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Figure 34 (left) Climbing route of Ayers Rock 1982. [ap] Figure 35 (right) Climbing Certificate
Viewing the rock from prescribed viewing points offered a less strenuous ritual. According to geographer Theano Terkenli, visual spectacle forms one o f the most significant traits of contemporary mass tourism.138 Terkenli identifies ‘staging’ as an integral component of spectacle, offering a temporally bounded, paced and structured viewing ‘to reproduce the contours of emotion.’n; Staging was integral to the viewing o f sunrise and sunset which concentrated tourists at a prescribed geographic site and temporal moments. These points were implicated in a circle of representation, which in the case o f sunset viewing, stretched all the way back to the very first photograph taken of Ayers Rock by Spencer during the Home expedition of 1894. For example, Figure 36, taken from the sunset viewing position, replicates the same view of the rock as depicted in Spencer’s image, shown in Figure 27.
138 Theano S. Terkenli, "Landscapes o f Tourism:Towards a Global Cultural Econom y o f Space?," Tourism Geographies 4, no. 3 (2002). p.248.
139 Ibid, p.248.
Figure 36 Photograph taken from the official sunset viewing point [ap]
Figure 37 Postcard tided ‘Central Australian Aborigine: Jimmy Walkabout, a member of the Pitjantjara Tribe 1982.’
In less than forty years, Ayers Rock-Mt Olga National Park achieved international and national iconic status as a dom inant and authentic symbol o f Australia.14" By 1980 more than 77,000 tourists visited each year, com pared with 4,332 in the 1960s.141 Unlike
140 Haynes, Seeking the Centre, p. 266.
141 Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service, "Uluru (Ayers Rock-Mount Olga) National Park: Plan of Management," (Canberra: Commonwealth o f Australia, 1982).p. 78.
Tongariro where management plans had regulated growth since as early as 1964, this tourism growth was largely uncontrolled. By the early 1970s concern over the impact of tourism on the desert ecology, combined with an acknowledgement of the distress that tourism caused the traditional owners, led to plans for better management practices.142 A Parliamentary committee report recommended the preparation of a management plan, and the re-siting of all visitor accommodation and the airstrip outside the park boundaries.14^ An area north o f the park was set aside for an airport and for a new tourist village to become known as Yulara. The task of developing Yulara was given to the Northern Territory government who capitalised on the opportunity to further discourage Aboriginal presence in the park. Initial plans featured an Anangu village that would not only supply accommodation but also provide tourist opportunities to view ‘authentic aborigines’. Yulara therefore was formulated not only to empty the landscape of significant tourist infrastructure, but to ensure no permanent Aboriginal presence at Ayers Rock. Twenty years after the declaration of Ayers Rock-Mt Olga National Park, Yulara finally provided a means for erasing all permanent human occupation, both indigenous and non-indigenous, from the park.
Landscape representations produced outside the institutional space of the park have dominated the shaping of tourist demand and experience, and in turn, the physical development o f the parks. In the most dramatic instance, revisions in anthropology, nationalism and aesthetics converged to elevate the harsh desert interior of Ayers Rock to the status of an iconic desert wilderness. The subsequent representation of the desert landscape and its Aboriginal occupants in guide books, advertisements, art, literature and anthropology introduced the remote interior to tourists, establishing a ‘circle of
representation’ between the images and the tourist activity. The revision of the land’s status from Aboriginal reserve to national park created the unique but not incongruous idea of a ‘peopled’ wilderness. The museum’s evolutionary positioning of Aboriginal people
provided a clear rationale for this by framing Aboriginal people as ancient and timeless, just as the landscape itself, thereby allowing the desert to be simultaneously prized as wilderness yet occupied. Consequently, the tourist experience of Ayers Rock-Mt Olga National Park was a carefully-scripted visual encounter with a primitive landscape and its inhabitants,
142 A meeting held at Emabella in 1971 informed government officials of the desecration of sacred sites at Ayers Rock. Paddy Uluru requested that government help protect the places entrusted to him by his ancestors. Four months later, a group including Uluru travelled to the Rock and held an inma ceremony, also requesting that the head ranger stop tourists entering particular sites.
143 Parks Australia, "Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Visitor Infrastructure Master Plan (Draft)."p.22.
providing an experience more aligned with the anthropological space of the museum than the recreational and scenic qualities generally associated with national parks.
The representational revision of Tongariro was less abrupt, but equally influential. The ‘concept’ of the park was revised in two major phases. An initial showcasing o f Maori cultural landscape and a natural playground was revised to a focus on the
‘extraordinariness’ of the national park, exemplified by its diverse landscape features and its unique origins as gifted land. This revision mirrors the museum’s assimilation o f Maori culture into the New Zealand national story, reducing the significance of the park’s origins from a cultural landscape of great meaning to Maori to ‘a gift.’ By removing the Maori cultural connections from the official narrative, the landscape was free to be managed according to ideals of the US National Park system and described in purely functional terms through delineation of management zones to meet the recreational needs for skiing, climbing and wilderness encounters.
By the early 1970s, this conceptualisation of nationalism, wilderness and indigenous people that was so central to the management and constructed tourist experience of Tongariro and Ayers Rock-Mt Olga National Parks would be challenged. As Chapters Three and Four will show, major political and theoretical revisions combined to fundamentally challenge the museum and national park in Australia and New Zealand.