Blog 20 Uluru

After a relaxing morning in Alice Springs, we flew to Yulara, the airport and town that service Uluru.  It was a very bumpy takeoff due to the heat, but thankfully it was only a 50 minute flight.  As we neared Yulara, we could see large dried salt beds that resembled a geode rock split in half.  We also saw Uluru for the first time.  The pilot flew a 360 circle near the rock so everyone could see.  As we neared the airport we saw a large fire burning in the brush.  We asked out guide if it was a controlled burn and he thought it was.  Wrong – it was an out-of-control brush fire that had come very close to our hotel – Sails in the Desert.  When we landed the pilot told us the temperature was 41 C or about 1046 F.  And again, the little black flies were everywhere, especially in your face.

We made a short stop at our hotel and then drove out to Uluru National Park.  Driving into the park you could see the fire burning and at one point a Willy-Willy – the Australian term for a fire tornado – formed.  It was a little frightening but also awe-inspiring.  

Willy-willy from the bus

Once in the park we visited the Cultural Center to learn a little about the Anangu, the indigenous people who own and look after the rock.  Then we took a 40 minute hike down to Mutitjulu Waterhole near the rock.  Our guide (who was also our driver) told us the story of Kuniya and the Liru and point out the features of the story on the Rock.  Here is the story as it was passed down by the Anangu:

Kuniya, the woma python, and Liru, the poisonous snake.

The Kuniya and Liru story occurs on different sides of Uluru, but their deadly battle took place near Mutitjulu Waterhole.

The Kuniya woman came from far away in the east to hatch her children at Uluru. She carried her eggs strung around her neck like a necklace and brought them to rest at Kuniya Piti on Uluru’s north-east corner. There she left the eggs on the ground.

Kuniya camped at Taputji and hunted in the nearby sand hills. As she left and entered her camp, she formed deep grooves in the rock. These grooves are still there.

One day, Kuniya had to draw on all her physical and magical powers to avenge the death of her young nephew, also a Kuniya.  He had enraged a group of Liru, or poisonous brown snakes, who travelled from the south-west to take revenge on him.

They saw him resting at the base of Uluru and rushed upon him, hurling their spears. Many spears hit the rock face with such force that they pierced it, leaving a series of round holes that are still obvious. The poor Kuniya, outnumbered, dodged what he could but eventually fell dead.

When news of the young python’s death reached his aunt on the other side of Uluru, she was overcome with grief and anger.  She raced along the curves of the rock to Mutitjulu Waterhole, where she confronted one of the Liru warriors, who mocked her grief and rage.

Kuniya began a dance of immense power and magic. As she moved towards the Liru warrior she scooped up sand and rubbed it over her body. Her rage was so great that it spread like a poison, saturating the area at that time.

In a fearsome dance she took up her wana, or digging stick, and struck the head of the Liru. But her anger was now beyond restraint, and she hit him again across the head.

He fell dead, dropping his shield near Mutitjulu Waterhole, where Kuniya herself remains as a sinuous black line on the eastern wall. The blows she struck are two deep cracks on the western wall, and the Liru’s shield, now a large boulder, lies where it fell.

He also showed us a small cave where there were cave drawings.  They have been dated from thousands of years ago to fairly recently.  However, the heat was overpowering and the flies (even with our nets) were very annoying, I just wanted to return to the air-conditioned bus.

[Sorry, I do not have any pictures of these features on the rock.  Bill accidently dropped the camera in the dirt, and now I get a "Systems Error (Zoom) whenever I try to turn it on.  Hopefully when we get home a camera shop can help me retrieve the pictures.]

After our walk we drove to the Sunset Viewing Area where our bus driver had arranged for a table with champagne, orange juice (anyone for a mimosa) and some snacks – chips and dips, veggies, smoked salmon.  There were also small groups of indigenous people selling their art work.  I bought a picture that showed Uluru at night with the Seven Sisters (Pleiades) constellation.  And we had a clear view of Uluru.  What a setting for watching the sun set on Uluru.  The day had turned cloudy (thanks to Cyclone Trevor that hit the northwest coast of the Northern Territories) and we were unsure whether we would see anything.  But all at once the sun broke through as it set in the west at 6:57 PM, and Uluru changed from a drab orange-brown into a glowing reddish rock.  What a sight!  And the actual sunset was itself was magnificent.  Since most of us were tired and hungry and had dinner reservations for 8 PM, we all hurried to our bus and where one of the first to leave the park.  We arrived back at the hotel at 7:30.  However, many of the tours were not so lucky.  The fire had intensified and the park rangers closed the only road out of the park.  They were stuck at the Rock until about 11:30.  We shared a fish and chips dinner and then went to our room for some much needed sleep.  Tomorrow will be a very early day.

Uluru before sunset

Uluru at sunset

Actual sunset (just opposite Uluru

Art work I bought

The wake-up call came at 5:15 AM!  We quickly dressed and joined 6 other of our tour to drive back out to Uluru to see the sunrise.  As we entered the park, you could see a mile-long line of fire.  And at one point we had to drive through the line with the fire only a few feet from the bus.  Sunrise was at 6:55, and while it was very pretty, it was not as spectacular as last night.  By 7:05 we were back on the bus to the hotel for breakfast and to get out bags out of the room by 8:30.   We were supposed to visit the other major attraction in the National Park – Kata Jtuca (meaning “many heads”), a group of 36 large, ancient rock domes about 18 miles away from Uluru, where we were going to do the  Walpa Gorge Walk.  But with the uncertainty of the fire, Ben was afraid to risk getting trapped at the Park (if they closed the road again) and missing out flight to Port Douglas and the Great Barrier Reef.  We all agreed with that decision and spent a mostly quiet morning in the hotel.  Our bus driver did take us a short drive around the little town of Yulara, but there is not much here – just some staff houses, a primary school, a small library, a police and fire station, and several backpacker campgrounds.  There is not even a church.

Fire burning in the morning

Brush fire very close to our bus

Uluru at Sunrise

Burned field very near our hotel

Galahs outside our hotel

At 1 PM we left the hotel for the airport and our flight to Port Douglas.  It was goodbye to the outback and Uluru.  It was a spiritual place, but we were all glad to be leaving the flies!

Blog 19 Alice Springs 21-22 March 2-19

We left Melbourne early in the morning for our flight to Alice Springs.  The first leg of our trip was a short hop over to Adelaide where we changed planes for the 2 ½ hour flight to the outback.  From the air you could see the scenery change from the green hills of South Australia to the red barren soil of the outback.  Once we arrived our bags were loaded on the bus and we were off to visit the Old Telegraph Station and have lunch (the bus drive would deliver our bags to our rooms at the DoubleTree Hilton at Alice Springs).

Alice Springs began life as a telegraph station, one of 12 repeater stations between Darwin and Adelaide.  A repeater station was needed to boost the signal as it traveled back and forth across the country.  The telegraph operator would receive the message from the previous repeater station, retype it and send it on its way to the next repeater station.  I wonder how many messages were ever received in their original form – I harken back to an old school game where the first person in line is given a verbal message, and he repeats it to the next person in line and so forth, until the last person in line says the message he received.  Not many times was it the same message that started the exercise!

This station, established in 1871, was the first European settlement in Alice Springs.  Not only did it connect the outback with the north of the country (Darwin), but it also connected Australia with the British Empire.  By 1871, the British had established an overland and underwater telegraph network from England to Darwin and another from Adelaide to New Zealand.  But there was nothing across Australia.  A message sent back to England by boat would take 3-4 months each way.  With the final link between Darwin and Adelaide in place, messages could be sent in as little as 5 hours.

The name Alice Springs came from the first name of the Adelaide telegraph director’s wife and the spring that the surveyor believed he had found when surveying the outback to determine the best locations for the repeater stations.  Why the name Alice was used is a mystery – the director’s wife never traveled to Alice Springs!  And, there was no spring – it was only a small pool of water (from a recent rainfall) near the telegraph station.  So the town received its name from a woman who never traveled there and a spring that wasn’t!

Old Telegraph Station

Inside the Telegraph Office

River Gum Tree - as old as the Station'
where you see them there is water

Stationmaster's Home

Old sandy riverbed - behind the trees-
there is water about 6' below

Beautiful Galahs

The station ceased operations in 1932 when more modern facilities were built in Stuart, a town about 4 miles away and founded during the gold rush era of the mid 1850's.  Eventually these two towns merged, and as Alice Springs was there first, Stuart was changed to Alice Springs.  From 1932 -1942, the facilities at the Old Telegraph Station were used as an education center for part aboriginal children – a program called the Bungalow.  The children had to be evacuated in 1942 as a result of World War II and the site became an army base during that war.  It then became an Aboriginal Reserve until 1963 when many of the Aboriginal people moved to another community near Alice Springs.  In June 1962, the area was proclaimed an historical reserve.

It was an interesting tour, but it was extremely hot and the tiny flies, which this area is noted for, were plentiful, irritating, and downright annoying.  You could not escape them and our fly net headpiece went with the bus to the hotel.  We all got very good at doing the Australian salute – waving your hands in front of your face!  But I did get to see some beautiful pink cockatoos – the galahs.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at the ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) Memorial to see some great views of the city and the outback.  This hill is a memorial to all the Australian who have served in wars.  During WWI and WWII Australian and New Zealand were combined into one organization lead by the British, thus the name ANZAC.

ANZAC Memorial

Alice Springs and MacDonnell Mt Range

The Ghan was back in town

Part of a mural showing history of the town

Back at the hotel we got settled in and relaxed.  There was nothing else planned for the day, so many of us retreated to the bar for Happy Hour (are you beginning to see how much we love our Happy Hour?) and then had dinner in the hotel restaurant.  Our poor guide Ben had come down with a cold on the last day in Melbourne so he had a very early evening and said he slept about 14 hours.

Friday we left the hotel about 9 AM with an Aborigine guide named Lindsay to visit Simpson Gap.  While on the bus he told us a little about the indigenous people, some of there customs, and their belief in the Dreaming or Dreamtime.  This is a term used to describe some of the important features of the Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and existence.  To the Aboriginals, Dreamtime goes back to the very beginning when the land and the people (the whole world) were created by the Spirits.  The Spirits made the rivers, streams, water holes, land, hills, rocks, plants and animals, and the Aboriginals believe that the Spirits gave them not only their hunting tools, but each tribe its land, their totems, and their Dreaming.  It was the creation and law by which they live.

The Ancestors made particular sites to show the Aboriginal people which places were to be sacred.  The Aboriginals performed ritual ceremonies and customary songs near the sacred sites to please the Ancestral spirits and to keep them alive.  The Aboriginals were a wandering people and the knowledge needed by each succeeding generation to find the sites necessary for them to return, e.g. water holes, were passed down through the song line – stories written in the sand and directions to important sites (like water holes) through marks on stones.  These were like survival maps.

What I found interesting was his comment that the dark skin color of the Aborigines is a recessive gene, while the skin of a white person is dominant.  It takes about 3 generations after a mixed marriage for the aborigine’s dark skin to disappear.  He also said that prior to 1967 (when the Aboriginies were granted citizenship) they were considered part of the Fauna and Flora Act and were treated as animals.  He also said that integration into the Australian society has been very hard for the indigenous people.  Prior to the existence of the Europeans in Australia, the indigenous people lived off the land – eating fruits and the lean meat of the kangaroo.  As a result, their systems have a hard time digesting sugars.  In the last half a century, many of the indigenous people have lived off of welfare and cannot afford to buy and eat the foods that their ancestors had.  Diabetes has become a very big issue for the aborigines.  Suicides, especially in the younger generation, and alcoholism are also issues that the Australian government has yet to come to grips with.  Lindsay was very frank and you could hear the passion in his voice as he spoke about these issues and the lack of support from the government.

When it comes to marriage the Aborigines had developed a very complicated system (at least to us) called skin names.  To prevent incest, as it was forbidden to marry within the family group, each child is allocated a name that would tell him who he could or could not marry.  The simplest explanation is that a child called “A” for example could not marry a “B, C, D, or E.”

Simpson’s Gap is a beautiful gorge cut out of the West MacDonnell Mountain Range by Roe Creek.  Most of the creek is just dry creek bed, but there is a little pool of water in the gap.  There is a colony of Rock Wallabies that live in the rocks near the water.  However the water in the pool is stagnant and the wallabies only like fresh water.  So they dig down into the sand until they reach the water level.  Lindsay also pointed out some of the plants that the Aborgines depend on for food.  There was a fig tree that had little figs on it.  He also showed us a wild orange tree and a passion fruit tree.

Rock Wallaby

Rock Wallaby

Simpson's Gap

Hole dug by wallaby looking for water

Simpson's Gap

Figs on the fig tree

Outback fashion

Don't we look chic!

On the way back into town we passed a jeep leading a camel named Willy.  Willy had recently lost his mate and was lonely.  The man who owns Willy is leaving for Germany in a few weeks and he wanted to make sure that Willy had a good home.  There is a mob of camels near the Alice Springs airport and the man wanted to take Willy there.  However, the first time he tried to walk him there, Willy cried out for his mate and refused too move.  And when a camel decides he does not want to move, he doesn't!  This time the man enlisted some help and finally got Willy moving.  And from where we saw them, they only had about 6 more miles to go.

Willy the camel

After lunch in town we visited the School of the Air, founded in 1951 to educate the children who live in the isolated areas of the outback.  The outback is made up of many large cattle ranches and small indigenous communities that do not have enough children to warrant a regular school.  The Alice Springs School of the Air is the grandmother of the 17 Schools of the Air in Australia.  It is basically a correspondence course that relies a lot on the education of the parents.  To qualify, a child must live 50 kilometers from the nearest school and have someone – either a parent or a hired tutor – who will be available every day to help the student with his/her studies.  When it first started, the lessons were taught over the radio.  However in the early 2000s, the school switched to satellite.  Every student is provided with a computer, satellite dish, printer, and fax machine.  Each class is assigned one teacher, although the upper grades may have several teachers.  They go to school for 6 ½ hours a day (just like normal students) and are in a class with other remote students.    However they may only have an hour lesson with a teacher over the internet.  The rest of the day is spent doing the assigned work from the teacher and from the workbooks that are provided every 2 months to each student.  This is where the tutors come into play.  They must work with the student to make sure they are understanding and completing their assignments.  Three times a year (at the beginning and ending of the school year and a sports week in the middle of the year) the students and their families must travel to Alice Springs to meet with the teachers and to meet with the other students in their class.  The school has students from 4 ½ to about 13 or 14 years of age.  Once they reach the high school level, they must go to a boarding school, if that is what the parents and the student want.  Many of these students will become farmers like their parents and therefore they education stops after they finish the School in the Air.  Those students who do decide to further their education are as capable as those who attended regular schools.  It was quite an interesting tour and a novel idea that allows those children who live a hundred miles from other children to receive a good education and social contact with other children their age.

Air of the School

Hotel's peacock

Back at the hotel, as we walked to the bar, the resident hotel peacock was in full bloom.  We had seen him several times, but never with his tail out.   Peacocks love to kill snakes, so the hotel (and me) are happy to keep him there.

Before dinner we had a lesson in playing the Didgeridoo, a traditional Australian instrument.  Made from tree thin trunks that have been hollowed out by termites, you use your lips to blow into the log.  But you have to blow your lips like you were doing a “raspberry” – something my lips would not do.  But it was funny trying to do it.  Andrew, a professional Didgeridoo performer, was outstanding.  He could play pieces for up to 4-5 minutes without stopping.  In addition to trembling your lips, you also need to know who to breathe and also how to make noises while blowing through your lips.  This was definitely not my instrument, but Andrew could really do it!  What a fun hour.

Andrew and his didgeridoos

Trying our hand at it

This is one instrument I will never master!

Dinner tonight was an Australian grill of chicken, barramundi, steak and kangaroo.  It was very good, but we had to eat outside by the pool and the flies were terrible.  We quickly finished and moved into the bar to continue the party.

   

Blog 18-Uluru and the Aborigines

Uluru (“Giant Pebble”) -- an immense red sandstone formation located in the middle of the Red Centre, Australia’s interior desert (or outback) – is thought to be about 550 million years old.  It stands 1,142 feet high and has a circumference of 5.8 miles.  It is the single largest monolith rock in the world.  But like an iceberg, most of is bulk is underground.  A striking characteristic of this rock is how the red/orange hue (from the iron deposits located within the rock) shifts fluidly throughout the day.  In the evening, as the sun sets, Uluru appears to glow from within.  It will also glow red at dawn.  It is located about 300 miles from Alice Springs.

In geology, Uluru is called a bornhardt – a big dome-shaped, steep-sided, bald rock formation, usually made up of granite, but can also be limestone or sandstone.  The material from which the Uluru was formed was once part of the Petermann Ranges formed 500 million years ago when large crustal blocks merged together to create Australia.  Although similar in size to the French Alps and Himalayas, the Petermann Ranges had no plant cover to stop it from eroding.  During this erosion, the sandstone that today makes up Uluru was dumped at the bottom of the mountain range.  This area of Australia then became an inland sea, followed by a phase of deposition of limestone, sand, and mud in what is today known as the Amadeus Basin, thus burying the sandstone that would become Uluru rock.  Over the next 400 million years, the pressure of the sand and mud changed the sediment into rock.  At the same time another phase of mountain building began (known as the Alice Springs Orogeny).  After another phase of erosion, Uluru eventually emerged from the softer rocks.  The red color of the sandstone that you see today is the result of the oxidation of the iron minerals within the rock.  The rock is homogeneous, and as a result there is no soil on it.  It is full of caves, canyons, cracks, water holes and other natural formations, as well as ancient paintings and carvings from the Aboriginal tribes. 

Although for a lot of Australians, climbing Uluru rock has been on their bucket list, come October 2019 that will no longer be allowed.  Since 1993 when the name Ayers Rock was officially returned to its native name Uluru, more and more people have become aware of the sacred, spiritual, and culture nature of the rock to the indigenous Aboriginal tribes.  For the Anangu tribe, the official caretakers of the rock (since it was given back to them in 1985 by the Australian government), this rock represents not only birth but also death – the ancestral tie to Mother Earth.  To them this is the rock from which they came and it is the rock to which they will return.  It is here that they perform ritual ceremonies, many of them thousands of years old.  Today tourists, instead of climbing the rock, have the opportunity to learn of the culture that is over 60,000 years old.  The Ayers Rock Resort, located near Uluru, is a place where the Aboriginal people can explain the importance and history of this rock to their daily lives through storytelling and indigenous craft demonstrations that are open to all people staying at the resort.   Any member of an indigenous tribe is guaranteed training and a job at the resort, and today they make up about 40% of the staff.

Perhaps now is a good time to give a little history of the Aborigines.  Aborigines have the oldest continual culture in the world.  It is believed that the Aborigines arrived in Australia 45,000 to 60,000 years ago, mostly like from Timor in the Indonesian Archipelago.  Once in Australia, they then spread out, populating the continent and living in more extreme climates and landscapes (wettest rain forests to driest deserts) than any other people of the world.  Most early European settlers and explorers to Australia considered the Aborigines to be subhuman, unfortunately a notion that existed into the 20^th century.  It wasn’t until 1967 that they were even counted in the national census.  It was estimated that at the beginning of the British settlement of Australia, there were about 1 million aborigines, but by the beginning of the 20^th century, there were only 50-60,000.  Like most native populations of other countries, they had no resistance to the diseases (especially smallpox) brought by the Europeans.  And like our own native Indians, many were ruthlessly and wantonly slaughtered by the settlers. 

From 1910 – 1970, in a period known as the Stolen Generation, anywhere from 1/10 to 1/3 of all aborigine children were taken from their parents and placed in foster homes or state training centers.  The idea was that this would better prepare them for life among the white population.  And because, until the 1960’s, Aborigine parents did not have legal custody of their children (the state had legal custody), there was nothing the parents could do.  Many children and parents, bothers and sisters never saw each other again.  This project was an utter failure.  The Aborigines people have been inexorably tied to the land and the children could not adapt to western culture.

Things began to change for the better after the 1960's and the government has tried to right some of these wrongs.  In 1962 the Aborigines were granted the right to vote, and the 1967 referendum finally included Aborigines in census counts to determine electoral representation.  In 1976, the Aborigines of the Northern Territory were granted the right to claim land if they could prove traditional association with the land.  And in 1992, the previous legal concept of terra nullius (nobody’s land), which essentially said that Australia had been nobody’s land prior to the British settlement and therefore no concept of native title existed in Australian law, was ruled invalid.  This ruling legally recognized certain land claims by the Aborigines.  In addition to the return of land to the Aborigines and the return of Uluru to their control, money has been spent on schools, clinics, and community projects to help small businesses.  But for the Aborigines, change and integration into Australia’s society has come slowly.  For many of the younger generation there is a sense of hopelessness; there are no real job opportunities and alcoholism is very prevalent.  Cattle ranches have taken over their land and the source of their food supply – namely kangaroo.  Without guns, the aborigines are unable to hunt for their food, and most cannot obtain a gun permit because they have committed some small infraction of the law.  Many of these laws were enacted with the sole purpose of keeping the aborigines from being able to own guns.  The white politicians were afraid that if the aborigines were armed, they would try and overthrow the “white” government.  With only a small welfare check each month, they are unable to eat the foods they have survived on for thousands of years.  Kangaroo in the supermarket goes for about $30/pound for a kangaroo tail.  Diabetes has become a big medical problem for the indigenous people as their systems cannot process the sugar found in many of the cheaper, processed foods they can afford to buy.  In many areas it is like the Aborigine is not there – sometimes seen but not really part of the community or the country.  The government has now started working with individual communities to provide assistance is certain criteria are met.  For example, in one West Australia community, eye disease among children is very severe.  The government will fund the purchase of petrol bowsers to start a business only if the children are washed twice a day.  The hope is that as more and more Aborigines become successful (e.g. the tennis player Yvonne Goolagong), they will become role models for the younger generation and help the children to find pride in their Aboriginal heritage.