The Uluru offering

The way that memory comes into the present is not in a dated time sequence. Memory isn’t logical, it’s not ordered by time or place; events don’t present themselves in months and years with an unending forward movement. But neither are they random, although they often seem to be when they first present. Memory is deeply structured in its images, symbols, smells, colours, sounds, tastes; all circling, repeating, spiralling, like poetry. Like Barney’s track-log. With each circle on his log, it’s hard to tell whether he is in the same location in relation to the paddocks below, just higher up, or whether he is, in fact, further along. It’s not until I zoom in close on the computer that I can see it unfurl and stretch out in space and time. In his unfurled story, time is measured in minutes of pain and hours of learning to walk a little further every day; the dates do not line up neatly with my walking. But if there needs to a be date, then the day I walked around Uluru was four years after Barney’s fall.

Uluru had always seemed impenetrable, unknowable. Its shape was too familiar, like the shape of your own child’s face. It was a picture I had seen too many times. Whenever an image comes first, the original gradually becomes impossible to see or know with any intimacy. But I wanted to try.

I had a Rock in my childhood, so I did know something about the nature of rocks. Baron Rock wasn’t on our farm, it was on Harry Wykes’ place, but it’s at the centre of my family’s mythology of place. The lopsided egg shape of it – I know I can speak for Barney and all of us – is the oldest and deepest shape in our lives. And a repeated image in my writing. My sense of being is unimaginable without it hunched there underneath all my memories like the bottom-most turtle holding up the world.

When I walked towards it with my brothers and sisters, scrambling over the wire fence into Harry’s farm, we always called out to it. We had to wait until we were halfway across Harry’s paddock to get a response, although we often impatiently called before then.

‘Hallooo,’ we yelled.

‘Allooo,’ it called back in its clear cool stone voice, not quite catching the first consonant of the greeting. Ah, I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have a Rock speak back to you. Such a clear cool voice our Rock had.

Jung wrote, ‘no voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, nor does he speak to them thinking they can hear’, but we called out and our stone answered. Our hearts stretched, our skinny chests expanded, and we started to run; always we ran when the Rock answered.

Baron Rock, I understood later in geography class, was made of solidified lava, the weathered basalt heart of a volcano left after millions of years had worn down the crater and revealed the volcanic plug. Rain running over its sides had created a small micro-environment around its base – native pines, eucalypts, native grasses – and on the rock itself, pale green-grey and orange lichens and small ti-trees grew in crevices.

The front was too steep to climb so we walked through the pines and gums until we came to a cleft in the rocks we could scramble up. We were on our own with no-one to worry that we were too near the edge, so we skittered like large lizards across the rocks, trying to find the quickest way up. We stood with the wind in our hair, with hawks, and sometimes eagles, circling nearby. It was the first time the joy of high places coursed through me.

But that didn’t mean I wanted to climb Uluru all these years later. For the local Anangu people, Uluru is a sacred site, which they ask visitors not to climb. But even given my love of high geography, I didn’t have any desire to climb it. Climbing to the top seemed an act of domination. I wanted the opposite, to submit myself to the Rock Heart, to walk around it, head bowed, to feel the passing of the Rock at a walking pace, step by step on the earth.

In Tibetan Buddhism there’s a practice called kora, circling the mountain. You walk clockwise around the mountain paying homage to its sacred being. The more powerful the site, the more merit can be gained. Prostration, lying flat on the ground after each step, produces greater rewards than simply walking – apparently the practice can expunge the sins of a lifetime – but I was hoping walking might be enough for someone who was not so much a sinner as a non-believer.

Belief looks real, so elaborated with stories and rituals and sacred objects – I love all that – but it depends on accepting the stories of ethereal beings and gods and ancestors walking the earth without verifiable evidence. That sounds so dry – verifiable evidence – so snooty and superior even, but after a childhood of faith in God, and then decades of faith in an amorphous Higher Reality, now it seems everything could be explained as brilliant constructions of our brilliant minds. I like the stories still, the rituals, but they are artefacts, like stone carvings and painted mandalas in a museum. Now I can be happy with a few facts.

The geological facts of Uluru, and Kata Tjuta, the domed rocks nearby, are a fantastical story. Both rock formations lie on the southern edge of the Amadeus Basin, a depression on the earth’s surface, which, twice over hundreds of millions of years, has been a shallow sea. The elusive Inland Sea the explorers searched for in the early days of British colonisation really did exist; they were just 300 million years too late for it.

After the sea receded the first time, the buckling earth created the Petermann Ranges, bare mountains that eroded into two vast fans, one rocky, the other sandy. A second shallow sea covered the fans in mud and sand and, over time, the pressure turned the fans to stone. About 300 million years ago, the sea receded and the earth buckled again in its restless way, twisting the two fans on their sides. The rocky fan became the conglomerate Kata Tjuta, and the sandy fan, the arkose sandstone of Uluru; both of them red due to iron in the rock oxidising as it came in contact with the air. So there we have it, Uluru is the edge of an ancient red fan that once lay under a primeval sea. Anything is possible.

The red fan is over 2000 kilometres from where I live in Sydney and it took more than three hours to fly there. Somewhere below me, Baron Rock dreamed on, quiet now I suppose, without any children to talk to. From above, the geometry of paddocks shifted to the organic curves of a landscape where humans were barely noticeable. The amoeba-like shapes of vegetation and claypans, red and grey-green and cream, floated on the surface. By the time Anthony and I arrived at Uluru, it felt as if we were in another country.

In this new country there was thigh-high spinifex, creamy-white, covering the red earth as far as the eye could see, purifying all the elements of the landscape. Red sand, pale jade sage bush, narrow desert oaks, mulga, cassia, occasional white-skinned gums, all bound together by a wash of soft spinifex – and above, an infinite sky.

It looks like a simple ecosystem, reduced to fundamentals, but there are more than 400 species of native plants in the region of Uluru. The local Anangu divide the fauna into Puni (trees), Puti (shrubs), Tjulpuntjulpunpa (flowers) and Ukiri (grasses). One of the most distinctive trees is the Kurkara, or desert oak, which is Christmas tree–shaped when it’s young, and the shape of a small English oak when it’s mature. Their dark green leaves looked fresh against the silvery grey of the Wanari mulga. I saw Sturt’s Desert Pea, red and black and pointed like pixie hats, in the gardens around the unit where we were staying, but didn’t see any that weren’t cultivated.

The flora here has to be able to survive on just 300 mm of rain each year. That’s half the annual rainfall of central western NSW where I grew up, which was just enough, some years, to grow wheat and oats and lucerne. Here, no European crops would be likely to germinate, let alone survive. The average temperature for six months of the year is over 30 degrees Celsius, so what moisture there is doesn’t last long in the desiccating heat. At night in winter, as Europeans call the season, the air temperature is cold enough for frost and dew to settle on leaves and grasses, and once, in July 1997, slushy snow fell on Uluru. I’ve only seen photographs of it; the snow and grey clouds and waterfalls pouring off the Rock made it look like a vast and wild fortress fit for a European story.

The Anangu seasons are differentiated not by rainfall or temperature nor climatic conditions of any kind, but by what foods are available. The Anangu say there are five seasons: Itjanu is from January to March; Wanitjunkupai is April and May; Wari is late May, June and July; Piriyakutu is August and September, then Mai Wiyaringkupai around December. According to the seasonal timetable, the Anangu look for bush tomatoes, wild figs, wild oranges, conkerberries, mulga apple, wild passionfruit, in a landscape where I can see no food.

It was Wanitjunkupai when we arrived there, warm and sunny with a cloudless blue sky. At sunset we watched the looming Rock change from ochre to deep glowing red, and the sky from cerulean to duck-egg blue and pink. Cameras on tripods and phones clicked dozens of times. Every snap yielded a postcard perfect version of the monolith, its simplicity of form impossible to get wrong.

‘Is it just a Big Rock?’ I said. It was my secret fear. Not a temple, not a sacred mountain, not the beating heart keeping the land alive.

‘Yeah, it’s a Big Rock,’ said Anthony. He made it sound as if that was all it needed to be. ‘Bigger than the pyramids anyway, by far. The Great Pyramid is less than 150 metres high, and Uluru is nearly 350 metres.’

‘Well, I just want to walk around it,’ I said.

That night at the pub we read Ulysses – it was still travelling with us – and Anthony read quietly in the fake Irish accent he had developed:

Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?

Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain beliefs and practices.

As?

The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal, the hebdomadary symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants; the supernatural character of Judaic scripture; the ineffability of the tetragrammaton; the sanctity of the Sabbath.

How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?

Not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than others’ beliefs and practices now appeared.

‘I’m tired,’ I said.

We set our alarm and got up in the dark next morning. I put on my walking gear and hefty boots, the ones that turn the planet under my heels, then we drove to Mala car park on the dark side of Uluru. The Rock loomed even larger than it had the day before, taking up most of the sky in front of us. It was before dawn, cool and fresh, but there was already a pale light as we shrugged on our daypacks, checked our water bottles and headed off along the track.

At the beginning was a gate in front of metal posts, and chain that led up the Rock for those who wanted to climb. A sign said the Anangu people asked visitors not to climb, and next to it there was another sign indicating the climb was closed today because it was too windy at the top. But there was a woman climbing, about 20 metres up. A ranger appeared from nowhere and yelled, ‘Come down from there’. I slipped my hand into the pocket of my pants, feeling the small stone I had brought with me from my cup of stones at home.

I’ve collected stones for years. Not often, just when I spot one that speaks to me. The first ones I picked up came from a beach on the coast south of Sydney decades ago when I was young with Anthony, and they seemed immediately to be talismans that would protect us and our lives together. It was just a feeling, not a thought-out cosmology; at that time I knew nothing about the idea of stones as powerful or sacred. The stone that represents me is like a flattened egg or lingam, an oval shape with swirling stripes of black and brown metamorphosed sand-stone; Anthony’s stone, I’m a bit embarrassed to say because it’s overly obvious, looks like a slightly flattened penis. On another visit to the same beach, I found two more stones, one for each of our sons; both of them elongated ovals of slate with threads of quartz through them, like veins in skin. I keep them all in an old painted cup on a windowsill in my study and occasionally take them out and hold them in the warmth of my palm, a private ritual of protection.

I like the European walking tradition of placing stones in piles along the wayside. Stone piles probably started as a practical method of clearing stones off the path, but it’s become a ritual, honouring the landscape. They are often a kind of altar, acknowledging that this is a holy place. There are piles on high mountain passes, in front of grottoes, where someone has died, where a story has happened. Sometimes walkers bring stones from home and carry them all the way along the path and leave them at the end. At times stones are carried as a symbol of someone – as Jung said, soul-stones – or they are carried and left in a particular location to symbolise an inner letting go.

Jung wrote that ancient peoples in many cultures collected certain stones as symbols of the life force, with the power to protect and create. The stones linked those who held them with ancestors and with place, and could even bring new life. The ‘Australian aborigines’, he said, rubbed a ‘child-stone’ with a tjuringa, a carved stone of sacred power, to make a new baby leap into the womb. He confessed that as a child he had ‘long kept a stone in my trouser pocket’ which he then hid in his attic with a manikin he made, and he visited and held it whenever he felt disturbed. It made him feel safe and calm, no longer at odds with himself.

I have long kept all my stones, but a couple of days before leaving for Uluru I realised that I wanted to bring an offering with me. It didn’t take long before I knew it had to be one of the stones. Not my family stones, not even in the coldest light of rationality would I part with them, but I had other stones spilling around the cup, which I had picked up when I was walking in Australia and in Ireland, France, England, Italy. They were my connection to Australia where I was born on country, and to Europe where my long-ago ancestors had been born. On my second Camino walk in Spain I had carried one of them from Australia and left it on a vast pile of stones placed by pilgrims from all over the world at the Cruz de Ferro. It was a custom that had been practised for centuries. I didn’t know what it originally meant and I hadn’t felt any particular connection to the geographic place, but I did think about the people who had passed by there for a thousand years. All their stones nestled together there, connecting them across time and countries of origin.

I looked at my stones, and held them and remembered where I had found them. The one I selected as an offering was a flat oval stone, a pale grey schist, about three centimetres by two, a good shape for skimming over water and small enough to slip into a pocket.

The stone came from a creek in the Snowy Mountains, a low range that had once been a sea-bed dotted with volcanic islands. Much more recently ice ages had created glaciers, which carved out valleys and lakes and left glacial moraine in dramatic piles. It had been made of sea and fire and ice, and then eons had worn it down into a vast plateau dissected by deep gorges. I had walked in the Snowies at Easter three years earlier and had bent down to pick up this stone from the cold water, drawn by its smoothness and its small quiet shape.

It lay in my pocket as I began walking, heading northwards and clockwise around the Rock, a crisp wind blowing back my hair. The path was close to the rock wall, which was red even in the pre-dawn light and filling one side of the sky. I touched the rock, just the once, palm against stone. Even though the air was cold, the rock was warm. The path snaked ahead, inviting circumnavigation, but apart from Anthony, there was no one else in sight.

I snapped a picture of the white spinifex rippling in the wind in contrast with the red rock and the stunted green gums, and was surprised to see a skull shape in the stone. Afterwards I kept seeing shapes in the stone: a large fish, an elephant’s head, a Cappadocian cave-house, a screaming Edvard Munch face, ghost men in a cave, a brain, a heart, sexual organs – especially female. But I stopped taking pictures because the places I was most inclined to see shapes and faces were also the places the Anangu had designated as sacred. I couldn’t help thinking that we all want the earth to speak to us. To tell us something, anything.

We came to Kantju Gorge, a narrow valley in the flank of Uluru. As I walked in, the wind dropped suddenly. The sides of the valley undulated like upright sand dunes, creating a feeling of enclosure in solid waves. Deep in the ‘V’ of the gorge there was a waterhole with a sign saying that it was a place to be quiet and to listen. I stood and stared at the dark water for a while and felt the flat stone in my pocket. Anthony, who had been walking several metres ahead of me, came back and stood beside me.

‘This place has a very strong feeling of stillness and silence,’ he said.

‘That’s what it says on the sign,’ I said.

‘Okay, well I didn’t read that.’

‘Probably just that the wind is stilled in here,’ I said.

After the gorge, the path swung out away from the base of the Rock to avoid sites that were sacred to Anangu men. We were on the sunny north-eastern side now but it was still cool. A series of scooped-out dry pools cascaded down from the top, ending in a drop to the desert floor that must have been spectacular in the rain. All the caves and crevices had been created by millions of years of wind and rain; the course of water marked a greenish black by the algae that grew when it did rain. How determined is life to take advantage of such rare water!

The path had widened and was patterned with other boot prints and bike tracks. The orangey-red dust scuffed under my boots, coated them, made them part of the landscape. I looked down and saw a line of caterpillars, head-to-toe, making a kind of caterpillar train over a metre long and as straight as a ruler. I looked them up later; they are called ‘processionary caterpillars’ and they follow a silken thread the lead caterpillar exudes. The spikily furry creatures looked so purposeful, plodding seemingly from nowhere to nowhere.

On the sunrise side of the rock, it was warmer, with no shade. The air was dry and clear, parching to the throat and mouth. It was about four kilometres to the eastern end, the bottom of the heart, a straight stretch with nowhere to fill water bottles – we had stocked up with extra bottles so there was no chance of running out – but it did make me think about the white explorers trying to traverse this country with no knowledge of how to survive. And how did the Anangu survive with rare rainfall and only two shrinking water holes? Of course, they knew and still know the country so intimately that they could find moisture in hollows and soakages and even tree roots and, in winter, dew on the leaves of the sage bush and grasses. To me it was a country I could lay myself down on with awe, prostrate myself in wonder, but anything less than that – simple daily life – seemed impossible.

The path here was about 200 metres from the base, which was a better position for seeing the rock, although I still wanted to be closer to it. It was its presence I wanted more than the view. It was on this side that I saw the Munch face, twisted and anguished; and the brain, eroded high up on the wall of rock. I thought, I cannot hear the Anangu stories, but the stone is telling me stories in a language I can hear, using metaphors and similes I can interpret. If the Rock is a sacred text, perhaps it speaks in different languages to all who come.

We reached the eastern end, domed like a giant stupa – the red stone and blue sky more still and silent than I could have imagined. There was not even the promise of revelation that I had felt before in the bush. It felt older and more inaccessible than anything my twenty-first-century brain could know. I touched the oval stone in my pocket, but there was no answering pull.

We set off into the heat along the southern side, the sun high enough now to light the whole rock. A formation like a giant fish, with small eyes and an open cave-mouth, gulping air, dwarfed the gums in front of it. In another couple of kilometres we reached a sign, Kuniya Walk, indicating another rock gorge. We followed the path into what, in this geography, could be called a glade – it had green grasses, cassia, white-skinned eucalypts, a little bridge and, high above, a love-heart carved by nature in the rock. At the end of the glade, at the bottom of a set of dry pools cascading down the rock, was the Mutitjulu Water-hole. The water was dark, shaded by the rock overhead, which was also in shade until near the top where the light transformed it into a pink glow. The whole effect was feminine; the folds of flesh-coloured rock, the creases, the dampness, the fronds of grasses.

Ah, I thought, this is the place. I curled my hand around the stone in my pocket. It was warm in my palm, it fitted snugly. The sign near the waterhole told the story of the python woman Minyma Kuniya who defeated the warrior Wati Liru and then her spirit combined with her nephew’s to become Wanampi, the water snake. Wanampi controlled the water and would let it flow when the Anangu sang to her.

People came and went, looking at the water hole, looking up at the shaded rock and the sunlit rock-flesh above, staring for a while. I waited. I didn’t want anyone to see me make my offering, not wanting anyone to think I was just throwing stones. I kept my hand on the stone, thinking about my stories, my family, how they had come to this country with a red heart in the middle of it. I was the first one of my family to come here to the centre; this was our offering, a small flat stone. It was from us, from everywhere we have put our roots into the soil. We are mixed in with this place now.

I threw the small stone and it plopped in the mud near the pool. Immediately afterwards, and with a sharp pang, I thought, I should have asked the Anangu if it was all right to bring a gift like that. I was too absorbed in my own story to have thought of it before. In my set of stories it was a humble offering; in the Anangu stories it could be an intrusion, even a violation. It’s only a little stone, I told myself, made of the elements, made from the same earth, from the same history of sea and fire and ice, but the fact stuck like a pebble in a shoe; I didn’t ask. I had enacted my story and didn’t take account of theirs; it was the whole dark story of colonisers who never asked, compressed in one little stone. The stone is there now, sitting on the edge of a muddy waterhole at Uluru. I can feel it there in my heart, scraping uneasily.