Decolonizing the Gaze at Uluru (Ayers Rock) - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 72

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Decolonizing the Gaze at Uluru
(Ayers Rock)

Jana-Axinja Paschen
The Australian Centre, School of Historical Studies,
University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Imagining space as constituted out of difference
and interrelations enables the political recogni-
tion of the possibility of alternative trajectories.
(Massey, 1999, p. 285)

spectacle. The Rock, it seems, has been carved
out of the land and, despite its offi cial Hand-
back to traditional owners in 1985, has been
torn out of the hands of its people, the Anangu. 1
Yet, this assessment represents only one facet
of the site's many contested meanings for
Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. To
Anangu, Uluru has been sacred for thousands
of years, providing physical and spiritual shelter
for countless of generations. Its signifi cance as
natural and national 'heart' of the Australian
nation on the other hand, is a recent develop-
ment that began with the opening of the site for
tourism in the 1950s and 60s (McGrath, 1991;
Cathcart, 2002). The image of the Rock has since
come to symbolize many things: embodying to
some a sense of national belonging, it is a
symbol of (neo-)colonial cultural appropriation
to others (Marcus, 1999). The site continues to
resonate with the confl icts and efforts of inter-
cultural understanding and the hope for recon-
ciliation in postcolonial Australia (Whittaker,
1994). Divergent narratives and images of Uluru
result in different, often confl icting ways of relat-
ing to and interacting with the place. The most
contested issue in this respect is the climb to the
Rock's summit. While for Anangu the climb is of

[T]he very function of fascination is to blind us
to the fact that the other is already gazing at us.
(Žižek, 1997, p. 114)

Introduction

With visitor numbers reaching more than half a
million each year, Uluru, an international icon
of Australia, can truly be called an icon of the
tourist gaze. Flocking together at sunrise and
sunset, their cameras clicking endlessly to cap-
ture the Rock's changing colours, hundreds of
tourists each day indulge in the Western 'addic-
tion to gazing' (Oettermann, 1984). Meanwhile,
coaches and helicopters disrupt the tranquillity
that now is only rarely allowed to descend upon
the place. Aboriginal 'country', embodiment of
Tjukurpa (Aboriginal sacred law and lore of the
creation time), has been commodifi ed into a
tourist 'landscape'; Uluru, itself the sacred junc-
tion of several Aboriginal creation stories, has
been turned into a readily consumable tourist

1 Anangu is the name by which Aboriginal people from the Central and Western desert regions refer to them-
selves. Originally, it means 'person' or 'people'. The two main language groups at Mutitjulu, the Aboriginal
community inside Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, are Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara but Ngaanyatjarra
and Luritja are also spoken in this region.