ROCK OF AGES
Rupert Christiansen visits the Southern
Hemisphere's fastest growing tourist attraction and observes the havoc wrought by consumerism
Ayers Rock WE DON'T call it Ayers Rock any more. Its Aboriginal name is Uluru, as the acolytes of Australian multiculturalism tartly insist. In fact, in these parts we don't even use that dirty racist word Aborigine — the term is Anangu, with a soft g.
And while you're at it, you may as well know that Anangu don't have a ball, they have an inma, and there will be a very big one at Uluru on 26 October, when a $4- million 'visitors' centre' is opened, marking a new phase of development in the South- ern Hemisphere's fastest growing tourist attraction. Coincidentally, the inma will also mark the tenth anniversary of an event of ludicrous hypocrisy and ideologi- cal claptrap — the handing back of the freehold of the site to its original Anangu owners.
Having sat unnoticed for approximately 600 million years, Ayers Rock has sudden- ly come a long way very fast. The first motel and airstrip in this desert area was built only in 1959; in 1962 there were 5,000 visitors, in 1994 over 300,000 — and the annual growth rate of 11 per cent is antici- pated to continue. The resort which accommodates this influx is located about 13 miles from the Rock itself. Purpose- built in the early 1980s by the state govern- ment of the Northern Territory, it was privatised in 1991 and is now highly suc- cessful. It deserves to be: this little tourist village has been attractively designed and is cleverly landscaped so as to be virtually invisible from a distance. But also being 300 miles from the nearest town of any consequence (Alice Springs), it is expen- sive and isolated: the staff tend to go stir- crazy — 'Nothing to do except f—k and drink,' as one bleary-eyed waiter cheerfully informed me as he poured my breakfast orange juice. Many of his colleagues can't stick it for more than a month; very few last a year.
The astonishing Rock itself lies in the middle of a national park, organised very much along the lines of similar American institutions, except for the fact that on 26 October 1985, as part of the Hawke gov- ernment's programme of self-determina- tion, the traditional landowners received formal title to the whole 800-square-mile area. Simultaneously, these traditional landowners agreed to lease back their property to the national parks for an annual rent which currently stands at about A$150,000.
But for all the name-changing and lin- guistic courtesies, very little has actually changed. First of all, there is no such thing as a traditional landowner of Ayers Rock: until we came along and told them about it, the concept of private property was entirely alien to the indigenous nomadic Anangu, which fostered their own rather intelligent — view that men do not own land, land owns them. Second, the distribution of the rental money, via yet another joint council, has been dogged by a series of corruption scandals, and by the impossibility, given the complex. Anangu kinship system, of determining exactly who is entitled to a share on what grounds. Third, the board of management only meets three times a year and confines itself to general issues. It is chaired by the blind Aboriginal Yami Lester, who has never lived in the region.
The truth is that the park is being run by white Australians (the current park manag- er is one such, as was his predecessor and all but two of the rangers) for the mass tourist industry, and the Aboriginals have been bought off to keep quiet and steer clear. The strain in this bogus arrangement is beginning to show.
As numbers of visitors rise, the fragile ecology of the area crumbles. This is not just a hippy platitude. Timid native creatures like the opossums and rufous-haired wallabies have completely vanished, foreign seeds and spores brought in on tourists' shoes take root and choke the soil, stealing water from desert flora (the greedy white gum tree has become a particular menace on this score). The rock painting, applied with friable ochre and ash, is peeling away irredeemably. Frag- ments of rock are stolen as souvenirs (and often guiltily returned to the rangers by post). It is extraordinarily difficult to handle the litter and sewage generated. The problems and pests are not only physical. New Age weirdos have recently set up a lot of phony claims to access the Rock's 'spiritual vibrations', and are charging substantial sums for the privilege of feeling them. Tourists wishing to demonstrate their masculinity — and there are quite a few of those — all want to climb the Rock and buy the T-shirt ('I climbed the Rock'). Not only is this dan- gerous (there is at least one fatality a year), it is also a violation of the sanctity of the place, something far more real to the Aborigines than any nonsense about `ownership', and the subject of their con- stant appeals. We wouldn't eat pork in a synagogue or wear shoes in a mosque, so why should this indisputable locus of a great wealth of myth and ritual not be accorded the same respect?
But the commercial development of the Rock has its own more powerful impetus. 'I don't think the land can take much more of this,' one ranger told me. 'There's a constant clamour for more signs, seats, lavatories, garbage bins and campsites, and if we're going to continue to meet cus- tomer demand, they must be provided.' One proposal currently before the board of management is the building of a new circular road close to the rock base. This would further deplete what little tranquil- lity is left to the Rock, but would satisfy the hordes of Japanese, who have no interest in hiking and don't like getting out of their coaches longer than it takes to snap a camera shutter.
The Aboriginals are now confined to Mutitjulu, a depressing township within the park. They are not welcome in the resort — there has been some trouble and are banned from buying liquor there. The money doled out from the rental has done nothing for them except feed their tragic vulnerability to a number of import- ed diseases, such as glaucoma and pneu- monia. 'They are almost as addicted to sugar as they are to alcohol, and their bod- ies just aren't programmed to digest it,' a local doctor told me. 'Chocolate is as big a risk to their health as the booze.' Recently, they have become crazy drivers too, piling their battered old cars with relatives and careering recklessly along the new sealed roads. The burnt-out wrecks which litter the otherwise virgin landscape are evidence of the result.
Meanwhile, the Aboriginals showered with jamboree bags of welfare state good- ies — parents are actually paid for conde- scending to send their children to primary school, for instance — causing under- standable resentment among the tax-pay- ing, small-time white farms and businesses nearby. 'They're given whatev- er they want, so long as they know how to ask for it,' an angry garage mechanic told me, and he wasn't altogether wrong. Of course, those few who do want genuinely to play our game and become ordinary Australian citizens still find it hard to be taken seriously rather than patronisingly treated as deserving charity cases. It's all too easy to buy a Toyota or blow a wad in an Alice Springs bottle shop; it's much harder to get secondary education or a bank loan.
Whether governments label their policies as assimilation or self-determination, the net effect of white Australia's guilt-coloured good intentions seems to be the same: resilient, adaptable, independent people with desert skills of astonishing vitality and inge- nuity have been castrated and disenfran- chised from their true inheritance.
Part of me can't help thinking that it would have been more decent, more hon- est, more respectable to have taken off the kid-gloves of liberalism and made a straightforward imperialist expropriation of Uluru, rebaptising it in the perfectly acceptable secular religion of conservation- ist tourism, like the Grand Canyon or Yosemite Valley. The Aboriginals could then pay their A$10 to visit Ayers Rock like anyone else. Their more pious elders might curse us, but, no fools, they would have moved on.
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