Gosse and Giles are the names most associated with the earliest white explorations of the area encompassing what is now known as Uluru National Park. Giles led three expeditions in the 1870s, all of them financed largely by a German botanist resident in Melbourne – Baron Von Mueller – which explains Mount Liebig, Ehrenberg Range, Petermann Creek, Lake Amadeus, and of course the Olgas. But it fell to Gosse to be the first white man to be flabbergasted by the Rock itself. His famous description of it, seen from a distance of two miles, as ‘an immense pebble rising abruptly from the plain’ is now generally out of favour, inasmuch as it fails of reverence for the sacred and the scientific. ‘In fact,’ an information board in the Visitors Centre at the Yulara Tourist Resort states, ‘both Ayers Rock and the Olgas are like exposed sections of a molar tooth. Rock material plunges underground for at least 2,500 metres, possibly 6,000 metres in the case of Ayers Rock, so the term pebble is inaccurate . . . No one is certain of the exact events involving the formation of Ayers Rock. However, it is probable that it developed from an unfractured block of arkose, isolated by rapid erosion of the fractured and cracked surround rock. The development of strong vertical jointing which enclosed a pentagon shape is probably responsible for the almost sheer walls of the monolith.’

Myself, I still thought ‘an immense pebble’ took some beating as an account of what you first saw and how you first felt seeing it. An immense mauve pebble – a familiar object ludicrously distended – the more wonderful for making you want to laugh even as you marvelled. It becomes more seriously beautiful, the nearer you get to it – grander, softer, rounder, steeper, more diverse, in every way more surprising than the usual banal photographs would ever lead you to expect. Close up, its texture is like the skin of an animal – creased and enfolded and a little weary, but also soft to the touch. It is as much animal as mineral in other ways too. It carries wounds, gashes in the flesh, and great clefts that remind you of lips. Not lips that can be said in any weather to smile though. The grotesquerie that is amusing from a distance becomes melancholy face to face. The Rock is sad in the way that the most prehistoric of existing creatures are sad. Elephant sad. It looks bulbous and cumbersome, anachronistic, top-heavy.

And the walk to the summit – the CLIMB, as it’s called – is like the steep incline of a camel’s back. If there were dinosaur rides they would begin with this: a thin line of enthusiasts in summer clothes, holding on to chains and turning to wave before they vanish into infinity, while at the bottom the old and the unadventurous crane their necks and take snaps.