Raining on the rock

No rain at this time

But it was raining on the rock the day we arrived.  

From Erldunda, almost to Yalara, we had heavy soaking tropic-style downpour: then, on the day we left, drenching rain. The Lasseter Highway was all damp gritty ochre-red sand, tufted at the verges with spinifex and grasses, green, fresh and cleanly laid out in linear fashion, as in a landscape designer’s prize desert garden design. This terrain does not look parched.

All across the landscape delightfully whimsical juvenile desert oaks, unique to the centre, stand like toy wooden soldiers, straight as a dye, but with their long thready needles drooping sadly. Every time I see them silhouetted against the new moon, with Venus rising, I have to laugh. They are so funny, yet durable. Termite-proof and nail-hard they were cut down and used as well-water liners in the early days of settlement and, no doubt, many are still in place today.

In the sunset of their lives

On all the routes we've been traveling we are impressed at the NT government's concerted effort to provide excellent picnic facilities.  Just about everywhere we’ve needed them great low-slung wooden picnic tables-cum-chairs have been provided and, as a variation, in Uluru/Kata Tjura National Park, one-off wooden love seats have been handmade out of recycled timbers torn up by Cyclone Tracy. Works of art, these: showpieces. 

Recycled after Cyclone Tracy

As are the unique thatched, humpy shelters that have been strategically placed to provide shade in lieu of large shade trees. They all look as though they were meant to be here and are wonderful and extremely welcome additions to the landscape.

Humpy shelters.  So Australian. 

We stop for morning tea overlooking Mt Connor, which, along with Uluru and Kata Tjuta, make a majestic triumverate of monolithic rocks in this ancient landscape. Why is this one so under-rated, when it, too, is utterly majestic?  Gosse Bluff is larger than Uluru. Kata Tjuta/Mt Olga is also larger than Uluru, and topographically, a tad more interesting, as, from a distance, it is made up of about a dozen different ‘heads’ which have eroded over the centuries from what once was a single massive rock-cake head composed of a batter of sand and mud, mixed with granite pebbles, boulders and cobbles. This sedimentary conglomerate erodes easily, which explains the name Kata Tjuta: ‘many heads’-- where lines of erosion have created round balls of rock, each like a giant's marble.

Eroding quickly like giant marbles

On one of our fine days here, we walk between two of Kata Tjuta’s heads, up over her grainy rocky-red spine swept hard and clean by the weather, into her cool heart, until we are enclosed by walls as high as a temple of stone, planted with exotic remnant plants, some of which grow nowhere else on earth. Quite special it is.

Yet Ulura remains the star. And there are some good, self-perpetuating, reasons for this. Formulated around the same time as its rocky cousin, Kata Tjuta, but with different foldings, compressions, and tilts, over aeons, Uluru is composed of arcose, a sandstone rich in felspar. It pokes only a small head above the ground. Underground its core goes many kilometres deep. Slower, much slower than Kata Tjuta, it erodes.

Uluru on a fine day It is rooted deep beneath the earth 

Rain on the rockface becomes droplets that find other droplets, forming into streamlets that groove down the face of the rock, wearing it out over time -- creating the features that form the core of the Dreamtime tales of this region. Close up it looks like a land-locked whale, with ancient shedding barnacled skin; one that has lost its way, and blobbed amorphously down in this vast space for a rest.

We walked for over three hours around the base of Uluru following the tales of gashes, grooves and gouges on virtually every interesting surface. These tell of the battle between Liru, the poisonous snake, and Kuniya, the woma python. 

A survivor in an arid landscape

Or Tatji, the small red lizard, who threw his curved throwing stick so hard it embedded into the rock so deep, that when he attempted to gouge it out with his bare hands, he left scars of rounded hollows, still there today. Or the Bell-bird brothers who, while stalking their feast of emu were overtaken by two blue-tongued lizard men who killed the emu, ate parts of it, then lied about touching it, but, betrayingly, left chunks of dead emu meat behind, which lie there still -- sandstone slabs on the face of the rock.

Every groove tells a tale

Everywhere is so much more interesting than its public face of being just a well-photographed rock. Tales of the Dreaming, and sacred sites as special as church altars in beautiful cathedrals, make up this place -- and are what folk pay to see. Nature plays her part, too, painting the rock pretty in pink or purple in the full light of day, yellow at times, then flame-red at sunrise and sunset.

And still the rock generates its own new tales: which makes this as big a drawcard as the pilgrim way.

A ‘Sorry Book’ in the Cultural Centre is inches thick revealing page after disconsolate page of individual letters from folk all over the world, Poland to Pittsburg, who have come to this place, been tempted to take away a tiny piece of the rock, or even a single grain of sand, only to have been dogged by such intolerably bad luck and impossible misfortune that they have been compelled to write: atoning. Returning the pieces of stolen rock with abject apologies. Attempting to improve their fortune. Hundreds upon hundreds of tortured and beautifully appealing letters.

Tiny brass memorials for those who did not survive

Then, pounded into the side of the rock – more scars – part way up its face.  Not far from the chained path the traditional elders have requested folk not climb as a mark of respect to this place are brass memorials, as in a graveyard, to those who have fallen while climbing the rock: a young male teacher, in front of a busload of his Baptist-school students; a female tourist from Yorkshire, only twenty-five; a sixty-two year old man, whose singular life-long ambition had been to climb the rock.

And so many others.

Slow eroding droplets of rain slide down the vertical face of the rock.

Like tears.

oooOOOooo