When I was a little girl, the dream of visiting the Land Down Under occupied my mind. I dreamed of long stretches of white beach, of bush land as far as the eye could see, of deserts that rivaled the Sahara. I thought about the friendly faces of blond haired, blue eyed Australians smiling as they greeted me with the traditional “G’day.” When I finally visited Australia, during my senior year of college, I found myself entering the land of my dreams. Blond haired, blue eyed Australians did greet me, as I wandered across their beaches, through their bush land and in their desert. But another side of Australia greeted me as well one that I had never thought about and was not expecting

When I first arrived in July of 1998, I faced the reality that natives of Australia and the settlers were not living in harmony. I learned of “The Stolen Generation” of aboriginal children who were taken from their families (as late as the 1970’s) to be raised in white homes. I saw a country struggling to move forward, to make right the wrongs of the past, and I saw the Aborigines struggling to keep up with the modernization of their land, while retaining some part of their ancient culture. While I was there, the most debated issue was that of land rights. The Aborigines claimed that parts of Australia had been taken from them, that certain landmarks and places were sacred ground in their religion and that a hundred years before it had been stolen by the Australian government. 

These proclamations of land rights, the talk of the “stolen generation,” the enforcement of a “National Sorry Day” and many other things combined to create a tension that was hard to ignore. Sometimes, I felt I had stepped back in time to 1960s America, during the height of the Civil Rights movement.

That is until I visited Ayers Rock. Uluru, as the Aborigines call it, was the one landmark in Australia that I had known about since I was a child. I discussed its strange existence several times with my father, and had even promised him that when I got there I would climb it.

Nevertheless, I learned that Ayers Rock was one of the major landmarks that the Aborigines claimed as theirs. They believe that their ancestors created Uluru, as well as many other landscape features, and that it is their duty to protect them. And so, they ask, out of respect for their culture that tourists not climb Ayer's Rock.

Our first stop, however, was not Ayers Rock, but the Olgas, another amazing rock formation about 30 km from Uluru.  Also known as Kata – Tjuta, which means “many heads” in traditional Aboriginal language, the Olgas’ 36 individual domes burst out of the ground in a magnificent display of Mother Nature.  There are two hikes you can take, that wind throughout the domes. The first, The Valley of the Winds, is a 7 km walk that circles several of the domes. The second, the Olga Gorge Walk, is a 2 km trail that takes you down into a spectacular gorge.

Our campsite for the evening was located about midway between the two landmarks, and provided us with a spectacular view of both, as the sun set behind Kata-Tjuta.

We woke at 5 am the next morning to see the sunrise over Uluru.

Nevertheless, as we all huddled together, staring at the rock, waiting for the sun to show its face and change the magnificent monolith all of the glowing reds and oranges that we had been promised, the dark clouds connected and in this desert land that receives less then 30 cm of precipitation a year, small raindrops began to fall.