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Talinguru Nyakunytjaku - has Australia been hoodwinked?

By Ross Barnett - posted Friday, 25 June 2010


“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.

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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.

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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.

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About the Author

Ross Barnett is a Sydney-based travel writer and photographer.

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All articles by Ross Barnett

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