Invented Traditions

On October 26 the board that manages the Uluru National Park banned all climbing of the monolith once known as Ayers Rock. The decision is not only bound to wreak serious damage to the well-developed tourist industry at the site. It also leaves a sour taste in the mouths of those who had until now regarded the rock as a site of awe and wonder, the symbolic heart of the continent, belonging to all Australians. Instead, they have discovered that rulings about the site by a local community of just 296 Aboriginal people can override the wishes of rest of the nation.

Most discussion in the media has accepted at face value the official rationale. The national park’s board claims the ban is an act of respect for the religion of the local Mutitjulu community, for whom Uluru is supposedly a sacred site of great cultural and religious importance.

However, as the geologist Marc Hendrickx has pointed out in his long, impressive but eventually unsuccessful campaign against the ban, the cultural traditions the board relies upon are a very recent invention. In articles in Quadrant and the national press, Hendrickx has pointed out that members of the Mutitjulu community endorsed the climb as far back as living memory extends. In the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, they guided anthropologist Charles Mountford to the summit. Mountford recounted their creation myths in his 1965 book Ayers Rock, Its People, Their Beliefs and Their Art. Hendrickx also points to the Lutheran layman Lou Borgelt, who in 1946 climbed to the top with the help of two local Aboriginal guides, Tiger Tjalkalyirri and Mitjenkeri Mick. A five-minute extract of Borgelt’s film of himself and his guides on the summit can now be seen on YouTube.

Hendrickx also quotes the experience of Derek Roff, a park ranger from 1968 to 1985. When the local airstrip and tourist accommodation were upgraded in the 1970s, Roff consulted thirty-five elders about the increased numbers climbing. They said they did not want climbing to stop, and only one site should be closed off, a cave once used for men’s initiation ceremonies. Roff made sure the tourist path around the base of the rock steered walkers away from that cave.

Several other examples that disprove current excuses for the ban are in Hendrickx’s recent book, A Guide to Climbing Ayers Rock. He records assurances given in 1983 by two regional Aboriginal bodies to the Hawke Labor government when it decided to give the local Aboriginal people freehold title to the rock, in return for which they would give a perpetual lease to the Commonwealth to create the national park. Government minister Clyde Holding said the negotiators guaranteed the rock would always be open for the benefit of all Australians and that “for the visiting tourist it will be business as usual”.

However, the demands of Aboriginal politics have since shifted dramatically. The principal Aboriginal demand is now for special recognition in the Australian Constitution of their status as the original owners of the continent. The disparate groups that constitute the Aboriginal political class made this a collective aim at a conference in 2017, held for its symbolism at Uluru itself. The “Uluru Statement from the Heart” wants the Constitution to guarantee self-government for the so-called indigenous nations—funded, of course, by the rest of us. The ban on climbing Uluru is another expression of this political demand. It might seem a small issue in itself, but its symbolic clout will sustain the wider movement, setting an example others will want to emulate. In short, the ban on climbing is not about culture or religion. It is a little exercise in political power.

Beneath all this gamesmanship, however, lies a darker story, which the Aboriginal political class rarely acknowledge. Mutitjulu is one of Australia’s 1100 remote Aboriginal communities. These communities did not evolve from traditional culture but were created by the Homelands movement of the 1970s, a creature of mainly white academics and bureaucrats, funded by both national and state governments, with the romantic goal of restoring Aboriginal culture and religion. The movement was not indigenous to Australia, but simply a copy of the same left-wing policies imposed upon indigenous people in Canada and United States over much the same period, which are today being inflicted on the Amazonian tribes of Brazil.

Mutitjulu is typical of the remote community movement. When it was handed over by the Hawke government, Uluru had become one of Australia’s most popular tourist sites, accommodating around half a million visitors a year. Its national park board offered the Mutitjulu community an annual share of all revenues, plus training and employment in the tourist industry. Everything seemed set for a good outcome.

Rather than solve all their problems, ownership of the site only compounded them. Instead of creating an Aboriginal economy, the revenue from the national park was treated as “sit-down money”, an effortless form of handout. By 2005, of the 800 people employed at the five hotels and camping ground at nearby Ayers Rock Resort, not one was Aboriginal, despite long-standing efforts by the resort’s managers to recruit them. Some 70 per cent of adults at Mutitjulu lived on welfare. The few who had jobs were employed part-time as guides for the national park, telling dreamtime stories to visitors. All housing maintenance and building were done by outside contractors. A report by a social worker in 2005 observed that, even though the funding paid for two local schools, the children had no incentive to study or even attend. “There is no need to study hard to get a job,” the report said, “because people are guaranteed welfare payments or can exert demanding pressures on family members for money and other resources.”

Part of the Mutitjulu problem has always been that, like other government-founded remote places its size, it is an artificial community which accommodates people from three tribal groups—Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and Ngaanyatjarra, now known collectively as Anangu people. Each group still retains its own language, and loyalties are to each of their clan hierarchies, rather than the community as a whole. The result is that disputes are many and hostility abounds.

The desire of the park board to respect and preserve the local culture and religion is equally artificial. As I have written several times in these pages and in The Break-up of Australia, in central and northern Australia, anthropologists as respected as Ted Strehlow and Bill Stanner both recorded the traditional High Culture that once governed Aboriginal societies had become obsolete by the 1930s. Attempts to revive it before and after the Second World War were failures. The old initiated men lamented that none of them had sons or grandsons responsible enough to be trusted with the secrets of their sacred objects, chants and ceremonies. Young Aboriginal men and women were no longer interested in preserving traditional Aboriginal ways. They moved to where the white cattle stations were established, where they were employed as stockmen and domestic servants, choosing their own partners rather than marrying according to customary clan rules.

Liberal access to alcohol also wreaked social havoc. The Mutitjulu community has been progressively overwhelmed by alcoholism, coupled with violence of all kinds, especially domestic violence and child sexual abuse. In 2004, the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, Clare Martin, said Mutitjulu suffered widespread “social dysfunction” including chemical addiction, malnutrition, sexual abuse, child prostitution and neglect. In 2005, a coroner’s court investigating the deaths of two Mutitjulu youths from petrol sniffing was told that young girls in the community regularly prostituted themselves for petrol.

The public servant who brokered the deal to give Uluru to the community, Bob Beadman, later disowned the policy: “With the benefit of the passage of time, we’ve been horrified by the outcome.”

In 2007, the government-commissioned report Little Children Are Sacred, by Pat Anderson and Rex Wild, found child abuse occurred in every one of the forty-five remote communities it visited in the Northern Territory. In response, the Howard government minister, Mal Brough, launched the “Intervention” into remote communities, banning alcohol, quarantining welfare payments, sacking failed administrators and jailing Aboriginal paedophiles. The first community the police and army targeted was Mutitjulu.

Despite support for the Intervention from Aboriginal women throughout the Territory, the urban, university-educated Aboriginal political class and its white mentors denounced it as racist, and offered instead their own program of self-management and local sovereignty as the solution.

In other words, the ban on climbing Uluru is simply one more example of the political strategy invented by urban intellectuals and bureaucrats who have tried to impose on the site a culture that exists only in their own romantic political fantasies. Like the tedious rituals now imposed on virtually all Australian government and educational institutions—welcome-to-country ceremonies, acknowledgments of elders, smoking ceremonies to ward off evil spirits, kangaroo-skin cloaks—the Aboriginal religion that banned climbing Ayers Rock is itself a recent political invention, and just as bogus as the rest of them.