Set the alarm: Uluru’s new Sunrise Journeys light show is worth the wake up

A scene from Sunrise Journeys, Uluru’s new pre-dawn laser, light and sound show, based on an artwork by three Anangu artists.
OPINION
What’s new Uluru? Kim Knight experiences the area’s new tourist interactions that complement, rather than compete with the monolith.
We’d been flying for about four days when the air steward’s voice crackled across the scenery.
“Below, you’ll see Lake Eyre . . . First European, 1840 . . . Largest saltwater lake . . . South Australia.”
WHAT? How could we still be in SOUTH Australia?
Holidaying New Zealanders have a tendency to treat Australia as an extension of home (with better prawns). Melbourne is an artsy long weekend. Sydney is a shopping trip. But go beyond those coastal cities and there is another world. Absolutely nothing can prepare you for the size of this country’s interior.
Track your progress via the changing colours below. From Sydney towards Uluru – blue to green to yellow to sienna. There is the occasional flash of a roof or the straight line of a road but, for the longest time, nothing to suggest human habitation.
Eventually, the dirt turns red.
Uluru is almost smack in the middle of Australia, at the lower end of its Northern Territory. The airport is still called Ayers Rock, the 1873 legacy of the first non-Aboriginal person to sight the geological behemoth that locals had been calling something else for the previous 30,000 years.
“This town didn’t exist 40 years ago,” says the park ranger tasked with introducing our contingent to the rules and regulations of doing media business in Uluru.
He’s talking about Yulara, the settlement that mostly consists of Ayers Rock Resort. (Jump onboard the free, 20-minute loop bus to get a proper sense of the place. Campsites, lodges, apartments and hotels, a camel farm, a town square with a supermarket, cafes, galleries and retail and, most intriguingly, a glimpse of the back end – staff accommodation and emergency services, et al).
Once, tourists stayed much closer to Uluru. Some rooms, we are told, had windows that faced directly towards portions of the rock that are sacred to Anangu, the Aboriginal owners of this place. Now, accommodation is outside the boundary of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park which is jointly managed by Traditional Owners and the Australian Government.
Over the decades, the tourism footprint has shifted – and not just in the physical sense. Visiting Uluru is an exercise in discovering how much I don’t know and how much more I will never know.
But first: That elephant on the horizon.
“I guess, eventually, you stop noticing it?” I ask a staffer.
“No!” she replies.
I will, ultimately, see Uluru in the context of the Wintjiri Wiru sunset dinner and drone show, a dawn excursion to a viewing platform followed by a guided, up close walk around its base and a visit to the Cultural Centre, a nighttime buffet in front of the Field of Light installation and, finally, the spectacular, brand new sound and light show that is Sunrise Journeys. Nope. I never stopped noticing Uluru.
Before my arrival, I’d wondered about all the bells and whistles. How could laser-lit spectacles, synchronised drone shows and (I am not making this up) segway tours around the base of Uluru, sit comfortably alongside the unparalleled natural grandeur and 30,000 years of unbroken living culture? Wouldn’t being there be enough?
Uluru is monumentally beautiful. A 340-metre high arkose sandstone formation with a 9.4-kilometre circumference that appears to rise straight up out of nowhere. The sheer scale speaks for itself. But if you want to scratch even the surface level of the stories it tells to the Anangu – the people whose land you’re on – you must enlist some help.
I’m astonished to discover Anangu stories can only be told in situ. You really do have to be there. And even then, visitors will only get children’s-level “Tjukurpa”.
To quote directly from the handbook: “Tjukurpa encompasses Anangu law, lore, cultural, morality, ceremony, inma, creation time stories, art and cultural knowledge. It sets out rules for living, rules for social interacting and how to care for country. It refers to past, present and future.”
So, I learn about the rufous-hare wallaby people, a devil dog and a kingfisher woman; the crested bellbird men and a blue-tongued lizard. Stories in (and about) the rock that – even at entry level – contain life lessons. Finish what you start. Don’t ignore a warning of danger. The greedy and dishonest will get their comeuppance. It’s dangerous to climb Uluru.
“This story is still here and will be forever,” says the man who greets our group at Wintjiri Wiru, an experience centred on a chapter of the Mala ancestral story that takes place at Uluru. (What happens after this chapter? I’m still getting my head around the idea that I must physically travel to another place to find out).
Award-winning Wintjiri Wuru is my first formal tourist interaction with Uluru. A short bus ride, a raised boardwalk and a gourmet picnic hamper dinner eaten on the steps of a sustainably constructed amphitheatre in the middle of the desert.
In brief: Smoked emu is my new favourite charcuterie, bush tomato romesco is my condiment of the year and curried crocodile tastes like chicken. (Two plump prawns are a long way from home; a cauliflower canape doesn’t seem terribly special until I clock the supermarket’s $10 apiece price tag). I have been given a blanket for the cold and the Penfold’s hasn’t stopped flowing. Cue lights, no cameras – and 1100 drones in synchronised action.
Wintjiri Wiru is a spectacular light show that begins as the stars light up and Uluru is just a silhouette in the darkness. It complements, rather than competes, with the rock and that Sunday night, I was certain it was an experience that couldn’t be topped.
Two mornings later, and my jaw is somewhere on the red dirt below. Three football fields worth of desert have become a digital canvas. Bit-by-bit, a painting I’d stood in front of the day prior at the Gallery of Central Australia, is coming to life.
Ngura Nganampa Wiru Mulapa, an artwork by three renowned female Anangu artists – Selina Kulitja, Denise Brady and Valerie Brumby – translates from Pitjantjatjara to “our country is beautiful”. Against a soundtrack by Anangu musician Jeremy Whiskey, water holes swirl, trees burst into flames, flocks of cockatoos rise up and flowers emerge from the ground. And, at the end, when the actual sun rises: Uluru.
I’m there for the premiere. It stuns a noisy and well-travelled media contingent into pin-drop silence. My alarm had gone off at 4.45am. A merino hat, gloves and jumper, a down puffer jacket and two hot cups of lemon myrtle tea were not making a dent in the sub-zero morning cold, but I didn’t care. Uluru is a dawn to dusk (and beyond) destination and it is worth the sleep deprivation (and cost) to make the most of both.
Ayer’s Rock Resort is managed by Voyages Indigenous Tourism Australia which has developed these tourist add-ons in partnership with the indigenous community. The first story I saw was ancient, but the second was entirely contemporary and the painting it is based on was specially commissioned and is now on display at the Gallery of Central Australia, right next door to my hotel. Once, tourists ignored Tjukurpa and climbed Uluru. Now, we see the country the way its people want us to.
It is just 151 years since the first European contact with the people of this area. At the Visitor’s Centre, I buy a book that explains that while a handful of surveyors, prospectors and scientists followed, the land was too poor for pastoralists. The colonisers were tourists – via the first vehicle-suitable road in 1948 and, a decade later, the development of a new airstrip and permanent accommodation. It was 1985 before Anangu finally reclaimed ownership of the national park land. The day after, Parks Australia signed a 99-year lease and the area is now managed by a 12-strong management board with an eight-member Anangu majority.
Back home, I do more reading. Voyages’ Reconcilliation Action Plan is in its second iteration. It lists dozens of deliverables, ranging from minimum indigenous employment rates (from 2% in 2011 to 44% in 2021) to minimum procurement spends with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses (7% this year; 10% next year).
My midday wander to the town square includes a stop at the Kulata Academy Cafe, staffed by students from the National Indigenous Training Academy, a live-in training programme that just celebrated its 700th graduate. Free experiences offered by the resort range from an outdoor didgeridoo workshop to a bush food lecture where I learn the yellow-flowered plant with seeds that can be ground to make a dough look (to me) identical to the yellow-flowered plant with the seeds you can use as a laxative.
I try to imagine this place in summer when the mercury routinely hits 35C and the flies flock to the sweat on your face. You could nap in your room or swim in a pool or head to the brand new Australian Native High Tea experience at the luxe Sails in the Desert hotel for 1.5 hours of air-conditioned deliciousness. Tasting highlights included a take on the Tim Tam with caramel infused from locally picked saltbush, and a lemon aspen and barramundi tart, in which the fish tasted surprisingly like crayfish. The teas are by Blak Brews, an indigenous-led company that recently won the reality television competition Gordon Ramsay’s Australian Food Stars. Obviously, I ordered the “red centre” (rosehip, hibiscus, strawberry gum and quandong).
All of these activities create career paths and economic opportunities for locals. The more things to do, the longer tourists are likely to stay (and spend). On my second night, that meant an outdoor buffet where my tablemates included the parents of an Australian sports star and a couple on their 25th wedding anniversary. The vegan option was pumpkin with warrigal greens, I counted five shooting stars and, as I walked back to the bus through the crazily ambitious “field of lights” installation (15 tonnes of lights covering 49,000 square metres of dessert), wondered whether snakes hibernated in winter.
One morning, I watched the dawn sun catch Uluru on fire from another raised viewing platform. Later, I joined the guided Mala walk around a small portion of the rock’s base. At ground level, the stories are quieter. We filed past caves, photographed slivers of bright morning light creeping over shadowed sandstone outcrops and, at the end, learned about the legacy of past tourism – decades of dumped rubbish, putrefied water holes and worse.
It was a necessary reality check. The human-made tourist activities I took part in that heightened the red centre’s wow factor took place from afar. Cocktails, canapes and wide-angle selfies. At some point, you want to get up close to Uluru. Stand still, be quiet and understand you are an infinitesimal blip in this story.
GETTING THERE
Ayers Rock Resort is 6km from Ayers Rock Airport and offers complimentary bus transfers. Direct flight options include Melbourne (3hrs), Sydney (3.40hrs) and Brisbane (3.45hrs). Alice Springs is 446km away (around five hours drive or 50 minutes by air).
DETAILS
ayersrockresort.com.au
Kim Knight’s visit to Uluru was courtesy of Voyages Indigenous Tourism Australia.