He should get another lens—see straight inside. He would see that Kuniya [sand-python creation being] living right inside there as from the beginning. He might throw his camera away then. Another step taken by Parks Australia was to insist that all tour guides complete an accreditation course developed by Charles Darwin University.
In particular this requirement ensures that non-Aboriginal guides tell Aboriginal origin stories correctly. In Aboriginal life, sacred stories are not just narrative accounts of something that happened once. Country is like a family member.
If the story is wrong, country suffers. When country suffers, people suffer. The park guides for our group were enthusiastically on board with this emphasis on accuracy and were eager to help us engage with Anangu stories and philosophy.
Each time we arrived at the national park, they gave a greeting in the local Pitjantjatjara language, which serves not just to welcome visitors but also to announce to the land that outsiders are entering it. Rather than simply encourage visitors not to climb, park management cleverly provided a way for them to feel they have contributed something by their decision.
At one time climbers who summitted Ayers Rock could record their achievement in a visitors book at the top. The book enables visitors to see their decision as an active endorsement of Aboriginal values, rather than a passive abstention. Signing becomes a record of a different kind of achievement. One unexpected response to the gradually developing perception of Uluru as a sacred site has been the return of the rock itself—or, rather, bits of it.
For years visitors have purloined pieces of Uluru as souvenirs. As awareness of Aboriginal beliefs began to become more widespread in Australian society, people started sending the rocks back. Almost daily, national park staff received packages of rocks from all over the world with messages of regret.
The heaviest piece returned so far weighs 70 pounds. Some letter writers claimed to have been cursed with bad luck since taking rocks home, but most simply said that they recognized what they or relatives from decades earlier did was wrong. By , climber numbers had plummeted. In the s, 74 percent of visitors climbed the 1,foot sandstone monolith.
By the percentage had dropped to less than Five years later it was a mere 16 percent. Instead visitors can go skydiving, camel riding, and cycle touring, or they can watch Aboriginal artists make their famous dot paintings in the Yulara cultural center.
Sunrise and sunset viewing areas provide visitors with optimum vistas of both Uluru and Kata Tjuta. If tjukurpa is gone, so is everything. There is a moment just before the sun sets when the west-facing flanks of Uluru blaze orange as if the rock has caught fire. The glow is fierce, intense, alive. The Anangu pronounced arn-ung-oo are the traditional indigenous owners of Uluru, which means great pebble, and the surrounding Kata Tjuta National Park.
To the traditional owners of the land, Uluru is incredibly sacred and spiritual, a living and breathing landscape in which their culture has always existed. According to Australian indigenous cultural beliefs, Uluru was created in the very beginning of time. That time is known as the Dreamtime, the period in which the natural environment was shaped and life forms, both animal and human, were created.
In the Dreamtime, ancestral spirits came up out of the earth and down from the sky to walk over the barren land, bringing about landscapes and creating life. Significant landscapes were formed by the ancestral spirits that hold deep spiritual connections and are deemed to be sacred. Uluru is one of those sacred landscapes.
The gigantic fissures that slice through the deep red sandstone are linked to ancestors and the caves that line the base of Uluru have great spiritual significance and are still used to perform sacred rituals. Indigenous Australians have been living, hunting and cultivating the sacred land since the Dreamtime.
These spiritual and cultural connections are still strong today. The spirits of the ancestral beings continue to reside in these sacred places making the land a deeply important part of Aboriginal cultural identity. Each visitor to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park is invited to share in these traditional beliefs and hear stories of this ancient land and how it came to be. Members of Anangu society have inherited and are responsible for their own Dreamtime stories and ceremonies associated with specific sites and their place of birth.
The Dreaming is a complex network of knowledge, beliefs and practices belonging to their community, to families and to individuals. It is seen as powerful living force that must be maintained and cared for, it is considered their duty to respect and look after the earth and pass these ancient traditions on for all of time. They may not be visited, filmed or photographed out of respect for their culture.
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