In 2017, we spent three weeks in Central Australia, guests of my generous Australian in-laws who wanted to mark the occasion of their 50th wedding anniversary in a special way. We travelled across the vast sandstone ocean, stopping for a day here and a day there to traverse a fraction of an immense ridge or take a dip in the crystal clear pool of a pock-marked gulch. We drove alongside impressive mountain ranges; blew out a tyre on a dusty creek bed fringed with ancient palms and ferns; imagined ourselves back in time at the Hermannsburg Mission; sat round the campfire and swapped stories; lay on our backs under a Southern Hemisphere sky, trying to make sense of the unfamiliar constellations. I scrutinised the ghostly lines of Albert Namatjira’s gumtrees; read books by Arthur Groom and Bruce Chatwin, soaking up tales of wonder and mystery; of human suffering caused by breathtaking arrogance and ignorance and stupidity; of perseverance in the face of adversity; of human kindness, the sort that occasionally materialises in the midst of human callousness, reminding us that there is always hope.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that we did not drive ourselves from A to B, nor pitch the tents in which we slept, nor make the fire each night, nor prepare the food eaten around it. This was done by stocky, white-socked Keith and his colleague (whose name escapes me now). They fed and watered us; showed us ancient things with a deep respect for the people who were here long before the likes of us – cosseted white tourists, spending our dollars on camel rides and early morning excursions by hot air balloon. It was impossible not to be stirred in this place, even for us outsiders – by the vastness of the country, by its wildness, its earthiness, its colours; by the strange cosmology of which every crag and mound and gulley seem to speak.
One morning, we got up before dawn and drove to Uluru. “What’s all the fuss about?”, said my husband, before we got there, when it was still dark and there was a chill in the air. “It’s just a rock.” But it isn’t just a rock. It’s a place where changeable and awesome elements converge – red, red earth; expansive light; mighty winds; sparkling water – and so it is never the same beguiling thing twice. It’s a place where humans converge and have done for millennia, resting in the shadow of something much mightier than they; seeking communion; sharing stories; making meaning. It’s a place that reminds us that there is something beyond…beyond that which can be easily comprehended, controlled, subjugated.
Back in London, I mixed some pigments – earthy ochres and umbers – and laid them on thick with a palette knife, and felt a small connection to this monumental place.
From the west the vertical strata of the Rock is obvious. It is an immense tilted monolith of sandstone bedding, rising to eleven hundred feet sheer above the surrounding plain, and undermined at its base, in places, by long cylindrical caves, in some cases more than a hundred feet deep. The Rock is reputed to be one and three-quarters of a mile long from west-north-west to east-south-east, and seven-eighths of a mile wide. From a distance the colour of the Rock is never the same, altering every hour of the day; but close at hand it is a light brick-red, with a stucco effect over its whole surface, caused no doubt by the cracking away of small flakes during the terrific summer heat.
From ‘I Saw a Strange Land’, by Arthur Groom. The Text Publishing Company, 2015.
The world and its problems were distant and unreal. The great monoliths in the desert were so symbolic of defiance amid desolation that I could not fail to gain at least some strength of purpose at sight of them. I do not think any of the few white men who have travelled slowly towards them in a desert pilgrimage, have not been affected in the same way.
From ‘I Saw a Strange Land’, by Arthur Groom. The Text Publishing Company, 2015.
See my painting of Uluru in Portfolio.