The sun hadn’t yet risen above the red sand hills of the horizon as she drove slowly around the silent base of Uluru. In the predawn light, even the parking area near the waterhole looked magic as she switched off her headlights.

It was five years already since she’d been a young single mum birthing a child in the nurturing embrace of her family. The gossamer memories of Amelia’s tiny, pale starfish fingers clung like gauzy threads to the edges of her mind. It was too personal, too painfully private to share this date with strangers, or to share her reconnection moment with this place that mystically eased the burden. Hence the reason she’d come very early today.

She switched off the ignition and sat for a moment as the engine ticked down in the empty parking zone. It was early enough that the tourist buses were all parked on the far rise, disgorging the first-time visitors onto the red sand in the middle of the desert well back from here. Rows of awestruck sightseers dragged from their dark beds were ready to capture the iconic moment with their cameras and smart phones as the sunrise finger-painted the desert and, more dramatically, the rising monolith in crimson and gold. Their sleepy eyes would be strained across the sand as dawn light began to hint at the deep-red mounds of Kata Tjuta in the distance as well.

‘Happy birthday, Amelia,’ she said aloud. For such a short time, mother and daughter had met and fallen in love.

As she climbed from her vehicle, tendrils of desert night clung to the air, and those ghostly fingers brushed cool kisses against the tears on her cheeks. Though she was alone, except for the call of the morning birds that made her peer into the sparse bushes as she walked the red sand of the path, she didn’t feel lonely.

To her left, a plump western bowerbird with his curved neck and rounded head hopped on long legs, the thicker feathers near his body dressing him in feathered trousers that made her mouth relax in a smile. To her right, a crimson chat, dark brown with his bright-red crown and feathered back and his black eye mask was scanning the area. He poked among the fallen leaves, scratching for small insects, but no doubt thinking carnivorously of a caterpillar. Overhead a lone wedge-tailed eagle, the magnificent walawuru of the desert Anangu people, soared and searched with his keen eyes for something, anything, that moved.

As she absorbed the silence of the winding path that carried her to the creases of Mutitjulu, she felt the sharpness of her burden of loss, which grew heavy on this date each year, gradually ease.