October 26 is a special date for the Anangu people.
For the traditional owners of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and its surrounding land, where Australia’s most iconic and sacred rock Uluru stands, the date marks when the Australian government returned the ownership of the land back to them in 1985.
It’s also the date settled on in 2019 to permanently ban the climbing of Uluru.
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Although the date is still three months away, the imminent closure has sparked an avalanche of tourists determined to make their way up the sandstone rock before the opportunity is closed to them forever.
Last Wednesday, a photo shared on Twitter showed a huge crush of people scurrying up the sandstone monolith. The Anangu call climbers “minga mob” or ants, as from afar they look just like a fleet of crawling ants, their sheer numbers overwhelming anything they climb.
“There’s cars parked either side of the road for about 1km leading up to the car park at the base,” the tweet read.
A friend of mine is down at Uluru at the moment & sent me this picture – saying it’s the busiest they’ve seen it, & there’s cars parked either side of the road for about 1km leading up to the car park at the base. pic.twitter.com/3cGQVUTYHd
— Katrina Beavan (@katrina_beavan) July 10, 2019
Top Comments
Uluru is not like Bondi Beach Pauline, To the Aboriginal people it's more like St Mary's Cathedral, How would you feel as a Christian if people were defecating and urinating and throwing dirty nappies all over the altar of your Church?. Show some respect to the beliefs of others and respect their holy sites as you'd expect them to respect yours, You are the very worst of Australian society, an uncultured, uneducated, racist.
You seem to view Aboriginal people as a collective group and Uluru is the pinnacle of everything Aboriginal. It matters not if you are Kulin in Victoria or in Perth Nyoongar communities thousands of kilometres away.
It's all the same right?
it matters not if you are catholic or protestant, you can still be Christian, and it matters not what tribe you are from, you still hold the land sacred.
I see what you are getting at -but there is a difference between religion and spirituality. Each region in Australia has their own sacred land and their own traditions. It's an ongoing discusssion .
It seems likely you are viewing this from a Western Abrahamic lens and applying the religious view expecting it to be the same for everyone.
It's the same as saying Christianity/Catholics/Protestants/Jews and Islam/Sunni/Shia/Sufis is all the same since they all ultimately worship the same God
Friend visited Uluru and surrounds recently. Didn't climb the rock. Probably because she had younger children in her group. She did comment that she didn't see one Indigenous person working at the hotel she stayed at. The camel operator was Dutch and other tour guides were from overseas. i think there was one Indigenous gentlemen acting as an additional guide on only one tour and they did a few. She said the only other Indigenous people she saw were sitting in a park. Hopefully there are more learning skills and talking about the land and their culture and they were just not there when she was. I really hope so. To me that would be a big part of taking the tour.