Uluru Rises
In the land of the Anagus where Uluru rises, the wise man is king. And among the Anagus, wisdom can only come with age. The problem was that to the best of anyone’s knowledge, both Reggie and Rolli were borne on the same day.
Reggie was born in the area of Uluru. When asked his age he produces from his pocket a small piece of yellowing paper which says, “Birthdate: August 17, 1945”. According to Reggie’s grandson, Reggie is not a day younger than 80, however he was “assigned” this birthdate when issued a government ID when he came into town during his third walkabout. Reggie had never bothered with Alice Springs for the first forty or so years of his life….why should he? He had all that he needed in the bush outside Yulara. He only went there because he had heard people speak of it and he was curious. Walkabout was about ancestral songlines, but he had lived those lives twice so he decided that this walkabout was to be about discovery. Little did Reggie know that the Government of Australia, Northern Territory Regional Aboriginal Authority, Census and Health Division would actually discover Reggie, not vice versa. Many Aborigines do not even have birth certificates, as they were not born in hospitals, and names like Reggie were assigned in lieu of their bush-names. Reggie liked his given name. His birth name was Munte, which is Aboriginal for thunder.
Rolli was born somewhere in the bush to a mother who had wandered all across the bush from parts unknown. On one stormy night with Ulura jumping up into the sky every few minutes with a crashing end-of-the-world sound, Rolli came into the world with minimal ceremony and hardly a notice from his unwed mother. Childbirth was a simple and mildly inconvenient fact of native life. Rolli’s mother handled the birth without assistance, as was her people’s habit. The child was a boy, which was good as he was more likely to survive. As she held her boy while biting through the umbilical cord to tie it off, Uluru rose up into the sky again with a great and brilliant flash of light. She needed a sign to choose a name and Uluru had given her his name, which would be Doongara, which meant lightning.
The next day, Doongara’s mother continued her journey with the added burden of her infant child. In a small village, if you can call a gathering of lean-to’s a village, she stopped for water. Bush tribesmen always made water available to travelers. It was the code of the bush. At the well was a young woman with an infant. For some reason, the woman felt a kindred spirit in the other mother. The decision to find a spare canvas and pitch her lean-to with the others was a natural choice. There was no need to seek community permission. Aborigine tribes consider themselves as one and all Aborigines intuitively understand without ever seeing any demographic tables that their numbers have dwindled and they must all help one another. So Munte and Doongara became neighbors and everyone in the village was proud to have thunder and lighting in their tribe.
Walkabout is a rite of solitary passage so the first time Munte and Doongara were separated was when they were thirteen and they each went off, one to the east and one to the west to relive their ancestral heritage in the natural songs of the wind and weather in the bush. Since Walkabout is a private matter, the only thing anyone in the village learned about the Walkabouts was that Munte came back with the European name of Reggie and Doongara came back with the name Roland. The name Roland was new to this particular group of Aborigines and after a few snickers over its formality, Reggie helped out his lifelong friend by starting to call him Rolli, which tripped much more easily off the Aborigine tongue.
But the village was too small for two strapping young men and the selection of native women was simply not sufficient to keep both “on the farm”. These issues did not need to be discussed, they were understood. Rolli’s mother had moved on several years ago and he seemed to have more wanderlust than Reggie, so it was Rolli who announced one day that he would be moving on. Rolli stood before Reggie and while they were only 16 years old, they were serious men already. Reggie embraced Rolli and simply said “Nmu’ltes”, which is a simple “I’ll see you” in their aboriginal dialect. The concept of saying goodbye is a bit foreign to the native population as they believe they will always see each other over and over again in this world or another, and the difference is not significant to them.
Both Reggie and Rolli found wives and had children in the following years. They were never more than 100 miles from one another, but as happens anywhere in the world, life interceded for each and the day-to-day duties of work, family and community kept them each occupied. Reggie spent several years hunting, but with the conservation trends he seemed to spend more and more time justifying his catch with the game rangers than hunting until they one day asked him to work for them as a local guide. He climbed the ladder of success like we all do and became a full game ranger despite his habit of occasionally walking off without notice or warning. His family grew up and had families of their own.
Meanwhile, Rolli became an urbanite. He gravitated to Goober Pady in Southern Australia Province. There he took up carpentry and helped many other natives build their first homes. He never really got comfortable with electricity and plumbing, but wood was a material he appreciated, understood and enjoyed handling. He worked at his own pace, but he was considered a quality craftsman who always stood by his work. The quirk that all his customers understood was that at any time Rolli could disappear and be gone for 3-6 months. It was simply an accepted fact of native life. If it meant he would not be paid, it was no matter. When Uluru called him, he hit the road.
And then, when Rolli’s second grandchild was born, he announced to his family that they would be moving to Yulara so that Rolli could live out his years in the shadow of Uluru. He did not think this over and come to a conclusion. He did not discuss it with his wife or grown children. He just knew he had to go one morning and told his family that he hoped they would join him. Aborigines very rarely demand anything from anyone. It is not culturally acceptable to force your will on others. Everyone must decide their path for themselves. But family is an equally strong force and Most of Rolli’s family gathered their possessions for the move to Yulara.
Over the years, the lean-to’s had given way to small handmade houses, much like what Rolli had spent his life crafting. Aborigines often simply pick spots in the bush to build their homes and never bother with the western habit of land ownership. That’s another unnatural concept for people who choose to flow with the wind, water and earth. The Australian government long ago decided to unofficially look the other way and allow this squatting on the abundant spaces of central Australia. This was especially the case around Uluru based on its sacred status with the tribes.
So Rolli and his clan simply trundled up the Lasseter Highway and showed up one day as though they had lived their whole lives in Yulara. And the funny thing was that the community never blinked an eye. In fact, they seemed to think that Rolli belonged in Yulara and gave him the immediate respect reserved for tribal elders.
On their second day in town, Rolli ran into Reggie on the Main Street. Reggie had already heard that Rolli was back, so there was no surprise in their meeting. There was genuine warmth and pleasure in seeing one another after 60 years apart. But unlike the western habit of “catching up” on each other’s details, what they spoke of was the light and the air and the amount of rain that had fallen to feed the earth. These were the things that mattered. Family and children were a given as were the joys and travails of life, but just like the tendency to walkabout when the spirit moved them, there was little concern about this minutia. Life was about the earth around you and life in the broadest sense was the only thing worthy of conversation among men.
When Reggie and Rolli walked together into the local coffee shop, where all the locals gathered at all times of the day, everyone knew these two men were now the village elders. Technically though they did not know who was the Elder, and this mattered. So they waited for the answer to reveal itself.
It was Rolli’s place as the traveller to tell a tale. So he he told of a night many years ago when Uluru was unsettled. Uluru was struggling with the gods of the sky because Uluru had grown too mighty and tall and was challenging the sky for its place in the heavens. The sky was angry and began to push back with all the might it had. The sky threw bolts of lightning with great crashing clamor onto Uluru. And finally Uluru made a bargain with the sky. It would stop growing if the sky would give Uluru the final light of the day and glorify it’s greatness each day at the end of day. And the sky offered Uluru a male child blown in on the north wind like the storm clouds with all the power of the sky. He would be called Doongala after the lighting that was the weapon of the sky. Uluru also offered to the sky a child born at its feet that would be called Munte in honor of the great thunder that Uluru had thrown back at the sky in protest. And Munte and Doongala would become a team that would remind the sacred people of the power of the sky and Uluru.
It was then that Rolli took a piece of paper out of his pocket and placed it reverently on the table. Reggie looked at it and smiled. The others leaned over to see and gasped. It was a birth certificates with Rolli’s name at the top dated August 17, 1945.
When Rolli had moved to Goober Pady he was told he needed a government ID. He had seen Reggie’s ID many times and he knew that one day he and Reggie would live out their days together, so he told them his birth date was the same as Reggie had. It was important to respect his lifelong friend so that one day they could both be the Elder.
And again that evening the sky honored Uluru with a bright red light and as Rolli and Reggie walked out of the coffee house, Rolli said to Reggie, “Look Munte, Uluru Rises.”