Locked Out of Our National Parks

Australia’s cultural identity has forever been closely connected with the Australian landscape. The natural world around us has helped forge our unique Australian spirit from which emerges our sense of humour, creed of mateship, altruism, ingenuity, self-reliance, courage and resilience in the face of hardship. Although the vast majority of us live in cities or suburbs, our character still draws on our close connections to our bushland, beaches and harsh desert interior. In visiting the natural world with our families to picnic, bushwalk, swim at the beach, go fishing or four-wheel-driving, go hunting or explore our country in caravans, we reaffirm and reinforce our connection with our landscape.

Our attachment to our land is reflected in the image of Australia we present to the rest of the world. Popular images used to sell our country feature pristine beaches, reefs full of colourful coral and fish, forested mountain ranges and the red sands of our deserts with Ayers Rock standing proud against a deep blue sky. Many of these areas are protected as national parks and until recently remained accessible to everyone regardless of their ancestry or religious views via long-established tracks and trails that open the gate to remarkable vistas, waterfalls, canyons, rivers and other natural features that inspire awe and wonder.

Over the last twenty years a number of our natural wonders have been drawn into controversy due to beliefs about their religious significance by a small group of mixed-race Australians who identify more closely with their Aboriginal ancestry over other cultural and racial connections in their background. According to their religious views, only certain men or women can access these places, all others are excluded under threat of punishment of some sort. Sadly, these animist beliefs built on old myths and superstitions have been permitted to re-emerge under the cover of identity politics, racial grievances and political gamesmanship. It is a travesty that they are being accepted as legitimate reasons to manage access in our public lands by supposedly secular government authorities.

The iconic climb to the summit of Ayers Rock was closed in October 2019, as was the summit of Mount Warning in northern New South Wales in October 2022. Many rock-climbing routes in the Grampians in Victoria were closed to the public in 2020 pending Aboriginal cultural heritage assessments, and many of these routes are unlikely to be reopened. Restrictions have been proposed on public access to the summits of Mount Beerwah, Mount Tibrogargen and Mount Coolum in the Glass House Mountains in south-eastern Queensland. Queensland government policy supports a ban on public access to these places based on Aboriginal ideology. St Mary’s Peak in South Australia has signs requesting visitors to stay away from its summit and stop at a lower saddle with a lesser view; and the official position of the South Australian government is to support a ban likely to come in the near future. That’s just the mountains. Many other places, beaches, lakes and camping grounds are similarly impacted. All these restrictions have emerged as national park authorities across the country adopt and promote Aboriginal ideological beliefs and force them onto the rest of the community.

In closing these long-established tracks our freedom of movement is impinged. We lose access to popular locations that provide life-affirming, uplifting experiences from which all society benefits through improved physical and mental health, and an appreciation of the importance of preserving these special places for future generations. Our understanding of the natural world is diminished if we are not allowed to enter, explore and experience these remarkable places.

Businesses in these places close as tourists go elsewhere.

As our governments officially promote and pander to irrational cult-like beliefs we allow their adherents to be locked into a cycle of ignorance, isolating them from rational viewpoints and scientific perspectives that provide a means of personal growth and enlightenment and enjoyment of the full benefits of modern civilisation. Locking people into archaic belief systems is doing them great harm and limiting their full potential.

The advent of access and other privileges based on race is a source of division in our community. It is doing great harm to our once united nation.

The bans on public access to the summits of Ayers Rock and Mount Warning provide examples of what is in store for other parks in the country. Closures at both were founded on lies. The facts demonstrate that justifications used by Commonwealth and state government authorities were not based on well-established anthropological science, but on myths and misconceptions and a rejection by public servants and bureaucrats of the sound utilitarian principles that should be applied in formulation of public policy. In the end the benefits to the public from our experience of awe and wonder in these beautiful natural places far outweigh any sense of offence felt by small groups who seek to impose their ideology on the rest of us. 

At Ayers Rock, our famous red monolith in central Australia, a revival in fundamentalist Aboriginal spirituality occurred when new groups arrived in the area drawn by the handover of the park to private Aboriginal interests in 1985. They were egged on by activists from the cities. These newcomers rejected the pragmatic approach to tourists of the old men and women at the Rock who were either indifferent to tourists climbing or encouraged the climb. The old people recognised we all look at the world differently, and while they saw the underlying dreamtime stories, the tourists saw rocks and plants, but that was fine. The same open-minded outlook allows non-believers to respectfully visit churches and mosques to marvel at the artwork and architecture without having to accept the religious beliefs that led to their construction. The newcomers at Ayers Rock put in place restrictions that culminated in the public ban on walking to the summit in 2018. The ban was supported by spurious environmental claims and fearful views on safety by park managers that exaggerated the risks. You will not read about the views of the old men and women in any signage or brochures in the park. The incredible life of the first climbing guide, Tiger Tjalkalyirri, or the sayings of Paddy Uluru and his brother Toby Naninga remain lost to tourists because they do not fit in with the postmodernist views pushed by the new owners and park management.

Similar claims are evident at Mount Warning. Before 1999 there were no issues with public climbing to the 1159-metre summit. In the 1970s and 1980s extensive anthropological surveys and interviews with local elders conducted by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) demonstrated there were no problems with public access. In 1993 the NPWS published a glossy guide to this outstanding park that celebrated the summit walk, labelling it the “Staircase to the sky”; a walk that could be successfully completed by children as young as five and people in their eighties.

The NPWS celebrated the end of the century with a Millennium Walk and held a raffle for sixty lucky climbers to witness the first Australian sunrise of the millennium. It almost didn’t go ahead, as one Aboriginal man from outside the area threatened to block the walk for the first time in its modern history. Aboriginal elders with closer connections to the mountain branded his claims as a “modern-day invention”. In the early 2000s these anti-climbing claims somehow became entrenched in NPWS policy, which sought to prevent public access to the summit. In 2006 a sign appeared at the base, much like the one at Ayers Rock that told visitors not to climb. The NPWS paid tourism academics from Southern Cross University to form plans to “demarket” the park in 2014. The results published in a journal article titled “Demarketing an Iconic National Park Experience”. Name another government anywhere in the world that would seek to diminish the importance of one of its natural wonders! Despite this bizarre campaign, there was no impact on visitor numbers and tens of thousands still came to climb the summit. As with Ayers Rock, government authorities played the safety game, falsely claiming the walk was an extreme risk, failing to acknowledge that their lack of maintenance had likely contributed to a reported increase in minor injuries and lost walkers. Despite 3.5 million climbers since the track was constructed there is very little environmental damage in the park, yet the NPWS claimed the walk was causing damage due to litter and human waste.

In 2020 the NPWS played its end game during the Covid lockdowns and “temporarily” closed the summit track. Under the cover of Covid it removed the chains that assisted less capable climbers to the summit, claiming engineering issues created an extreme safety hazard. Independent investigations suggested otherwise. These rolling temporary closures ultimately resulted in a total ban on the summit for all but a small group of Aboriginal men, as a new Aboriginal Place Management Plan was released in October 2022.

This deeply flawed government document was put together without the involvement of other Aboriginal groups amenable to public access and without any consultation with the local community, bushwalking groups and local businesses reliant on visitors.

The NPWS allowed Mount Warning to be stolen based on lies and misrepresentation. The safety and environmental issues have been exaggerated beyond all connection to reality. The problems are trivial and can be easily fixed with some minor track maintenance. The NPWS embraces the ideology of one Aboriginal group with tenuous links to the mountain, whose tenets of sacredness are a “modern-day invention”, over groups with closer ties established long ago. The “secret men’s business” at Mount Warning, so reminiscent of the Hindmarsh Bridge scandal, is worthy of an ICAC investigation or royal commission.

The heart of the issue for both Mount Warning and Ayers Rock is poor management. Neither Parks Australia nor the NPWS has properly managed these natural wonders for many years. Ayers Rock was better managed under the direction of the late Derek Roff up to his departure with the forced takeover of the park by the Commonwealth government in 1985. At Mount Warning the last act of sound management was the construction of the summit lookouts in 1989 and track repairs in the 1990s. It’s all been downhill since then in regard to information, facilities and maintenance.

One simply has to look at how similar natural wonders are managed overseas to realise how badly things are done here. Zion National Park in Utah attracts nearly five million visitors annually and manages to balance access to remarkable walks and lookouts like Angels Landing with competing safety, environmental and cultural responsibilities. The much smaller Diamond Head State Monument in Hawaii, with the popular Diamond Head walk attracting a million visitors a year, similarly manages high visitation while preserving important environmental and cultural sites. There needs to be a fresh approach, and public access to long-established lookouts needs to be returned as a first order priority.

The lockouts at Ayers Rock and Mount Warning provide an important message to us all and we should be resisting irrational actions taken on our behalf by the governments we elect. The New South Wales government announced plans in June 2022 to hand over our all its national parks to Aboriginal groups. Look out for many more closures and much more division and community outrage if the Mount Warning model is followed.

Ordinary Australians, busy getting on with life, have been slow to realise the full consequences of the political war being waged against them by the so-called “progressive” political players that now control much of our public service and inhabit higher places in government bureaucracy, media and corporations. Their corrosive influence on public policy has prioritised nonsensical postmodernist concepts of race and gender and animist ideology over historical and scientific facts, democratic ideals of utilitarianism, and freedom of speech and movement. Pragmatism in managing our national parks is being replaced by an impossible zero-harm safety mentality coupled with over-regulation, environmental alarmism, animist mysticism, myth and superstition, and it is being done under our very noses. As the environmentalist Arthur Groom outlined over seventy years ago, “we think and live literally within four walls”; this is now made immeasurably worse in our “smartphone” era where our news is controlled, groupthink dominates and dissenting rational voices and views are shamed or ignored. The grievance industry, thin-skinned minority groups who claim victimhood based on distant historical injustices, have easy access to guilt-ridden, sensationalist media and government agencies who are too eager to appease and not strong enough to simply say No. Instead of opening up debate, our internet era has narrowed it ever tighter. The time is long overdue that the silent majority who value the opportunity to enjoy the natural world on their own terms without undue influence from government or the ideological beliefs of others raise a voice and demand to be heard.

If we fail to stand up for our common ideals we risk being locked out of the wonderful country around us. In appeasing narrow-minded selfish minorities who see themselves as perpetual victims, we agree to be locked out of the Australian landscape and risk losing the very essence of what makes us Australian.

Marc Hendrickx is a geologist who has worked across Australia. His books about Ayers Rock and Mount Warning, available from Connor Court, provide facts and information that government authorities have long ignored or suppressed. In February 2024 he launched an e-petition to reopen Mount Warning, which may be signed at the NSW Legislative Council e-petition website up until May 1.