Uluru - The Rock...

Local landscape photographer Peter Carroll was in the right place at the right time when the rain came bucketing down earlier in the month.

 
Peter was at Yulara - the township near Uluru - when he woke at 3am to the sound of torrential rain.

"It has been a 20 year dream to see Uluru with water pouring down her flanks," writes Peter in his blog, "so there I lay tossing and turning praying the rain would continue til the crack of dawn."
 

Most longtime residents of Central Australia know that the sight of rain on the rock is a rare phenomenon. For a landscape photographer, it's gold. Before the sun had risen, Peter was out there with his camera.
 

"I had to calm myself a little bit. It was pretty momentous," says Peter.  "I went round to the general car park area where the climb is...and that's where these white stripes started to reveal themselves, it was pretty spectacular."
 

The result of Peter's work is a spectacular collection of images that show Uluru in a whole new light.

Barely recognisable with silver lines snaking down the surface and eerie fog hovering - the images will no doubt find a large audience. Several have already appeared on the front page of The Australian.
 

Most of the shots were taken near the Mututjulu waterhole, says Peter, and what he heard that morning was just as powerful as what he saw through the lens.
 

"Once I got out of the car and started walking in, all the noises started to take over," he says. "When you hear that water rushing down the side, and plummeting over cliffs, it really is a special sound. And because we've had so much rain lately there's just hundreds of thousands of frogs around the place, it was pretty magical."
 

"I've been down [to Uluru] a lot and whenever I'm down there it delivers some special, special moment..I don't know what the inner workings of it are on the human psyche but it's fairly powerful stuff."

 

 

Midnight Oil was asked to write a song that would be performed during the  1985 ceremony to hand Uluru back to its traditional owners.   The band submitted three songs and the Aboriginal people chose to use Dead Heart. 

Lyrics

We don't serve your country
Don't serve your king
Know your custom don't speak your tongue
White man came took everyone

We don't serve your country
Don't serve your king
White man listen to the songs we sing
White man came took everything

We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken

We don't serve your country
Don't serve your king
Know your custom don't speak your tongue
White man came took everyone

We don't need protection
Don't need your land
Keep your promise on where we stand
We will listen we'll understand

We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken

We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken

Mining companies, pastoral companies
Uranium companies
Collected companies
Got more right than people
Got more say than people
Forty thousand years can make a difference to the state
of things
The dead heart lives here