Talinguru Nyakunytjaku - has Australia been hoodwinked?

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.”