The Red Center

The enormous central Australian desert is aptly named, being as it is in the center of the country and very red. And something about the name also captures the quality of the color--a searing orange-red that can be arresting in its intensity. It is a landscape as demanding as it is beautiful. It is hot, cold, dry, and full of strange, scrubby bushes and little, skinny, wispy trees that look as if they have been hastily drawn by children. This unforgiving scenery is almost unpopulated by humans but is home to 25 species of mammals, 74 species of reptiles, 178 species of birds and 4 species of frogs. There are also vast populations of bugs, ants, enormous grasshoppers, venemous insects, and this time of year, flies. These flies look exactly like the common house fly but there are about a billion more of them and they are assertive. There are 20 or 30 of them on your clothes at any given moment and they don't hesitate to land on your face. Archeologists think that the humans who do live here have been in the area for at least 10,000 years. It takes that kind of tenacity to make it in the outback.

And arising out of the Simpson Desert is this magnificent, startling rock that changes color with the light, but which is mostly the same orange-red as the soil. At sunrise and sunset it glows, and anytime of day it has an uncanny presence to it. White settlers named it Ayers Rock, but it is now mainly called by its older Aboriginal name, Uluru. Forged by geological forces of arkose sandstone and exposed by erosion, it is maybe a quarter of mile high, and is thought to extend underground for 3-4 miles. Uluru is also a sacred site of the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara peoples, local Aboriginal groups who call themelves Anangu. Uluru is central to Anangu law and legend (Tjukurpa). The Anangu believe that at the beginning of time the world was flat and formless, but very powerful ancestral beings (tjukuritja) travelled across the land and their movement and activity formed the landscape. Among the most important ancestral beings were the woman python (Kuniya), the poisonous snake (Liru), and the rufous-hare wallaby (Mala), all of whom came to Uluru, their rites and battles shaping the rock. Most of Uluru's countless crevices, caves, and undulations have an aboriginal backstory. For example, on one section of the rock there is a dark vertical line and a squiggly horizontal line that mark the site of a great battle between Kuniya the python and Liru the snake (see photo, and along the path is my dad shrouded in fly netting). Kuniya had travelled a great distance to Uluru carrying her eggs around her neck like a necklace. Setting her eggs at the base of Uluru (still visible as a mound of boulders), she set off in search of Liru, to avenge the death of her nephew who'd been killed by Liru. She found Liru by the water hole (still known as Kuniya) and did a powerful and magical dance. She spat poison at him, so that all the plants that grow there became poisonous. She threw her spears so forcefully that they created two large cracks on the other side of the rock. And Kuniya and Liru's forms were seared into the face of the rock. An ancient oral tradition is written into the landscape at Uluru and even if you don't know the stories, which mostly we don't, the place feels sacred, scarred and magical.

We also drove three hours north to Kings Canyon, a beautiful canyon formed 400 million years ago from compressed sand dunes. We did the Kings Canyon climb, hiking up to the rim and all the way around it. The 6-kilometer, 4-hour hike on rough terrain in 95-degree heat with a 1 year old, a 7 year old and a 71 year old was, in retrospect, foolhardy. Actually we realized it was foolhardy about halfway through when Matt left us for an hour to help the rangers carry an injured tourist back to where the helicopter could land. But miraculously Lucy mostly stayed in the backpack, my dad stayed upright, Jake proved to be an excellent hiker and we all made it down unharmed. We drove on to a camel ranch for gas, camel burgers and a fortuitous dingo sighting.

The funny thing about the intense climate and physical grandeur of the outback is that those weren't the things that most impressed Jake. When we asked him what he liked best about the red center, he said it was the mirages. He'd never seen a mirage before, and there in the heat, the road always appeared to be covered in water up ahead. For all the magic in the culture and landscape around us, he loved best the magical effects of light and heat on an ordinary asphalt road.