Even Uluru, the Rock formerly known as Ayer’s, is diminished by mass tourism. There are crowds of chattering tourists at the designated scenic photo spots, who just flew in for the day from Sydney or Tokyo, and ask each other loudly what all the fuss is about.
For it is, undeniably, just a big old rock.
To appreciate Uluru’s splendid isolation, you need to take your time getting there. After a few thousand kilometers of nothing, the largest rock in the world can’t help making an impression. Context is everything.
There is also an easy way to escape the crowd, and that is to walk around the rock. Perfectly flat but ten kilometers long, the hike is too much for most visitors, and for part of it we seemed to have Uluru to ourselves. If you take your time, there really is something magical about the size and the solitude and the endless patterns in the surface of the rock, patterns that appear and disappear and change color with the light.
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Uluru was handed back to its traditional owners in 1985, and the visitors’ center has a good overview of the local Aboriginal culture and the traditions that surround the rock. But there is no explanation of the geology. In a 36-page guide to Uluru, one half of one page contains a brief account of current thinking, along with a reminder that this is just the ‘western’ account of Uluru.
As Uluru is unique, the geology is fascinating: it involves a collision between India and Australia, an ancient inland sea, and a hell of a lot of erosion. Our tour guide made an excellent attempt to explain all this by drawing a map of Australia in the dirt, scooping up soil to illustrate mountain formation and pouring a bottle of water over his model to suggest the inland sea.
Unfortunately, we had two people in our group whose Christian faith led them to question conventional geology, and who were armed with stock lines like "that’s a theory, not a fact, right?" Our guide lacked the scientific training to deal with questions like these, and many people were left confused.
You can make the case that Uluru is one of the few places where indigenous people can tell their stories to the exclusion of all others - including Genesis. But most people have a very limited understanding of science, and I believe that’s a much bigger problem for all of us - because it leads to poor decisions by individuals and by governments on issues like education, healthcare, and the environment, as well as economic planning. The traditional owners of Uluru are squandering an opportunity to educate millions of people. I guess that is their right.