The story

Told as it is shared

Kuniya, the woma python woman, was travelling the long road to Uluru with her family when news reached her: Liru, the venomous snake man, had attacked her nephew and left him for dead. Her grief became fury. She travelled to the rock, found the Liru camp, and fought — striking with her poison and her grief, her blows cutting the face of the rock itself.

Everything Anangu point to on Uluru is evidence: the long fissure on the western face is the venom that dripped from Liru's bite; the cracks are the marks of Kuniya's strikes; the caves and the waterhole of Mutitjulu hold the rest of the story — Kuniya's body, her grief, her victory.

For Anangu, then, the rock is not a monument to the past. It is the present. The story is not over; the rock simply holds it in stone.

Country & context

The land that holds it

Uluru rises from the red sand country of the Anangu — the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people of the centre. Tjukurpatjukurpa — Pitjantjatjara & Yankunytjatjara: law, story, the Dreaming, the law that holds the stories, is not myth: it is the operating system of the desert, teaching where to find water, when to burn, who may speak to whom, and how to care for the places that care for you.

In 1985 the title to Uluru was handed back to its Traditional Owners, who lease it back to the nation as a national park and manage it jointly to this day. In 2019 the climb to the summit was closed for good — for decades Anangu had asked visitors not to walk the story itself.

Art & memory

Painted, woven, sung

In the caves of Mutitjulu, generations of painting lie over painting — the rock face used as a canvas of record for thousands of years, renewed with ceremony and teaching.

Today the park's interpretive walks share publicly approved versions of Tjukurpatjukurpa — Pitjantjatjara & Yankunytjatjara: law, story, the Dreaming in Anangu words and English, and the art centres of the APY lands carry the same law onto canvas for the world's galleries.