The next series of images will be from Uluru, called Ayers Rock by the early European explorers, but the aboriginal Australians got there 35000 years earlier so I reckon it’s their call. This first shot is the standard tourist image taken at sunrise. Very pretty yet I will have the same photograph as the couple of hundred other visitors around me that morning; and, with some small variations, much the same as the couple of hundred on the previous day, the next day etc.

So I tried for something a bit different. This next shot was taken from Kata Tjuta (Mt Olga to the aforementioned explorers) and it shows something of the vast outback, and though Uluru only rises 350m above this undulating desert , the impact is quite startling; and imagine the impact on the aboriginal ‘explorers’ 35000 years ago who, instead of 30 mins bus ride from the resort, or even a few months on horseback, may have been migrating for years across this open landscape and suddenly this rock comes into sight.

And I also photographed details of Uluru during the early morning light. Geologically it is arkose sandstone, harder than surrounding rocks with no significant jointing  and homogenous across bedding planes with no clear sedimentary discontinuity across the planes and with the planes being tilted on end by mountain building about 400 million years ago. Aesthetically and artistically this resistance created a remnant mountain, last man standing after all else around it had been destroyed by the years, with swooping gullies where the occasional rains create torrents that will eventually destroy even this grand old remnant, and curves and lines from vertical planes, windblasted and sculpted. A place of age and spirituality, of strange shapes and a place to explain and teach how things came to be.

NB I give the figure of 35000 years ago for arrival in the centre but there is much academic debate and the archaeological date evidence scant . Aboriginals Australians arrived on the continent at least 40000 years ago, probably 60000 years ago and possibly 80000 years ago. They arrived from SE Asia across the Torres Straight at a time when glaciation (elsewhere in the world) lowered sea levels and made a dry land crossing viable.