Simply Red – The Australian Centre

The Outback, yesterday

What’s big and red and covered in flies? Well, besides Sarah Fergusson the answer is of course the central Australian Outback, to which Rosie and I repaired this week after five months of living and working in Melbourne.

We first flew to Alice Springs, where we hired a gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive vehicle for a trip across the red heart of the continent. From Alice we headed west along sealed roads before, in true Fast Show style, going off-road and following the 200-odd kilometres of the Mereenie Loop track to King’s Canyon.

Now the first thing to say about the Outback is that, if you let them, the flies will drive you mad. Within seconds of stepping from your vehicle, you’ll be surrounded by a cloud of insects, trying their level best to get into your eyes, ears, nose, mouth and any other orifice they can find. Getting back into the vehicle is even more difficult. Rosie and I evolved a little ‘fly dance’ which sent the wee beasties skywards for a few seconds, giving us a brief opportunity to get back into the car without taking too many of them with us.

From a fly’s point of view, I suppose, finding a person in millions of acres of uninhabited Outback must be something of a coup: something to tell the grandchildren about even. But for the life of me, I can’t see why they’re so keen to land on us. I watched one of the blighters the other day as he settled down on my arm just to see what he’d do. Would he suck the moisture from my skin? Would he bite me and draw blood? No, he just gave himself a little wash, then sat and enjoyed the view.

There are no flies on Rosie Niven.

Having perfected our ‘Aussie wave’ (the hand sweeping windscreen-wiper-like in front of the face every few seconds) we arrived at King’s Canyon, a yawning red chasm in the middle of the desert. We followed the Rim Walk (stop that sniggering you at the back) for spectacular, jaw-dropping views over the surprisingly fertile canyon below. At night, we heard dingoes howling in the sand dunes near our campsite. Posted about the place were dire warnings against feeding these animals or otherwise treating them like domestic dogs. ‘A fed dingo is a dead dingo’ apparently: if they get too used to human company they become more of a danger to children, so have to be shot by a friendly ranger.

The next day, we headed to Uluru or Ayers Rock. Few images can be considered as quintessentially Australian as that of the sun rising or setting over Uluru. You’ve seen it before and I’ve seen it before, on postcards, tourist brochures and beermats. Strange then to think that this iconic monolith was for so long unknown to white Australia. The first European explorer, William Gosse, arrived in the region in 1873, naming the rock after the governor of South Australia, the nearest British colony at the time. Soon afterwards, cattle ranchers arrived and changed the lives of the local Aborigines forever. Within a generation, they’d lost access to most of the land that they’d had custody of for thousands of years and were reduced to hunting dingos for the bounty on their scalps. Today, while much of the Northern Territory remains in the hands of the ranchers, the Uluru-Kata-Tjuta National Park has been handed back to the land’s traditional owners – the Anangu Aboriginal tribes – on the condition that they lease it back to the government for 99 years.

Uluru itself is the focal point for many of the Anangu’s ‘dreamtime’ creation myths. As you walk around the base of the rock, there are signs requesting that you not photograph certain areas because of their sacred nature and the fact that they’re still used today for Aboriginal ceremonies. Like an iceberg, two thirds of the rock is reckoned to be underground, but that doesn’t stop it being an impressive sight. The base walk is 11 kilometres (6-ish miles) and the colour, even on a cloudy day, is a deep otherworldly red.

The base walk at Uluru

Climbing Uluru is a bit like farting in a cathedral: you can do it, but you probably shouldn’t. One of the Anangu myths involving the rock tells of how their dreamtime ancestors clambered to the top and planted a ceremonial staff there, cementing the relationship between the people and the land. Anangu signs at the base of the climb ask visitors to show respect by not climbing the rock. Nevertheless, a significant number of people still do, although when we visited the climb was closed due to high winds.

If a bad conscience isn’t enough to put you off climbing Uluru, then a display in the visitor’s centre might. The ‘Sorry Book’ contains letters of apology from visitors who have either climbed Uluru or taken small pieces of rock from the site as souvenirs. Many report that bad luck has dogged them ever since. Never underestimate the persuasive power of a terrible curse!

40 kilometres from Uluru is Kata-Tjuta, or The Olgas, an equally impressive collection of rocks, the highest of which towers 500 metres (1500 feet) above the surrounding landscape and the tiny people in it. The site is even more sacred to the area’s Aboriginals than Uluru: every Anangu man is required to visit and perform a particular ceremony once in his life. The details of the ceremony – and even of the spirits involved – is a closely-guarded secret, for the initiated only.

Ace reporter Rosie Niven shares a joke with The Olgas.

Our trip was punctuated by visits to other rocky outcrops and hilltops and dried-up creeks, but what sticks in the mind most is the overall impression created by the red dusty soil and the huge empty spaces of the Outback. We saw a wild, white donkey by the side of the road one day, and cows that may as well have been wild – left to roam across vast acres of scrub land until the twice-yearly helicopter-assisted muster. (The largest cattle station, in the Northern Territory is reckoned to be the size of Belgium.)

Returning to Alice Springs was like returning to an oasis of lattès and shopping malls. By most people’s standards, Alice is a small town, with only 26 000 or so people. In the context of the Northern Territory however, it’s a bustling metropolis, and a significant centre for Aboriginal art and culture, with galleries dotted around the town. It’s also a place where a lot of the problems that Aboriginal communities face, particularly those related to alcohol, are plain to see.

The thing that I found most striking was how most Aboriginals and most non-Aboriginals seemed to live almost parallel lives, disconnected from each other. So while the non-Aboriginal population got on with shopping and sipping lattès and selling souvenirs to tourists, much of the Aboriginal population could be found congregated in the town’s public areas, or walking along the dried-up bed of the Todd River, which serves as a kind of alternative high street. It was like the town had simply dropped from the sky around these people’s ears and they were still somehow bewildered by it and separate from it. And in a sense, historically, that’s what has happened.

I’ve only been in the country for six months, so I’m in no real position to comment on the thorny issue of reconciliation between post- and pre-1788 Australians. Nevertheless (and after a couple of schooners of beer) my two penny’s worth is that a big part of the problem is that we whitefellas are accustomed to think of 200 years as being a long time. Aborigines have been living in Australia for at least 40 000 – many experts would say 60 000 – years. Their culture is the oldest living culture in the world. In this context, 200 years is no time at all, particularly when two groups of people have such radically different world views and when one has done so badly out of contact with the other.

With such sombre thoughts weighing on our minds (alongside what we were going to have for our dinner, and the song 500 Miles by The Proclaimers) we hit the road once more, heading south towards distant Adelaide and fresh, moderately-priced adventure.