WHO OWNS AYRES ROCK?
by Peter B. English
The late Alice Springs journalist-author, Peter B. English – a man well versed in Aboriginal land rights issues – wrote “Storm Over Uluru,” he said, “to set the record straight.”
A respected elder of the Ayres Rock region, Kunmanara (known as Paddy Uluru) rejected every move by the Pitjantjatjara people and the Central Land Council to have Ayres Rock handed over for exploitation to the lucrative tourism market.
The unchallenged custodian died on January 18, 1979. Just four weeks later, with indecent haste, the Central Land Council re-submitted a claim for Ayres Rock and The Olgas – and the rest is history.
The “incredible hoax” started, Peter English claims, when a bogus Aboriginal organisation was registered with the Companies Office in Darwin on December 1, 1975, calling itself “The Uluru Community Incorporated.”
This name was changed on November 18, 1981, to “The Mutitjulu Community Incorporated.”
The Australian media at this point started erroneously promoting “the Mutitjulus” as “the former traditional owners of Uluru,” a claim that has yet to be validated.
Documentation asserts that the original occupiers of the Ayers Rock locality were the tribal group known as the Ngonde Ngolanju who abandoned the area (through inter-tribal warfare or want of food or water) and whose descendants are now scattered in South Australia.
Anthropologists have asserted that the name, “Mutitjulu,” is the name of a waterhole at Ayres Rock known to Europeans as “Maggie Springs,” but there has never been a tribal group of Aborigines anywhere in Central Australia who were known as “the Mutitjulus.”
Norman Tinsdale’s “Map of Australian Tribal Boundaries” (circa 1960) incorrectly assigned the total Ayres Rock region to the tribal group known as the Pitjantjatjara. Earlier, maps and notes by Tinsdale, published 20 years before, in 1940, “accurately fixed the … traditional boundaries of the Jankuntjatjara and showed their common border with the Pitjantjatjara whose former tribal territory was confined to the Petermann Ranges, well to the west of … the limits of the Ayres Rock region.”
Mr Yami (Jim) Lester, a part-Aboriginal, assumed the role of spokesman for the alleged “traditional owners”, the so-called “Mututjulus.” Overlooked by all, it seems, was a tape recording made by Lester in Adelaide, in 1973, in which he clearly stated he was born in 1941 at Wallatina Station (of which he later claimed ownership) , in South Australia, some 350 kms (200 miles) south-east of Ayres Rock. Lester’s taped reminiscences make no references to Ayres Rock or his traditional connection with it.
A lead story in “The Australian” newspaper on March 14, 1985, declared: “The Federal (Labor) Government is to take out a 99-year lease on Uluru (Ayres Rock) National Park, which includes Ayres Rock and The Olgas and continue to operate it … The traditional aboriginal (sic) owners, the Mutitjulus, will collect about $100,000 a year – a $75,000 annual rental and 20 per cent of the entrance fees …”
The date of the hand-over was October 26, 1985. On that day, said Peter English, Australia’s Governor-General, Sir Ninian Stephen, officiated in an event that was “clouded in so much political grandstanding and misrepresentation … (that it) must go down in history as a ‘black’ day for the Australian Nation, when the Federal Government betrayed the Jankuntjatjara by granting title … to the descendants of their former enemies …”
Peter English, elsewhere and earlier, wrote: “The ancient religion, the ceremonies and the secret rites … are now fast fading (written in 1985) … and there are none now sufficiently trained to take their place … Instead, strangers … and untrained novices now exercise control over the former traditional tribal lands of Central Australia, utter meaningless nonsense and mumbo-jumbo about some spurious type of undefined “aboriginal culture” – which is a product of the 80’s – and those who know the least are now those who have the most to say.”
-P. Gregson.
COMMENTS
thank you for the information.. i read with interest and passionate regret.
i will see you at the rock one day ..
all my love elizabeth.
— elizabeth boyland · 13 July 2009 · #
I can’t find who owns it.
— Isabella · 18 October 2009 · #
Would love to find a copy of this book. After a recent trip to the rock I’m interested in the history.
— Wayne Masters · 21 November 2009 · #
who owns uluru
— bella · 2 March 2010 · #