A month-long sabbatical offered a chance – a ‘window‘, you might say – of a long-haul holiday for my wife, son and me. So, after crossing off various dysentery destinations, we found ourselves bound for Australia and, like so many before us, we opted for the great triumvirate known by the Ocker tourist trade as ‘Rock, Reef and Harbour’. Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef and the fried barrumundi of Sydney done, we took the plane to Uluru, the rock formerly known as Ayer’s. In the past you had to fly to Alice Springs, some 400km distant. Now, Uluru is so alluring that it has its own airport at Yulara, the resort beside the rock. It’s been growing for decades, but now it’s mega, a Piccadilly Circus of the Outback hosting 400,000 people a year. A company called Voyages has the monopoly, offering various categories of accommodation and tour ‘packages’ called things like ‘Desert Awakening’.
Once you de-plane, you belong to Voyages. We stayed in its cheapest option, a youth-hostel-cum-motel called Pioneer Outback. Breeze-block cabins and tropical fauna made the sleeping quarters feel like a barracks in Kenya, while the resort itself was an unpleasant melange of pool tables, nasty bars and vending machines. Brisk gap-year types manned the tour desks with that abrasive efficiency that London pub-goers know and abhor. There was little else to do but visit the rock using, of course, extortionate Voyages transport.
We got up at 4.30 am to take the sunrise trip, and after a rattling drive, alighted at a viewing point, helpfully signposted ‘Viewing Point’. Yes, so industrialised was the tourism process at Uluru that we had to be told where to stand to get the photo. Around us were perhaps 200 people, holding their cameras at arm’s length in that curious digital-camera outstretched pose.
Granted, it was beautiful. The sandstone rock did change colour in barely perceptible fashion as the sun came up, a bit like the fade-lighting in a posh spa. We took our snaps and, as we’d come millions of miles to see the damn thing, we felt it worth returning for an ‘interpretive’ trek in the afternoon.
Back on the bus we came, and in the afternoon light the rock was certainly magnificent, the dazzling blue of the sky setting off its dusty reds just so. We walked, finding odd moments of peace in its curvaceous gullies. But there were weird notices around about how the local Aboriginal tribe needed us to behave: you couldn’t climb, women couldn’t go here, no ball games … Far from being a consensus forged by some deep mystical reverence, it all had the smell of committee about it.
Any misapprehension that we’d done the right thing was dashed when we returned back to Yulara for the evening’s entertainment. After a dismal supper of kangaroo burger we ended up in the bar, where a musician was torturing routine karaoke songs by the likes of Simon and Garfunkel. Instead of a middle eight guitar solo, however, each song had a didgeridoo sequence, where the player suddenly picked up a long tube and started giving it the old hoomba-hoomba.
During one of these sequences, we saw a squabble develop between a tight Aboriginal man and one of the workers. Beside the bar was a notice: ‘The whitefella brought grog, and the community can’t handle it.’ We realised that not only was Yulara a rip-off, but the place was riven with political unease: a microcosm of liberal post-colonial angst, in which a toxic mixture of condescension to ‘spiritual’ natives combined with high commerce and an insincere deference to tradition – which might in any case be false. A dump with a geo-political twist.