. After that they realised they were just gonna end up with a whole side of Uluru covered in plaques.”

Steven Baldwin and his park team assess the climb path for safety at 7am, 8am, 10am, 12pm and 2pm each day. They take three separate readings for wind and direction. They constantly monitor weather patterns, ensuring zero chance of tourists being caught on the summit in dangerous weather. But some tourists can’t be saved from themselves. All the safety measures in the world can’t stop a tourist chasing their windblown hat over the edge of Uluru to their death. No warning sign can stop the Taiwanese adventurer who decides to scale down an Uluru waterfall and ends up getting trapped for 28 hours.

Baldwin was first on the scene during the July fatality. “There was nothing we could have done,” he says, mournfully. He shakes his head in despair. “You see them walking with young children up there. You see them walking with illnesses. I’ve had people with heart bypasses and colostomy bags that are climbing up. It’s just crazy. They’ll say, ‘It’s my right, how dare you tell me that it’s too windy or too hot’. I say, ‘All of these regulations are put in place after coronials, do you know what that means? It means every time someone dies we try and stop it happening again’.

“Our staff have copped abuse, quite regularly, from both sides. Up until the decision to close the climb at least half the complaints were, ‘Why ­haven’t you closed it yet? Why are you pandering to the tourists?’

“A lot of those that don’t agree with the decision to close the climb say it’s incorrect to say it’s for cultural reasons. To be honest, there are cultural reasons, but at the end of the day, the Anangu get very sad when anybody gets injured or killed on the climb. One of the primary reasons is they just don’t want people to get hurt.”

A French couple, Nathan and Julie Cohen, make their final steps off the rock. “We know that we’re not allowed to do it,” Nathan says. “But it’s such an amazing part of this world. A red rock like this! I know it’s not recommended but we have done hours and hours of journey. We came to Australia to do this.”

Peter Chapman stands to the right of the climb entry watching his son and daughter descend the rock. He’s a 50-year-old from Bundaberg who works in one of the toughest jobs there is, cane farming; coming here with his family has been a long-held dream. “I think every Australian, every person in the world, should have an opportunity to climb the rock,” he says. “It was now or never for us. We had to come now.” He drinks it in. “The size of it,” he gasps. “There’s nothing else around it. It’s totally bizarre.” He shakes his head in awe, arms folded. “I’ll never forget this moment.”

Chapman is feeling the rock. It’s the same thing 11-year-old Dana Hendrickx felt in July when she turned to her father and announced that she was “alive”; that she was here on this Earth; that she was part of something profound and precious that her home city, Sydney, was yet to reveal to her.

An Uluru visit is an individualised experience. The power of the moment makes people personalise the whole thing. They take the big red rock and make it all about themselves. They put their own meaning on it; making some silent and sacred discovery of the kind that’s not easy to find on the London Underground or the streets of New York or Shanghai or Berlin or Brisbane. The feeling is real to them; so real that some want to take that feeling home.

In the photocopying and storage room of the Parks Australia headquarters at the base of the rock, Steven Baldwin opens a large cardboard box filled with red sandstone rocks of all shapes and sizes. These are the “Sorry Rocks”. Almost every day his team — as well as the local police station and several more businesses across the region — receive random parcels containing rocks taken from Uluru and later returned from across the world. Some send the rocks back because they feel guilty for committing a crime that can attract an $8500 fine; others send them back in a bid to remove the strange bad luck that has riddled their lives since stealing from mighty Uluru. Hundreds of rocks, thousands over the course of a decade. The largest: a 32kg chunk stolen and returned by an anonymous Adelaide couple.

A letter from Hong Kong: “When I received the rock I was so worried that I want to return it as soon as possible… in just one week, my brother broke up with his girlfriend, my father went to hospital and he will do heart surgery on the 20 January. Anyway, I just want to return the rock to its rightful place and say goodbye to the bad luck!”

A letter from France: “Uluru, I took one from you, too. I wanted to take away some of your magic with me for the rest of my travels, for the rest of my life even… Forgive me for being foolish and thank you for letting me spend time with you and absorb your beauty.”

“Every day there will be an envelope or a box with these things,” Steven says. “I’ve had bottles of sake and things from Japan turn up with rocks, we have cash regularly turn up and we put the money toward mala [the region’s culturally significant rufous hare-wallaby] research.

“To be honest, some of the letters are like country music songs: dog died, the wife left me, the house burnt down. All these tales of woe, one after the other. I got divorced, I’m destitute, because I took this rock. But there’s nothing like that in tjukurpa. There’s nothing about Anangu law or culture that would cause that to happen. They don’t want to talk about it because they don’t want to perpetuate it. They say, ‘We don’t have a curse on them. That’s not true. Why are people making it about themselves?’ People make it about themselves.”

Marc Hendrickx has an Uluru rock in his ­possession. “I’m a geologist,” he says. “This is just another one of those irrational things people do. Every now and then I touch my rock and it brings back some great memories of my time in the ­centre. There’s other ways of looking at these things. I’m sure around the world there’s probably many more lucky rocks from Uluru than there are sorry rocks. I have a rock. It’s not a sorry rock at all. It’s my lucky rock.”

By the chain climb entry, Jane Goodear watches every step of her sister Claire’s long descent. Jane has loyally sat for two hours in the hot sun, rarely taking her eyes off the rock, praying her sister returns unscathed.

“I got to the top,” Claire says, elated by the climb, elated to be back on the ground. “I got up there and I thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m here’. So glad I did it. It was all worth it. I think that moment will be with me for the rest of my life.”

Anangu law woman Napananga Nelly Patterson. Picture: Justine Walpole

It’s 6.45pm in the alive dead heart of Australia and the show’s about to start. The rock show. Our great performer has been doing this special ­sunset gig every day for eons. Buses pull up at the signposted sunset viewing area and tour group leaders place white cloths over wine and cheese tables. One group of 20 or so line up their portable chairs in a perfect row and they sit like theatre critics waiting for Hamlet to say that line about heaven and earth and dreams and philosophy. Hundreds of tourists popping corks, puffing on cigarettes, posing for photographs. Selfie after selfie after selfie, with the dauntless rock as the perfect prop. Also watching the show from a wheelchair a distance from the main crowd is 80-year-old Napananga Nelly Patterson. She’s one of the last senior Anangu law women; a custodian of the tjukurpa stories of Uluru. She remembers walking barefoot as a ­five-year-old through these spinifex fields cooled by the shadow of Uluru. “No car, no donkey, no camel, no horse,” she says. “Only barefoot.” Her elders told her the tjukurpa stories in those long walks and they made her promise to pass those stories on. And she has passed them on to the 25-year-old Anangu woman standing by her side, her great granddaughter, Wanatjura Patterson.

“Back in the olden times, my great grandmother here kept this place very special,” ­Wanatjura says. “I grew up with her telling me stories about this rock every time we pass here. I’m still learning, too.” She nods at a young Anangu boy and girl skipping about in the red dust near the tourist buses. “I need to learn all those stories and pass them on because this generation is… fading away, they’re kinda losing the stories. They need to learn about why they need to care for this rock.”

Wanatjura says she cries whenever she leaves the rock for any extended period. She sometimes goes to visit her dad in Adelaide and the rock calls her back. “It pulls me,” she says. Then she comes home and she sees people climbing on the rock and something about that hurts her heart because it’s in her heart that she feels her ancestors.

She asks her great grandmother, in the language of her people, what she feels when she sees people climbing the rock. Nelly ponders this for a moment. She points to her eyes and she points to the rock and she points to her eyes again.

“See?” she says. “It’s my home.” She rests back in her wheelchair. “No more climb it,” she says. “Finished. We can stop worrying now.”

The sun falls and lemon butter light spreads across the rock and an awed silence spreads across the desert because it’s not polite to talk through such spectacular theatre. Wanatjura smiles at the reaction from the crowd, the dropped jaws, the gentle arms over shoulders. “I know that feeling,” she says, looking at the tourists. “It touches everyone’s heart the same. You come here and you feel like it’s your home, too. It does that to everyone.”

Everyone feels it. Everyone stands in silence asking that peculiar red rock their questions. Where have we been? Where are we going? We all wait patiently for our answers and the strangest thing of all is that, one by one, the old rock ­provides them.