"It’s a long way to travel just to see a bloody big rock," my father says when I call him out of the blue from New York and suggest that we take a trip together to Uluru to celebrate his upcoming 75th birthday. I’m wise enough now to know that his response is typical of the jocular yet tough Australians of his generation, but it is still enough for me to question my motives. Why do I want to travel a great distance to the center of the driest, hottest continent on the planet—in the middle of summer—to see a solitary rock that is as postcard familiar as the Sydney Opera House? After all, maybe my dad and I are just not cut out for that male bonding thing that so many others seem to go in for? We awkwardly persist with the chat and, without words, sense it is an important opportunity, agree on a date, and I book. As unlikely as it seems, in a month I’m going to Australia’s remote red center for a ‘bloke’s weekend.’
Fast track to the morning of departure and I am running late to the airport, having estimated Sydney traffic on the same metrics that I did when I lived there a full decade before. I bribe the Uber driver, beg the ground crew, and bolt through the terminal to arrive at the gate with seconds to spare—all the while pretending to my dad that this is just how an ‘international travel writer’ rolls. Of the hundreds of flights I have taken, I can say with certainty this was easily my closest shave. When I saw my dad standing there at the gate waiting for me in his Akubra hat, I knew that it was also the flight with the highest stakes. Hotels can be rescheduled; appointments, too; but had I missed the flight and left my dad stranded, not only would his disappointment have been irreversible but together we would have missed a perspective altering, world-view enhancing, even life-changing travel experience.
Flying from the coast of Australia to its center on a clear day is to reveal the true nature of this vast and mercurial continent. Within minutes in the air, the sapphire waters and thin band of coastal green where 90 percent of the population live have vanished, making way for an expanse of yellowed pasture criss-crossed by country roads and interrupted by swathes of brown bush. Before long the brown rusts and then, quite suddenly, the earth begins to glow increasingly red. For hours all that can be seen is an endless expanse of ochre moving to vermillion, cracked with dried creek beds and speckled with odd trees. We’re both glued to the window, mesmerized by the landscape: its scale, and the only-in-Australia color palette. In viewing Australia from the sky, the genius of Aboriginal dot paintings becomes entirely clear; they are maps and storytelling aides created by people who didn’t fly but so intimately knew their land that they painted an aerial through this feeling of connection alone. A mind-bending thought that begins to place in context the importance of the rock rising out of desert in the distance.
Once you view Uluru from the ground, it's clear that it is the heart of Australia. Physically as close to the center of the continent as is estimable and of supreme spiritual significance to the local Aboriginal Anangu people, Uluru is more than an impressive rock in the desert. Yet for most Australians, it has only recently come to mean something more. With European settlement, the 40,000-year-long stewardship of the site by the Aboriginal people was interrupted and it was renamed Ayers Rock. The local people were pushed out, traditions discarded, a climbing apparatus was erected for those eager to earn their ‘I Climbed Ayers Rock’ T-shirt and the site became an infamous camping-ground-cum-theme park. (Who will ever forget "A dingo ate my baaaaaby?")
However, 30 years have passed since the land was handed back to the original owners and the area was declared one of the rarest of all UNESCO denominations, a dual natural and cultural World Heritage Site. Australia has grown up and is beginning to mend a strained relationship. The campsites are gone, respect is paramount, and sensitive tourism operators like Longitude 131 place a genuine emphasis on the cultural significance of the national park. Days are filled with programming run by young guides well versed in local lore, custom, and unaffected by the prejudice of another era. Their stories unfold throughout the stay and trips are taken to extraordinary sites once left off the typical fly-in, fly-out itinerary, such as Uluru’s neglected but no less spectacular or sacred twin Kata Tjuta (known once as The Olgas). But at Longitude, the only hotel with direct views of Uluru and surely one of the world’s best positioned accommodations, it is also possible to kick back in silence with a beer on the deck of a ‘tent’, like we did, and watch one of nature’s greatest shows. Under cloud and clear skies, struck by lightning, and then consumed by a red sand storm, we saw Uluru transform from its hallmark vermillion and ochre to violet, and then entirely to black.
Many travelers had mentioned to both my dad and I that we would be affected by the otherworldly aura of the site—that it would have a profound affect on our understanding of what it means not only to be Australian, but also human. Being skeptics, we both scoffed. Again, just a bloody big rock. We were wrong, entirely wrong. Uluru is a mercurial, mythical, and magical place that defies exact description, and like any truly spiritual place offers different insights to different folks. What I can say, clearly, is that it offers a singular experience of being dwarfed by nature and enlightened by the values and startling beauty of the world’s oldest living culture. It makes me hopeful for the future of Australia: A visit here is now much more about connecting than conquering.
