Look at a map of Australia. Not the political map – state boundaries and capital cities mean nothing right now – the vegetation map. You’ll see that apart from a greenish fringe, like the scum on a bathtub of rusty water, most of Australia is desert. No plants. No cutesy kangaroos or koalas, just hectares and hectares of blue sky and red earth.
What’s more surprising than the sheer amount of nothingness, is that there are actually people living in it. Alice Springs is one such town in the heart of the outback. It is the primary waypoint for the multitude of tourists hoping to visit Uluru – Australia’s most famous landmark apart from the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
If you’ve never heard of Uluru or Kata Tjuta, perhaps you might know them by their politically incorrect names: Ayers Rock and the Olgas. Those of us educated during the roaring eighties certainly do – the former coming from an alleged aborigine torturer, the latter from European royalty –and we commit unspeakable thoughtcrimes unintentionally, attracting harsh glares from academics and other inner party members every time we speak them. Giving back the land and the (very lucrative) naming rights to the traditional aboriginal owners comes with best intentions, I’m sure. Reconciliation has been in vogue for at least two decades now. But I’m a simple guy from South-East Asia, and I’ve seen this sort of thing before: It’s called ‘Re-education in the Year Zero’.
Once you see Uluru, however, the names lose meaning. How do you name a monolith that changes colour as the day passes; that floats like an ochre iceberg, nine-tenths under a sea of red land? How then, do you own it? In fact, who owns it? The government? The traditional owners? The people of Alice Springs? While we’re at it let’s also count in the corporate behemoth that owns the nearby resort, listed on the stock exchange. Let’s count in the tribes of neon-wearing aborigines that drift drunk and loud through the shopping malls of downtown Alice Springs, to retire at dusk to the permanently dry Todd River bed. I felt more and more indignant as signs everywhere warned me not to climb or take photographs or disturb a single particle of this sacred, sacred site.
Hello! I am Australian too! Not by birthright, but I worked bloody hard to get here. I paid to be Australian, just like I paid to get to Uluru, or Ayers Rock, or whatever. And nothing, no multi-lingual signposts, no rock paintings, no skivvy-wearing, latte-quaffing thought-police was going to stop me treading where I had earned the right to tread.
Having said all that, violating a sacred site isn’t that exciting. Sacred sites in outback Australia look just anywhere else: brown and rocky. Tourists often remark how even man-made sacred sites, like Beijing’s Forbidden City, are pretty boring. I gleefully jumped a fence, took a few candid shots, checked my soul for curses, and jumped back jaded. Things tend to lose their dangerous ‘edge’ when you’ve got busloads of Korean tourists surrounding you, snapping their Nikons in all directions like the holiday paparazzi.
We returned to Alice Springs to find the media there in full force to catch Midnight Oil’s free concert on the lawns of Lasseter’s Casino, a world-class gambling den in the middle of nowhere. And what will you find if you go into Lasseter’s, and indeed any other casino around the world? Asians. Never ceases to amaze me. A town like Alice, without enough Chinese to make a spring roll, manages to fill Lasseter’s across the Todd with Asians.
Midnight Oil played on for a marathon two hours before concluding their set and taking off their sweaty cardigans for an encore. Then, as if frontman Peter Garrett had imbued me with his stamina, I bounced back to Alice on foot, trolling for a party in the direction of the Melanka’s Youth Hostel.
I have never seen a more multicultural mix of backpacker booty! Blond Japanese Daishoku-boys, Spanish Senoritas, Swiss Fraus, and me drinking beer from jugs and dancing on Melanka’s tables – not a single one of us over 30 – until three in the morning. Staggering back to bed around four, I paused only to grab a cigarette from two British girls heading out to another party.
The population of Alice Springs on any given day must be sixty percent international tourists. On the top of Anzac Hill, the only other English speaker was a grim girl from London who gave every sentence a dollop of ‘fuck’.
“… haven’t met one person who actually lives here.” I said.
“Yeah. You’d have thought no-one’d fucking travel after fucking September 11th.”
“Is it serious back home?”
“Yeah. All that fucking Axis of Evil shit. Fucking depressing.”
The locals stay well hidden. There is so much free land around Alice that all family houses are mansions, with copious grounds for the benefit of one’s privacy. Just to give you an idea of how sparsely populated Alice is, the civic golf course is ten minutes walk from the CBD, and even from there the night sky is surprisingly clear.
The desert night sky is the epitome of starkness. The darkness is as black as a mine shaft. The stars are so clear they don’t twinkle and you can almost make out their roundness. The stars and space are so astronomically definite that there’s no denying they exist, save at the highest levels of astrophysics. They just are. And at night you can see them. I mean, really see them.
For a short moment during the solar eclipse, the moon cut a path of desert night across the land, twenty kilometers south of Leichhardt; six hundred kilometers north of Adelaide, the closest major city. The beam of darkness was so narrow you could see daylight at both ends, illuminating the hills on either side. The sun took an hour to get eaten away by the moon, shining with full force the whole time. We watched it slowly disappear, ten seconds at a time, through a non-prescription welding mask. The land changed colour from bright red to maroon, like a time-lapse movie of a sunset.
Then: bang! Everything went black, like God had switched out the lights. My father said he noticed the silence – all the animals thought night had fallen. But I was watching the sun. The sun! It had disappeared! And in its place was an alien ring of light in the sky! A flaming eight-ball, the licking event horizon of a star gone black hole, a sight to inspire not just awe, but also panic. Where had the sun gone?
Though no bigger than a button, the eclipse occupied my entire field of vision. I saw a ring of beads – light filtering through the mountains and caverns on the moon – just like the Americans near us said we would. They watched the whole thing from next to their bus – with a powerful American filter lens hooked up to a powerful American telescope, hooked up to a powerful American DV camera, recording the event because they could.
“We travel round the world huntin’ eclipses.” Their spokesman pulled the ‘rrs’ through his nose –
wrrld – definitely American.
“Are you all from the same country?”
“Oh no! We’ve gaht some from Minessota, I’m from California, Bahb’s from Louisiana,”
(Hey!) “And Jerry’s from Texas.” (Howdy!)
Then, as quickly as the eclipse ended and light descended once more, the crowd packed up and shuffled out of Leichhardt in a kilometer-long convoy back to Adelaide.
What an event! We’re not talking just nature here, we’re talking celestial motion for Christ’s sakes, I wanted to tell my friends and colleagues. It’s just so big! So … huge! How can you put a name … ! Words cannot begin … !
Look at the map. You might just see the word ‘Uluru’. But you don’t see Uluru, or the endless red sea it sits in. Nothing that we can hope to individually own will be visible on that map. But with names and language we attempt vainly to squeeze the whole universe into our comprehension. Our time on Earth is as fleeting as an eclipse. Our footprints in the sand, whether ochre or golden, are washed away with the wind and the tide. How much can we, Americans, corporations, Australians, aborigines, ever own?
For a split-second: everything. For eternity: nothing.
