Uluru Tales

by John Keeble

When, in the thick light of dawn, you see the colours changing on the great monolith of central Australia, are you seeing Uluru or Ayers Rock?

You may say, what does it matter? - they are two names for the same place. But the answers are worlds apart ... Ayers Rock speaks of the domination of outside ideas and Uluru speaks of aboriginal culture, values and knowledge.

As outsiders, we can look with a 21st century scientific eye on the holes in the rock that the Aborigines say were made by their supernatural ancestors fighting to the death. They are interesting stories, something to take away; nothing that damages our view of how the world works.

But the aboriginal contemplation of the outside ideas - how great land masses collided and forced up the rock and how weather finished the design - is far more painful and destructive.

This is because their whole existence has been lived under the guidance of their ancestor stories, dance, music and art. The roots within the individual and collective mind, where there is no concept of 'belief' and everything is knowledge, depend on the acceptance of their creation stories.

If Ayers Rock is geologically explainable, this fundamentally damages the entire Aboriginal tjukurpa - the complex and interconnected system of religion, law and moral rules; understandings of past, present and future; and relationships between people, animals, plants and the land and the knowledge of how these relationships must be preserved.

In an individual, when the whole world view stops making sense, it is a breakdown. The same happens to cultures. Some - like the Japanese after the atomic bombs were exploded - come back in a new form. But others cannot recover and are eventually lost in history.

If there is one enduring negative aspect that you take away from central Australia, it is the position of the Aborigines: most are invisible in settlements not open to visitors; others are in settlements where, reportedly, there are chronic social problems; and a small but significant number exist on the fringes of town life.

You do not see many aboriginal people at Uluru - if you are thinking Ayers Rock, this is the moment to switch - but those who are there will explain, at a superficial level, how the rock was shaped, not in Dreamtime (that is an outside word) but in the reality of the aboriginal world. 

A major problem in any deeper understanding of aboriginal culture is the secrecy, the system of revelations being made as people grow and live the life to those points where they are initiated into more and more knowledge handed down from the ancestors. Almost everything that the outside world understands has been interpreted and disseminated by outsiders from within their own perspectives.

But, with that caveat, you can get a glimpse of how Uluru was formed: one outside report says the spirit realm's Intelligent Snake caused a great rainbow for a huge spirit snake to slither down to earth - this was Uluru, the Great Rainbow Serpent. Uluru's shape includes an indented area filled with eggs, symbolising both male and female - father and mother of all forms of life. 

In the time before time (the creation period, often described by outsiders as 'Dreamtime'), many supernatural entities came to earth in the shape of people, animals, birds and plants. As they lived their lives, they formed and shaped the land; and their knowledge passed to their descendants who passed it, as a complete survival and life system, from generation to generation for 65,000 years. And the spirits still live around the rock and can be offended by wrong actions.

The traditional owners of Uluru are the Anangu, two tribes who share the line of descent from the supernatural Mala hare-wallaby people in the time before time. 'Anangu' translates as 'we, the people' to differentiate them from the spirit people.

A Mala event played out at Uluru can be read today in the rock. They had travelled to Uluru for initiation ceremonies and separate camps had been set up for the men and for the women and children.

 The supernatural Wintalyka mulga seed people sent a messenger to invite them to a ceremony but received a discourteous refusal ... they responded by having their sorcerers create a giant wild dingo to attack the Mala, who fled from Uluru after Lunba, an old kingfisher woman living in a cave above their campsite, raised the alarm. Two of the Mala men were killed fighting off the dingo as the rest escaped.

Today, you can see the sleeping women as boulders, Lunba's cave above, and holes in the rock made by the men fighting the dingo (this, like many places at Uluru, is sacred to the Aborigines and, although you can see it, the park authorities use Australian laws to prevent the sacrilege of photographs being published; VISA is following those rules to avoid any offence to the Anangu).

At another part of Uluru you can see the rock pool, holes in the rock and 'snake slithers' that were formed in the time before time. Then, the peaceful Kuniya python people travelled to Uluru and lived in contentment near a water source.

But a party of venomous snake men, the Liru, attacked them. There was a great battle in which a powerful Kuniya woman, who was nursing a child, spat death at them, killing many. A young Kuniya man took up the challenge and was fatally wounded, and as he crawled away his trail of blood turned into water courses and three small ponds.

The Liru were victorious and the great Kuniya mother snake sang a death song to kill herself and the few remaining Kuniya who could not survive alone. At the end of creation time, they were all turned into boulders; the Liru spear thrusts into the rock remained as holes for all time; and the giant snake slither marks were left in the rock.

The difficulty for us, with our 21st century minds, is to deal with these creation stories and understand how they are fragments - perhaps even distorted fragments - of a whole life view of the aboriginal culture that sets down everything from how people interacted to what the law should be and the relationship with the natural world.

The difficulty for the Aborigines is surviving the destruction of their internal world by people who see Uluru as Ayers Rock.

First published in VISA issue 70 (Dec 2006)