google.com, pub-0288379932320714, DIRECT, f08c47fec0942fa0 GRAVIR LES MONTAGNES... EN PEINTURE: ULURU / AYERS ROCKS PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1894 BY WALTER BALDWIN SPENCER

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

ULURU / AYERS ROCKS PHOTOGRAPHED IN 1894 BY WALTER BALDWIN SPENCER


WALTER BALDWIN SPENCER (1860-1929) Uluru /Ayers Rock (863 m -2,831 ft) Australia (Northern Territory)   In  Uluru, Ayers Rock, central Australia, 1894,  Glass plate negative 80 mm x 106 mm, Museums Victoria

WALTER BALDWIN SPENCER (1860-1929)
Uluru /Ayers Rock (863 m -2,831 ft)
Australia (Northern Territory)


In Uluru, Ayers Rock, central Australia, 1894, Glass plate negative 80 mm x 106 mm, 
Museums Victoria


The artist
Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer commonly referred to as Baldwin Spencer, was a British-Australian evolutionary biologist, anthropologist and ethnologist. He is known for his fieldwork with Aboriginal peoples in Central Australia, contributions to the study of ethnography, and academic collaborations with Frank Gillen. Spencer introduced the study of zoology at the University of Melbourne and held the title of Emeritus Professor until his death in 1929.In 1894 a new field was opened up for Spencer when he joined the W.A. Horn scientific expedition which left Adelaide in May 1894 to explore Australia. Spencer paid two more visits to the centre of Australia, one in 1923 with Dr Leonard Keith Ward, the government geologist of South Australia, and the other in 1926. These visits enabled Spencer to revise his earlier researches and consider on the spot various opposing theories that had been brought forward. His The Arunta: a Study of a Stone Age People (1927), revisits and reaffirms his earlier conclusions; Gillen's name as joint author appeared on the title-page though he had died 15 years before. Wanderings in Wild Australia, published a year later and slightly more popular in form, completes the list of his books. A list of his other published writings will be found in Spencer's Last Journey (1931). Spencer went to London in 1927 to see these books through the press. Ten years before he had said that he realised he was not getting younger and must regard his field work as finished. In February 1929, however, in his sixty-ninth year, he travelled in a cargo boat to Magallanes and then went in a little schooner to Ushuaia at the south of Tierra del Fuego. 

 

The mountain 
Uluru (863m -2,831 ft) also known as Ayers Rock (in honour of the then Chief Secretary of South AustraliaSir Henry Ayers) is a large sandstone rock formation in the southern part of the Northern Territory in central Australia.   Officially  the rock is gazetted as "Uluru / Ayers Rock". 
It lies 335 km (208 mi) south west of the nearest large town, Alice Springs, 450 km (280 mi) by road.
Kata Tjuta and Uluru are the two major features of the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Uluru is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara Anangu, the Aboriginal people of the area. The area around the formation is home to an abundance of springs, waterholes, rock caves, and ancient paintings.  Both Uluru and the nearby Kata Tjuta formation have great cultural significance for the Aṉangu people, the traditional inhabitants of the area, who lead walking tours to inform visitors about the local flora and fauna, bush food and the Aboriginal dreamtime stories of the area.
Uluru is notable for appearing to change colour at different times of the day and year, most notably when it glows red at dawn and sunset.
Uluru is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Uluru is an inselberg, literally "island mountain"An inselberg is a prominent isolated residual knob or hill that rises abruptly from and is surrounded by extensive and relatively flat erosion lowlands in a hot, dry region.  Uluru is also often referred to as a monolith, although this is a somewhat ambiguous term that is generally avoided by geologists. The remarkable feature of Uluru is its homogeneity and lack of jointing and parting at bedding surfaces, leading to the lack of development of scree slopes and soil. These characteristics led to its survival, while the surrounding rocks were eroded. For the purpose of mapping and describing the geological history of the area, geologists refer to the rock strata making up Uluru as the Mutitjulu Arkose, and it is one of many sedimentary formations filling the Amadeus Basin.
According to the Aṉangu, traditional landowners of Uluru: 
The world was once a featureless place. None of the places we know existed until creator beings, in the forms of people, plants and animals, traveled widely across the land. Then, in a process of creation and destruction, they formed the landscape as we know it today. Aṉangu land is still inhabited by the spirits of dozens of these ancestral creator beings which are referred to as Tjukuritja or Waparitja.
There are a number of differing accounts given, by outsiders, of Aboriginal ancestral stories for the origins of Uluru and its many cracks and fissures. One such account, taken from Robert Layton's (1989) Uluru: An Aboriginal history of Ayers Rock, reads as follows:
Uluru was built up during the creation period by two boys who played in the mud after rain. When they had finished their game they travelled south to Wiputa ... Fighting together, the two boys made their way to the table topped Mount Conner, on top of which their bodies are preserved as boulders. 
Two other accounts are given in Norbert Brockman's (1997) Encyclopedia of Sacred Places.
The first tells of serpent beings who waged many wars around Uluru, scarring the rock. The second tells of two tribes of ancestral spirits who were invited to a feast, but were distracted by the beautiful Sleepy Lizard Women and did not show up. In response, the angry hosts sang evil into a mud sculpture that came to life as the dingo. There followed a great battle, which ended in the deaths of the leaders of both tribes. The earth itself rose up in grief at the bloodshed, becoming Uluru.
The Commonwealth Department of Environment's webpage advises:
Many...Tjukurpa such as Kalaya (Emu), Liru (poisonous snake), Lungkata (blue tongue lizard), Luunpa (kingfisher) and Tjintir-tjintirpa (willie wagtail) travel through Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa National Park. Other Tjukurpa affect only one specific area.
Kuniya, the woma python, lived in the rocks at Uluru where she fought the Liru, the poisonous snake.
It is sometimes reported that those who take rocks from the formation will be cursed and suffer misfortune. There have been many instances where people who removed such rocks attempted to mail them back to various agencies in an attempt to remove the perceived curse.

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2022 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau

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