The Rock of Law at the Desert's Heart
Uluru rises about 348 metres above the surrounding sandplain, roughly 9.4 kilometres around, a single mass of coarse sandstone that shifts from ochre red to deep violet at dawn and dusk. To its traditional owners, the Anangu — Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people — the whole rock is the text of Tjukurpa: every gully, pool, and cave on the rock corresponds to a Dreaming narrative, and to walk its base is to walk the story.
The most widely shared public narrative is the battle of Kuniya and Liru. Kuniya, the woma python woman, carried her eggs from far in the east and set them on top of the rock. When a war party of Liru, the venomous-snake warriors, killed her nephew, Kuniya met their leader beside the Mutitjulu waterhole and struck him twice on the head with her digging stick. Two long vertical clefts in the rock face are read as the blows; rounded boulders nearby are the scattered eggs; the dark sinuous stain above the pool is Kuniya herself, passed into the stone. Mutitjulu is held to be the home of Kuniya and of Wanampi, a rainbow-serpent being, and visitors are asked to keep quiet there. Another public cycle tells how the Mala wallaby people were attacked mid-ceremony by the devil-dog Kurpany; the caves on the north-west face are their camps.
The surveyor William Gosse named it Ayers Rock in 1873 after Sir Henry Ayers, then Chief Secretary of South Australia. On 26 October 1985 the Commonwealth returned title to the Anangu, who lease it back as a jointly managed national park, and on 26 October 2019, after decades of requests by the traditional owners, the climbing route was permanently closed. With neighbouring Kata Tjuta, Uluru is World Heritage listed for both culture and nature, and stands as the best-known emblem of the Aboriginal land rights movement.
