According to the Anangu, the traditional owners of Uluru in central Australia, it is not OK to climb the imposing red rock.
So why, then, was the United Nations permitted to illuminate what many Indigenous Australians – including the Anangu – rightly consider to be a most sacred Aboriginal spiritual and cultural site and to advertise its logo on its face?
That is what happened on Saturday night. As part of a global celebration to mark the 70th anniversary of the UN, at least 25 culturally significant Australian places – including the Sydney Opera House and the Melbourne Cricket Ground – were lit up in the New York-based organisation’s signature blue.
Uluru, however, was the only place upon which the UN logo was projected in what was, undeniably, a most photogenic moment for the world’s cameras.
Fortuitously for the UN its 70th birthday coincided with the 30th anniversary of the hand back of Uluru and Kata Tjuta to its traditional owners – an event that has not resulted in the outcomes, predicted back in 1985, of greater social and economic advancement of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people, the Ananga.
Uluru is one of few places in the world that is dual-registered with Unesco, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, some leading Indigenous activists responded with anger to the illumination of the rock and the projection on to it of the UN logo. They challenged the propriety of using such a spiritually and culturally totemic place for Indigenous people as a stage to promote the UN, an organisation some insist has done too little to advance the lot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Historian, artist and leading activist Gary Foley, who helped establish the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra in 1972, wrote on his Facebook page: “Why??? What the hell has the UN ever done for us? They should have been told to F**K OFF.”
The historian and activist Franny Peters-Little (the daughter of celebrated musician and Aboriginal rights campaigner Jimmy Little) wrote: “This is appalling. I wonder how much they gave to the Mututjulu community … Uluru, the latest advertising space.”
Mututjulu is the Anangu community at the base of Uluru, where poverty and social dysfunction remains rife three decades after the hand back, despite the wealth that is being generated by a nearby resort whose business relies on the rock and its associated traditional culture.
Activist, historian and Miles Franklin-shortlisted novelist Tony Birch commented: “That it is the UN is wrong but any logo – a commercial symbol – is an act of vandalism.”
Meanwhile, Philip Mundine of the New South Wales Land Council asked: “Have they tried doing it to the Vatican or Westminster Abbey or the walls of Jerusalem?”
When he first saw Uluru in the mid 1930s, the self-taught Australian anthropologist Charles Mountford “was almost overawed by its size, its colour, its silence, and its solitude”.
His outlook became more nuanced as he discovered more about the creationist legends of what was then known to whites as “Ayer’s Rock”, “of the snakes which fought round Mutigulana waterhole, of the marsupial rats and the evil Kalpunya, of the distraught lizard and its lost boomerang, and of the harmless marsupial mole”.
He realised that the precipices and caves were the creation of – and home to – the ancestral beings, and the “grey smudge on the cliff, [was] the smoke stain from the burning camp of the sleepy-lizard women”.
And so he climbed the rock and discovered that the deep gutters that score the summit “were the tracks of the carpet snakes as they travelled … to Uluru in ‘creation time’ ”.
Mountford had no compunction about climbing the rock and of reporting in detail, courtesy of the insights given to him by his Anangu friends and guides, the stories – many of them so secret and sacred they could not be shared today – that are enshrined in the rock and its surrounds.
He, like thousands who would follow, tramped over the tracks of the snakes to experience that now famous climb.
Perhaps today the former tram driver Mountford (“Monty”) would have heeded the advice of the traditional owners, who urge the hordes of tourists who visit the Uluru Kata-Tjuta national park annually not to climb the rock. Hundreds of visitors ignore the request and climb anyway.
As the anthropological race to find, document, record and photograph Indigenous Australians buzzed across the continent in the first half of the 20th century in the mistaken assumption that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people would soon be extinct, cultural sensitivity was no great strong point.
Mountford was by no means the most intrusive – or destructive – of the anthropologists of his epoch. Nonetheless, he fell foul of some traditional owners in his 1965 opus on the rock, its people, their beliefs and art by publishing details of secret/sacred material. Some offending copies of another, later, book – Nomads of the Australian Desert – were pulped after successful legal action brought by Aboriginal people because, again, they intruded on secret knowledge.
Recent history is replete with lessons on intrusions into sacred sites and knowledge.
But too often in Australia the past is just viewed as another country.
