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 Australia,
Sir Henry Ayers) is a large sandstone rock formation in the southern part of the Northern Territory in central Australia. O
fficially 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
