Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park
Uluru-Kata Tjuta – Beats and Buds of Harmony
Uluru-Kata Tjuta. Beat the drum! A national park is the place, in line with the purity of the tropical forest and its impenetrability that dares the spirit of adventure and plunge in the unknown, where the harmony of Nature reigns supreme as in the heart with love unconditional and universal, as it does too, this harmony, in the infinity of the sea, the stretch of the strands and the expanse of the savannah, all cocooning in peace profound.
The place to begin our visit to Uluru-Kata Tjuta is the name that brings with it a kind of samba dancing in the moonlight with beautiful girls gyrating their wastes temptingly as the boys run gallantly, with swords that never can hurt a fly in their hands, from one end to the other of a place that defines the universe itself. They wear amulets, the boys and beads and waist rings, the girls. They caricature their faces and look friendly and ferocious at the same time and as the friendly runs its brush through the ferocious, the gods behind and within transfigure into human beings. And they smile. And the crowd claps away in abandon. With this, it is welcome to the Aboriginal culture from which Uluru-Kata Tjuta got its name. The name is a combination of Uluru and Kata Tjuta both of which come from the local Anangu (Aboriginal) people. Uluru means ‘Earth Mother’ whilst Kata Tjuta means ‘Many Heads’.
Here are the rocks again!
Sometimes you get to a place in this world and wonder whether you are still in the same world. Things look like the doors of heaven gently thrown open or like the sommersault of being in the space between, what is transfigurally called the interspace in which the here and there come together as one in the other.
And the person from here getting to the other shakes the head to clear a kind of mist trying to figure whether she is still here or there. It is the heavenly folded into the earthly to make it one. There are places like that on this earth, in this world and certainly, many of their kind in the universe.
There is something about the rocks of Ululu and Kata Tjuta that savours of a leap to the interspace. Uluru, a rock, is like a birthday cake waiting for the guests on the table. It sits there on the ground, its table, as the celebration of Nature’s creativity. It is called an inselberg, that is, an island mountain, which has survived the ravages of time that reduce its size but fail to remove the glamour of its mystery. That is the view from one perspective. Another perspective gives the picture of a person rolled into self in the prayerful manner of the praying mantle. Or a rare acrobatic display in which the toes are folded to rest on the ears with hands under the feet meeting on the abdomen such that a large zero with topological deformations results.
In the same vein even if in its own different way, Kata Tjuta surrounds itself with mystery too. Many Heads which is the meaning of the Aboriginal name Kata Tjuta fits this group of rocks which roll into one another with the narrow crevices between them reminding us of the concept of Passage in the paintings of Paul Cézanne. And since from their story, these rocks were originally one as all the continents of the world were once a supercontinent, even those that are spaced more apart have larger passages and so are also together with the others.
A poetic excursion into Uluru and Kata Tjuta brings us closer to their story than all geological excursions, loaded with data that isolate and numbers that insulate from the environment, can, even if praise-worthy in spite of its shortcomings bourne of the paradigm that produce them, can ever claim.
These rocks live indeed. They remain solid like ideals but changing like personality. They are a natural blend of pool of ideals, a constant, and the flow of their manifestations, the changing parameters. For example, the colour of Uluru changed from red which it has worn for many years to violet in 2004. This was caused by waterfalls on the rock.
Uluru and Kata Tjuta live also in the myths and stories of the Aborigines from which the rocks get their various names. It is not that these myths are fantasies of children that see a bird using the bed of the ocean as its nest nor the tree walking straight to the market for shopping, all of which are possible in the natural world where there are no barriers at all. The Aboriginal myths could be said to originate from the womb of Nature’s creavity in which the new is made from the given by liberating it from that which walls it within and prevents it from partaking of freedom, the heartbeat of creativity itself.
The reality behind the name is respect for the rocks and all of Nature. And it is this respect for and love of Nature that puts Australia on the map as that place where Nature decides to showcase the beauty of her creativity because didn’t they say that love begets love?
