Uluru: Fact and Fiction

1. Uluru:Fact and Fiction Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story

2. Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story • The 'Aboriginal Dreamtime' is that part of aboriginal culture which explains the origins and culture of the land and its people. • Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on Earth - dating back - by some estimates - 65,000 years. Dreamtime is Aboriginal Religion and Culture. • The Dreamtime contains many parts: It is the story of things that have happened, how the universe came to be, how human beings were created and how the Creator intended for humans to function within the cosmos.

3. Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story • The expression 'Dreamtime' is most often used to refer to the 'time before time', or 'the time of the creation of all things', What is certain is that 'Ancestor Spirits' came to Earth in human and other forms and the land, the plants and animals were given their form as we know them today. • These Spirits also established relationships between groups and individuals, (whether people or animals) and where they travelled across the land, or came to a halt, they created rivers, hills, etc., and there are often stories attached to these places. • Once their work was done, the Ancestor Spirits changed again; into animals or stars or hills or other objects. For Indigenous Australians, the past is still alive and vital today and will remain so into the future. The Ancestor Spirits and their powers have not gone, they are present in the forms into which they changed at the end of the 'Dreamtime' or 'Dreaming', as the stories tell.

4. Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story • Australian Aboriginal people know that the area around Ayers Rock (Mount Uluru) is inhabited by dozens of ancestral beings whose activities are recorded at many separate sites. At each site, the events that took place can be recounted, whether those events were of significance or whether the ancestral being just rested at a certain place before going on. • Around Ayers Rock (Uluru) there are many examples of ancestral sites. The Anangu explanations of these sites and of the formation of Ayers Rock (Mount Uluru) itself derive from the Tjukurpa. On the next slide are some of these stories:

5. Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story • Uluru and the Anangu People • Many Aboriginal elders tell stories about special places around Uluru and animals that made them. Here is one of those stories from the Dreamtime. • Long, long ago in the Dreamtime the animals gave shape to some of the Rock. At that time a young Woma Python, called Kuniya was surprised by a group of Liru, which are venomous snakes. The Liru threw spears at the python and killed him. So hard did they throw their spears, that the points made holes in The Rock. The boy's aunt, called Kuniya, was so angry that she killed one of the Liru with her stick. They made holes in the rock when the points of Kuniya's stick hit it. You can still see these holes today. Kuniya, the Woma Python can still be seen as a dark wavy line on Uluru.

6. Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story Tjati tries to retrieve his kali • In the creation period, Tatji, the small Red Lizard, who lived on the mulgi flats, came to Uluru.  He threw his kali, a curved throwing stick, and it became embedded in the surface. He used his hands to scoop it out in his efforts to retrieve his kali, leaving a series ofbowl-shaped hollows.

7. Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story The cave where Tjati died at Kantju • Unable to recover his kali, he finally died in this cave. His implements and bodily remains survive as large boulders on the cave floor.

8. Ayers Rock - Dreamtime Story • In several caves in Uluru, rock represents many stories of the Dreamtime. The paintings are regularly renewed, with layer upon layer of paint, dating back many thousands of years.

9. Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction Ayers Rock - A product of Noah’s Flood?

10. Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction • Figure 1 shows water currents bringing in sand, supposedly from the Musgrave Ranges to the south. The sand pours into a very deep water-filled basin whose floor consists of heavily folded and eroded older rocks (age of deposition and erosion unspecified). • Figure 2 shows how a "catastrophic flood" filled in this basin by dumping: • some 6000 metres (approx. 20, 000 feet) of sand, probably in only a matter of hours, after having carried this sand some 100 kilometres (63 miles). • The clear implication here is that the basin seen in Fig 2 was at least 6000 metres deep! Since the beds are now standing vertically, it is also obvious that the sand, after being washed into the depression, and while still being compressed and hardened, was pushed up and tilted by earth movements.

11. Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction • Figure 3 thus depicts the "sand layers tilted late in Noah's Flood" with the waters draining off and eroding and sculpting the massive structure as they went. • Following the retreat of these flood waters, and as the landscape dried, the material in Ayers Rocks finally hardened. • So how was it that this sludgy material was held together high above the flood? • According to Dr Snelling it was not until after the Flood waters finally subsided that: • the chemicals in the water between the sand grains formed a cementing material to bind the mineral grains together, drying in much the same way as cement in concrete dries and binds together the stones and sand mixed with it. With the final retreat of the waters from off the land, and the continued drying out of the continent, present day desert wind erosion has merely pock-marked the surface of the rock. • Figure 4 shows a cross-section of Ayers Rock today, with its relationships to the present land surface and desert sands; the underlying folded and eroded bedrock conveniently disappears from the scene.

12. Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction • Uluru (Ayers Rock) is situated in the Uluru National Park, Northern Territory, Australia, it is believed to be about 550 million years old. Uluru rises 348 metres from the desert and has a girth of 9.4 kilometres is the world's most famous monolith, yet it is estimated that at least two-thirds of the Rock lies beneath the surface. • There is some scientific disagreement about the origins of Uluru. The most widely held theory is that both Uluru and Kata Tjuta are remnants of a vast sedimentary bed which was laid down some 600 million years ago. The bed was spectacularly tilted so that Uluru now protrudes at an angle of up to 85°. The rock is actually grey but is covered with a distinctive red iron oxide coating.

13. Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction • According to Sweet and Crick (1992, Uluru & Kata Tjuta:  A Geological History), about 550 million years ago erosion from the Petermann Ranges led to huge alluvial fans (at least 2.5 km in vertical thickness) being built up by deposits of Arkose sands from the eroded materials of the adjacentranges. • This close-up view gives an general indication of the coarse-grained nature of this semi-metamorphosed sandstone, which being more resistant to erosion, has allowed Uluru to remain a high point in an otherwise largely levelled plain.

14. Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction • Fifty million years later these alluvial fans were covered by sediments when the region became a shallow sea (isostatic subsidence due to the loading caused by these Arkose sand deposits playing a role in this process).  • Then during the period from c. 400 to c. 300 million years BP, another uplift (the Alice Springs Orogeny, which created the Macdonnell Ranges to the north of the Uluru area) caused massive folding and faulting in the region, causing the formerly horizontal strata of the Arkose sandstones which comprise Uluru to be folded • nearly vertically from their former position (i.e., rotated vertically nearly 90 degrees from their original bedding planes).   • Then subsequent erosion over the past 300 million years has led to the uncovering of the Arkose sandstones which comprise Uluru and its gradual shaping by erosion into the huge 'monolith' which we can see there today.    • The deposits which previously covered the Arkose sandstones have largely been eroded away, so that 'The Rock' stands high over the surrounding desert plain because its rock is more resistant to erosion than were the rocks which formerly covered it. 

15. Ayers Rock - Geology Fact and Fiction • The rocks which form Uluru were probably exposed to surface erosion about 70 million years ago, the landscape being progressively worn down since then.  The diagram below illustrates the current geology of the area. • To Recap: Erosion of material from a nearby mountain range lead to huge fluvial fans (large river features of deposition) this was covered by a shallow sea, burying the unsorted sand material. 100milion years later uplift caused massive folding and faulting and the rocks were tilted 89 degrees! The softer material around Uluru which was not subjected to part metamorphism and is more unconsolidated has been eroded, leaving the mass of Arkose Sandstone which makes up the Uluru monolith today.