Bad drivers and cultural conflict in Australia's red heart (+photos)

At the foot of Uluru. Photo / Jill Worrall

There's someone out there with a guilty secret. Unless they are one of the world's worst drivers they can hardly not have noticed backing into my rental car and becoming wedged in the spoiler.

A mechanic with overalls zipped snugly over a commodious beer belly reckoned the culprit would have had to drive forward with some force to extricate his vehicle.

If it hadn't been for the 44-degree heat and the fact that there were hundreds of kilometres of roads around Uluru in central Australia I'd have pursued the coward.

Instead I tried to be grateful that I'd succumbed to the rental car company's insurance excess reduction. (Incidentally how is that rental cars, no matter how much one checks the small print seem to end up costing double the original price?)

I also tried to stop myself seething about the car and thus ruining the impact of the brooding immensity of Uluru.

Streaked and swirled in a palette of sunset colours, this monolith (which will be more familiar to some readers by its non PC name Ayers Rock) rises 348 metres above the desert sands.

The secret sites and caves adorned with paintings attest to Uluru's deep spiritual significance to the local Aboriginal people. So significant in fact, that apparently when one is on a cultural tour of the rock, asking questions about the rock's geological history are gently rebuffed....

Maybe it was the heat but I was determined to find an explanation as to why nowadays - when the local people strongly discourage tourists from climbing Uluru - climbs still take place. There's even a chain to aid tourists' ascents and descents.

Apparently, when guardianship of the rock was handed back to the locals by the Australian government the one proviso was that the climbs (still heavily marketed overseas, especially in Europe and Asia) would be continued under a long-term lease agreement.

Although I struggle to see how some geological information in the information centre would reduce Uluru's spiritual power, I am completely with the Aboriginals that climbing is unnecessary.

Some places on our earth should be left untrammeled by humans, and what's more, the climb is dangerous and the presence of people on the summit has lead to pollution of the waterholes around Uluru's base (sweat, urine, even suntan cream is thought to eventually seep through the rock and thus into the water).

Far better to stand at the foot of Uluru and gaze up at its flanks - sensually smooth in places, gashed with fissures and pockmarked by water and wind in others.

Later the same day I sat barefoot in the sand quaffing a good Aussie red and eating crocodile and macadamia hors d'oeuvres and kangaroo fillet at a Sounds of Silence dinner and watched Uluru being washed by moonlight.

Maybe it was the wine or the haunting sound of the didgeridoo but somehow one cracked spoiler and a hefty bill no longer seemed quite so cataclysmic.