Witchetty grubs are on the breakfast menu at
Kings Canyon, a rugged gash in the ranges near Alice
Springs in Central Australia. It is not my ideal way to start the day,
but I manage to swallow some of the creamy little creatures by
pretending they are scrambled egg.
Jacinta my aboriginal
guide, later offered me some green plums (a rich source of vitamin
C) and as we continued our morning walk she plucked `desert raisins` and
`rock figs` from what seemed to me be inhospitable bush.
After keeping quiet about their cuisine for
some 250 years, Aborigines have decided to share
their secrets with Australia`s white
settlers and as a result `Bush Encounter Tours` have become popular with visitors
travelling into the Great Outback.
Seeking to avoid tourists, I had rented a four-wheel drive
vehicle in the main Outback town of Alice Springs and headed west,
driving through a an ox-blood coloured landscape studded with clumps of spinifex grass and scarlet `Desert
Pea.`
At dusk I drew up at the Frontier Lodge in the
Watarrka National Park which made a comfortable base to visit the
canyon after my witchetty breakfast the following next morning.
Like Uluru - my ultimate
destination - the
sandstone gorge attracts many walkers who choose various bush trails graded
easy (Emu) moderate (Sand Goanna) and tough
(Rock
Wallaby) by the Northern Territory Tourist Commission.
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It is easy to become lost in the Australian Outback.
Park rangers advise that you drink a litre of water for every hour you walk
and to leave a note on the car windscreen saying where you went and the
time you left in the event you do not return.
Uluru, the world`s largest monolith and one of the most
sacred aboriginal sites in Australia. sits on the horizon like a
giant hamburger 310 km south-west of Kings Canyon. Twenty-six tourists have
so far died while scaling the 335 metre high rock and concerned
as much about safety as their traditional beliefs,
its Anangu tribal custodians prefer it is not climbed at all. As one explains: it
is like wearing your shoes in a mosque.
Aborigines believe that the path leading up Uluru is marked
with `footprints` of the mala or Rufus hare wallaby, the
kuniya - female python and other creatures from their
Dreamtime. In fact the whole vast continent of Australia is
criss-crossed by tracks of the `Dreamings`: walking, slithering,
crawling, chasing, hunting, dying, giving birth, performing
rituals and establishing links between one place and another. Such
places are sacred sites, at times visible
as rock art and engravings but largely invisible to all but
aborigines such as the local Pitjantjatjara who still find
their way from place to place guided by spiritual `song lines`.
In Aboriginal mythology
Uluru is the Intelligent Snake
from the `higher spirit realms` who conjured up a great rainbow down which
it slithered to earth. To them the snake
symbolises fertility, the lower part
of the "U" filled with eggs being considered the `father and mother` of all
living creatures.
Clearly it is an affront to climb the sacred
rock, but there
are several sightseeing alternatives. You can cycle slowly around the base
- 9kms in circumference -
roar around it on a Harley Davidson, fly across it by
light aircraft or drift over it in a hot air balloon. A final thought is
to circumambulate Uluru alone with a heritage I-Pod plugged into
your ear. At sunset the colours are magic as the rock changes from
red to purple and black until it finally becomes silver in the
moonlight.
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Geologists consider both Uluru and the Kata Tjuta outcrop,
30 kms north, were originally part of a single up-thrust in the flat belly of
Central Australia and that weathering over millions of
years has reduced the rocks to the sensual, flowing
contours of today.
Kata Tjuta was previously called the Olgas by early Lutheran missionaries
(after Queen Olga of Wurtemburg) but following its
return under the Land Rights Bill of 1985, like
Uluru (formerly named Ayers rock after a
19th . century Governor of South Australia) it is now called by its true aboriginal name.
Unlike Uluru which is
a solid lump of sandstone,
here you can walk right
into the group of massive rounded domes, the tallest
soaring some 546 metres high. Some people
even prefer the spiritual experience of Kata Tjuta
which glows like the hot coals on a camp-fire.
Visitors to the Uluru-Kata Tjuta
National Park are able to stay overnight at Yulara, a tourist complex designed to melt into
the environment where nothing is taller than a Desert Oak
and everything - even the local Fire Brigade is painted
red-like the surrounding desert.
From the aboriginal word meaning
howling - as in dingo - Yulara has a population of
only 1000 residents and when you consider that
this is the biggest town between Alice Springs and the
Indian Ocean (2400 kms west) you realise the great
emptiness of the Outback and of the need for a basic
knowledge of `bush tucker` should you stray off the
track.
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