Most of all, though, we would miss the Rock. I hadn’t got very far with it myself as a religious totem; by and large I didn’t hold with sacred sites and was left quite cold by the various taboos and other unspeakables vested in Uluru. I had always experienced difficulty taking holy objects seriously in my own faith – fringes that you kissed, thongs that you wound, walls that you wailed at – so I was unlikely to be able to venerate them in other people’s. The best thing about Aboriginal religiosity as manifested in these parts, it seemed to me, was the tangle into which it threw the whites. Either they went the way of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, finding connections, where lesser men failed to see any, between sacred sites, heathens, gays, and the spirit of the goanna, and proclaiming, ‘No goannas, no gays!’ Or they felt the shame now associated with secularity and joined the scramble to show just who could be more animistic than whom. THE AREA IS MYSTIC TO ALL OF US.

But, just as there must be thousands of ostensibly practising Christians who have long since lost their taste for worship but keep turning up at church for the company and the jumble sales, so I remained a devotee of the Rock because I liked the excuse it provided for a get-together. Sombre in itself, it was the cause that light-heartedness was in others. In a word, this was awe the way I preferred it: without having to sway back and forth or wear a yarmulka. No goannas, no yarmulkas.

Coming at it from a different angle I think Ros felt similarly. We had both been happy at Ayers Rock. It was a question we put to ourselves with some seriousness as we left: Would we ever be as happy again?

* See any literary magazines coming out of Melbourne or Sydney Universities in the 1960s or early ’70s for specific applications of this phrase; especially in regard to George Herbert’s divine lucubrations, Emily Dickinson’s sexuality, Frank Churchill’s hair appointment, Captain Ahab’s monomania, Blake’s night-flying worm, etc.

I use the phrase in its more widely understood sense.

15 Mintja

Fifteen
 
Mintja

Leafing through the Centralian Advocate in an idle hour I had already picked Gone Troppo as the likely winner of the Alice Springs Cup, so when we found ourselves driving into Neville Shute’s famous outback town on Cup Day, and what is more only a stone’s throw from the racetrack, I hit upon the ruse of a quick flutter as the smartest way of launching ourselves at once into Alice Springs society.