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Uluru, the aborigines sacred mountain

Although in the airport sign says Ayers Rock, we are at Uluru, the red mountain, one of the most sacred location for the aborigines. And no wonder, because it really seems to be alive. If you stare at it you can even see how it breathes, like if, deep inside, there was a creature from another world waiting to come out. For some people it is just a simple rock set in the middle of nowhere, like an iceberg made of red sand. For others it is the evidence that even a rock can have a soul. But it is not all alone. Less than 50 kilometres away, a walking distance when you are in the heart of Australia, you can find its twin soul. If Uluru were a god, Kaja-Tjuta would be its goddess, and it also breathes, but it is more brutal. Uluru is subtle, almost an imperceptible movement, as if it were an abdomen going up and down very slowly. Kata-Tjuta breathes deeply, absorbing the air with her mouth full and blowing hurricanes to fill up their throats with energy. If you climb up to the Valley of the Four Winds, you will be able to feel the strength of its breath, as if it were feeding the life that is inside of it.

Before Uluru and Kaja-Tujta the world was plain. It was the Ancestral Beings who travel through it and created the plants, animals, and other things, leaving a piece of their soul in each of them. Aborigines believe that they are the direct descendants of those beings, the heirs of an oral will that rules their lives. It is a shame that it is secret and that only little parts of that knowledge have been revealed to the white population. We know just enough to know that it is the first ecologist manifesto in the world, nothing weird in a country were its population depends, more that any other else, on Nature to survive.

These sons of gods, authentic prehistoric hippies, woke up one day with these other sons of “their mothers” camping in their Eden Garden. They, who didn’t know the wheel or the writing, had travelled to the future without leaving their island. Twenty thousand years totally isolated without knowing what a war was until they ran into a bunch of prisoners freed by the Queen’s whim. It is not necessary to explain what happened. The Australians have been trying to make everybody believe that the aborigines were a tribe who lived in the dessert. Liar, liar, pants on fire. The few that they didn’t hunt, literally, were thrown from the best lands to keep them themselves. They had only one option: leave and hide where the white people would never dare to look for them.

Nowadays, the blacks, as they describe themselves, walk barefoot in the streets, with their sight lost, and dirty clothes. Many of them are alcoholics, and all of them are fattened up by the Western diet. They still wonder how their ancestors, who knew everything, never taught them how to face the so called modern world that they feel so odd. Although the other ones don’t seem to be doing much better. Many Australians, as much as the deny it, live embittered, surrounded by natural traps, with the westerner wannabe wish, to end up rotting in the end of the world.

If they could choose, whites and blacks would prefer to travel to their past. Or to their future.  Anywhere as long as they could get out of here. But neither a travel machine nor the Australians themselves can fix that. They tried it 50 years ago officially stealing hundreds of aborigine’s babies to grow up among westerners and they are still trying to get forgiveness for such atrocity. Twenty years ago they came back again making people think that they would return the land to their “original owners” but, of course, they were not going to return the whole country and much less the best areas, where the big cities are. Thus, the issue was limited to desert fields and swampy forests where you can only find flies and mosquitoes, but one thing is for sure, they have the National Park title. There is only one honourable exception, the only land affected by the law and pending to be returned is the one where they found all kinds of mines. What a coincidence, isn’t it?

Three hundred years later they don’t know what to do with them and that is why they stuff them with welfare, without realizing how dangerous it is to take them out of their world and leaving them at ours’ gates. First they stole their land and their lives, then their future and their children’s, and now they are doing the same thing with their hopes. Of course, as soon as there’s none left, I am sure that they will expand the Ayers Rock airport, and even change its name to the real one, Uluru.