Talinguru Nyakunytjaku - has Australia been hoodwinked?

In December 2009, Wesley Aird, a member of the Gold Coast Native Title Group and board member of the Bennelong Society, wrote in The Australian that there was a culture of fabrication associated with Indigenous affairs in Australia that preyed on unquestioning mainstream Australians.

According to Aird, this culture of fabrication thrived “because of mainstream Australia's inability to spot a cultural fraud even when it is staring it in the face”.

“It is often shrouded in the mystical and unchallenged by the naïve for fear of giving offence,” he wrote. ”It is handsomely rewarded with grants by unwitting government officials. This false culture is abetted by a broad willingness to be hoodwinked.”

Aird said that in his own Indigenous community in south-east Queensland he had seen blatant cultural fraud and the fabrication of history. Elsewhere, the Hindmarsh Island affair in South Australia proved, he argued - in the courts, parliament and even through a royal commission - that “not every indigenous story should be taken at face value”.

“Chances are the underlying themes of that affair are being played out right now in any number of negotiations across the country,” he added.

I have just returned from another visit to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, the natural heartbeat of our nation. And it is here that I would suggest that the underlying themes of the Hindmarsh Island affair - of cultural fraud - are still being played out.

I went to Uluru to see the new Talinguru Nyakunytjaku Viewing Area, which is located on the south-east side of the Rock. Built at a staggering cost of $21 million and completed in October 2009, the TN Viewing Area is supposedly a great boon to tourism in Australia’s best known national park.

But has it been?

While the usual suspects (Parks Australia and the industry body, Tourism Central Australia) made the expected positive statements, when I spoke to people on the ground - the coach drivers, the tour guides and the average tourist - there was much disquiet about this new viewing area.

On the very first evening I was there, I overheard a conversation between a shuttle service driver and one of her friends, in which the driver was quick to point out that the Talinguru view was not good at this time of the year and that there were shadows all across the Rock as the sun rose after a chilly dawn.

The next morning I drove to the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku Viewing Area in company with an Alice Springs-based cameraman, Chris Tangey. As somebody who has had a long and often unsatisfactory relationship with the park service, Tangey was less than impressed.

“It’s been designed with contempt,” he told me. “They spent $21 million on this viewing area but $21,000 spent on a consultant’s report would have told them that it was in the wrong place to see the sunrise.

“For much of the year I would be wasting my time shooting anything here, even in the unlikely event they would issue me with a filming permit.”

Many other people that I spoke to over the next five days in and about the national park echoed what Tangey had to say.

At Yulara, the small town that doubles as the site of the Ayers Rock Resort, I spoke to a number of coach drivers - strictly on the basis that their names and the name of the company that they worked for would not be used. Such is the power that Parks Australia, a small bureaucracy with a massive ego problem, wields, that tour operators and individual tour workers are loathe to speak publicly.

One coach driver said that the sunrise viewing conditions at the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku site had been “crap” since at least mid-April and that this new viewing area was a waste of time for much of the year.

“All the tour operators knew this once they were shown the maps for the new site, as they could draw the lines of sight for the effect of the sunrise on that side of the Rock,” he said. “But there was nothing they could do about it as they don’t control what goes on in the park.”

So how did such a perverse situation come about?

When Environment Minister Peter Garrett opened the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku site on October 8th last year, Parks Australia virtually closed down the former sunrise viewing area on the north-east side of Uluru.

Sure, there had been problems with this site, which was nothing more than road shoulder parking along a kilometre or so of the Uluru Ring Road. With people sometimes aimlessly wandering back and forth across the road at dawn while cars and coaches were passing through, it was almost a miracle that no one had been killed or badly injured.

But for more than 50 years since the national park was first declared in 1958, it was where people gathered to see the sunrise. And it is where, year-round, the early morning sun strikes the Rock directly and all of the vivid colour change that is associated with dawn occurs.

To solve the safety problem, the management of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park commissioned a Traffic and Parking Study in 2005. This report by the firm Sinclair Knight Merz proposed a number of options, two of which, costed at approximately $2 million each, would have solved the safety issue and re-located the sunrise viewing area to a location that was only a kilometre further away from the Rock on that same north-east side. A short spur road was all that was that was needed in terms of big budget items, along with some short walkways that would have led to a dune viewing area.

But like any bureaucracy, Parks Australia chose instead to turn a minor project into a very major expenditure of public money. The Talinguru Nyakunytjaku project eventually required an extra 11 kilometres of roadworks in the national park, 1,600 metres of walking tracks, 760 square metres of elevated platforms and walkways and enough parking spaces for 3,000 visitors at a time.

That’s if these visitors ever come. When I was at the park in mid-June, which is part of the peak season for visitation at Uluru, the coach parking area was less than half-full at sunrise, while at other times of the day it was entirely empty.

Peter Cochrane, the Director of National Parks, claims that the new site was suggested by Anangu, the park’s traditional owners, who had cultural “issues” about a viewing area remaining on the north-east side of the Rock. Yet these cultural issues hadn’t stopped the traditional owners in the past from allowing the respected author and photographer Stanley Breeden to take pictures from one of these sites in the early 1990s.

One photograph taken from here even graced the cover of his 1994 book, Uluru: Looking After Uluru-Kata Tjuta - The Anangu Way. This dramatic sunrise image with its brilliant red glow of the north-east face, clearly shows - to those who can identify them - some of the sacred sites that are along this side of the Rock.

That book has now been reprinted and I saw copies of it in both the Ayers Rock Newsagency at Yulara and at the Anangu-owned Ininti Souvenirs store in the park’s Cultural Centre. This was most intriguing as Anangu are now deriving income from an image that they will not let ordinary tourists or other photographers aspire to.

The other strange aspect to this “cultural issues” stance is the fact that the sacred features of the north-east face of the Rock can be clearly seen by all Anangu as they exit from the local Mutitjulu community on the only sealed road that connects them to the outside world. Yet the justification by park management for their increasingly restrictive photographic controls within the national park is that these guidelines stop non-initiated Anangu people from seeing sites that they shouldn’t - just in case an “inappropriate” image is published in The Sydney Morning Herald, The New York Times or The Kalamazoo Gazette.

In recent times I have asked both the Director of National Parks and the Environment Minister himself for an explanation of this seeming anomaly, but the only answers I have got so far are spin.

Another aspect of these apparent double standards that Parks Australia don’t like mentioned is the fact that tucked inside Breeden’s book is a reproduction of a painting by the Anangu artist and one-time park management board member, Kunbry Pei Pei, of the north-east face of Uluru, in which she not only painted several of these sacred sites but also explained part of their story.

But I digress a bit. After spending a frustrating morning at Talinguru Nyakunytjaku watching the sun struggle to light up any of the south-east face of the Rock, I decided that a morning visit to the old sunrise viewing area on the north-east side of Uluru would be worthwhile.

Over three successive mornings I watched as the sun came up and instantly set all of this side of the Rock ablaze with warm, ruddy light - a spectacular contrast to what was happening just a few kilometres away at Talinguru Nyakunytjaku.

It was here that I met Bert Plenkovich from Alstonville in northern New South Wales. A keen amateur photographer, Bert had already been to the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku site on the morning that I met him but had decided that as a photo-taking viewpoint it was decidedly second-rate.

“There was no colour and we kept waiting for something to happen light-wise but it didn’t,” he said. “For me Talinguru was a complete anti-climax.”

Swiss tourists Alexander and Nicole Zbinden had also come to the same conclusion. After arriving at Talinguru Nyakunytjaku at 7.10am (20 minutes before sun-up), they quickly realised that the new site didn’t have a good view and headed off to the old sunrise viewing area as well.

“It’s beautiful here,” Alexander said of the old viewing area. “It’s really nice. We could tell that Talinguru was nothing and we were lucky that we still had time to get around here.”

Further along the stretch of road that marks the old sunrise viewing area I met a group of Welsh backpackers who hadn’t even bothered to go to Talinguru Nyakunytjaku in the first place. They had come to this now unmarked site after hearing “campground whispers” that the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku viewpoint was only worthwhile as a sunrise option in the height of summer.

One morning a small tour group from Anangu Tours also stopped at the old sunrise viewing area. Their driver was company manager Andrew Simpson who told me without hesitation that the park was over-regulated and that Parks Australia didn’t know how to “handle tourism”.

But the final word on Talinguru Nyakunytjaku must belong to the tour guide I met in Alice Springs a few days later. He said that when he told his passengers that the new viewing area had cost $21 million and was put in the “wrong spot” for sunrise, their jaws dropped.

“Then we tell them that Parks Australia is stumping up another $21 million so that they can get the sun shifted around to light up the side of Uluru where the new viewing area is.

“That always gets a good laugh.”

View of Uluru one hour after sunrise from the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku Viewing Area
(At most about 20 per cent of the Rock has sunlight on it and the rest is in deep shadow)

View of Uluru at 4pm from the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku Viewing Area
(In October 2009 a Parks Australia spokesperson said that the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku Viewing Area would provide "stunning vistas at all times of the day")

View of part of the north-east face of Uluru from the old sunrise viewing area
(This image was taken at 7.33am on June 14, 2010, just four minutes after sunrise - this image shows intense colour on the Rock and pink tones in the sky,
both of which are missing from pictures of Uluru taken at the same time from the Talinguru Nyakunytjaku Viewing Area)