Kata Tjuta

After the day at Uluru we got up bright and early to catch the sunrise from a sand dune between Uluru and Kata Tjuta. Kata Tjuta is the lesser known part of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. It's a collection of sandsone and conglomerate domes that together cover just over 8 square miles of bush west of Uluru. I was particularly looking forward to visiting Kata Tjuta for several reasons. It's bigger than Uluru, its less well known than Uluru, its more sacred to the Anangu than Uluru, and more of it is off limits to non-Aboriginal people for cultural reasons than Uluru. Neither site has been commercialized to any great degree but to me Kata Tjuta feels less touristy than Uluru. I can't describe why exactly, but Kata Tjuta felt more primordial to me than anywhere else in the Outback.

Uluru is big in an obvious way. After all, the incongruity of a massive chunk of sandstone rising hundreds of meters straight out of an otherwise flat-as-a-pool table landscape is difficult to miss. Kata Tjuta, on the other hand, is as understated as Uluru is obvious. It's far more massive than Uluru, but deceptively so. It's not a single monolith, but a series of gigantic stones several of which are inidividually taller than Uluru, all packed together with spaces in between. The enormity of Kata Tjuta is easy to miss because the relatively featureless scrub surrounding it can make it seem a lot closer than it is at any given point, its far enough away from Uluru that an accurate visual comparison is difficult to make, and Kata Tjuta's stones are arranged in a roughly circular pattern. This means that from anywhere except overhead Kata Tjuta always looks more 2-dimensional than it is in reality.

The law component of Tjukurpa includes certain aspects that are particularly relevant for men or women. In our language these are called simply women's law and men's law. I was only able to scratch the surface of the Tjukurpa associated with Uluru and Kata Tjuta, but I was left with the impression that the significance of Kata Tjuta cannot be overstated, particularly in men's law. I was told that Kata Tjuta means "many heads". In Tjukurpa the domes of Kata Tjuta are understood to be the tops of the heads of the Mala men, ancestral giants that figure prominently in the Tjukurpa stories surrounding Uluru as well. There are several other snippets of stories about Kata Tjuta that seem to have leaked out the Anangu culture, but for non-Aboriginal people there remain many more secrets than explanations of the traditional significance of Kata Tjuta.

There are only two routes that non-Anangu people are allowed to take into Kata Tjuta's interior. I took the Valley of the Winds walk, which is the longest of the two, and as its name suggests follows a natural wind tunnel between the rocks. It opens into a natural ampitheather formed by the surrounding domes. The expansive landscape inside Kata Tjuta is undetectable from the outside. As with Uluru, the geologists seem to be unable to agree on a scientific explanation of Kata Tjuta's origins, but they do agree that much more of the domes are currently below ground than above it.

Maybe the geologists ought to talk to the Anangu. They seem to know exactly where Kata Tjuta came from. Too bad they're not telling.