Uluru: An Aboriginal History of Ayers Rock by Robert Layton

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Dust jacket has light creasing at edges and spine. Interior and binding are also very good.

Most of us think of it as Ayer's Rock, the largest monolith in the world, a great Australian tourist attraction second only to the Great Barrier Reef. However, the Yakunjatjara and Pitjantjatara people see it as Uluru, a major centre of the Dreaming tracks which criss-cross central Australia.

During the Dreamtime, the ancestral beings left their mark as they travelled across the landscape. The two boys who quarrelled, the hare wallabies, the pythons, the blue-tongued lizard and Tjati, the red lizard, all helped to create Uluru. The activities of the heroes, which are recorded in rituals, epic song cycles, stories or myths, also established the rules of Aboriginal social life.

Robert Layton describes how each religion, subsistence patterns and land ownership all form part of a living culture, despite the fact that the Yakunjatjara and Pitjantjatara people have lived like refugees in their own country for the past 100 years. He traces the history of their dispossession and their relations with bureaucracies, cattle stations, missions and police.