Today is a great day to be thankful that you are not one of the three 23-year-old Aussie blokes who got stuck on the top of Uluru yesterday before being abseiled to safety by a rescue team that worked overnight to get them down.
It would be bad enough if you got stuck in a crevice on a giant rock because you wandered into a restricted area, but it can’t feel all that great when the first thing you’re greeted with when you descend from the rock is the weight of every Australian with a smartphone mocking you for the sheer irony of having become stuck climbing a rock that everyone had told you not to climb.
It’s not really a secret that the Pitjantjatjara Anangu, the traditional owners of the land, don’t want people climbing up there: it’s more or less common knowledge in Australia that Uluru is considered sacred and that it’s disrespectful to climb on it, and, for people either not from here or who don’t really keep up with the news, there are signs all around the base declaring exactly that in a bunch of different languages.
But, as evidenced by the rescue crew that spent hours last night setting up abseiling points to get these three dinguses down, people still do it. In April this year, NT Chief Minister Adam Giles was heavily criticised for essentially telling Indigenous Australians to lighten up and let people climb it because A) it was good for tourism and B) it’s higher than the Eiffel Tower.
While both of those things are true (you literally cannot dispute B), it’s unbelievably ignorant to put them before the wishes of the people who had already been in the area for an estimated 10,000 years by the time that European settlers rocked up.
We can’t uninvade Australia, we can’t undo the Stolen Generations, we can’t undo any of the atrocities we did when we came here and took the country as our own when it was already occupied – what’s done is done. I know that you personally didn’t come here and take Australia or murder Indigenous Australians or take their children away from them, and that you can’t be held responsible for it – but you have the opportunity to do something good by showing a modicum of courtesy and respect to the Indigenous Australians who are still here.
You can start by calling it Uluru. I’m not saying that you’re racist if you insist on calling it Ayer’s Rock but it sure seems like you’re going out of your way to be a bit of a dickhead. Once you’ve got that down, you can maybe follow that up by just not climbing on the rock.
If you think it’s ridiculous not to do something just because it would go against someone’s religion, you might want to consider that that religion was here way, way, way before you were, and the only reason you have the opportunity to debate whether you’re going to disrespect it or not is because we took this country by force. You might also have to consider that you might just be an inconsiderate asshole because for some reason respecting people’s feelings seems alien to you.
Look, I get it, the rock is really big. It’s fun to climb on big rocks. But the thing about rocks is, there are a lot of them. You can climb big rocks anywhere you like. You know what you’ll see if you climb on top of Uluru? Nothing, because you are on the only thing for a thousand million kilometres.
People will tell you that another good reason not to climb it is that it’s unsafe, but that’s really beside the point. People will do dangerous, stupid shit for fun all the time and I absolutely respect that; I do not respect people being an inconsiderate dick so that they can get a slightly better photo for Instagram.
What it comes down to is being a decent person, showing some respect, and keeping in mind that it’s way, way easier to not climb Uluru than it is to climb Uluru.
Photo: Channel 9.
