Bromley climbs into trouble

By ROSS BARNETT

A children's book nearly 10 years old is the focus for one of Australia's more unlikely battles over Aboriginal rights.

On one side are the authors, Alan and Patricia Campbell, who live in the outer suburbs of Sydney; on the other side is the Central Land Council, a statutory body based in the town of Alice Springs which has the authority to protect the interests of traditional Aboriginal land owners in the southern half of the Northern Territory.

The Central Land Council has written to the Campbells, asking them and their publisher, to withdraw from sale all copies of Bromley Climbs Uluru, a light-hearted fantasy about a teddy bear that climbs Australia's largest rock.

If the book is not withdrawn from sale the CLC says it will apply to the Federal Court of Australia to stop the Campbells and their publisher re-printing and distributing any further copies of the book. Acting against a restraining order of the Federal Court could make the Campbells liable to a $55,000 fine under new government regulations.

The CLC is acting on behalf of the traditional owners of Uluru, or Ayers Rock as it used to be better known, around the globe.

According to the CLC the Bromley book contains several pictures to which these traditional owners, the Anangu people, strongly object.

One of them, used on the cover, shows the teddy bear on top of the Rock with a climbing rope slung over his shoulder. Another has Bromley in the process of climbing the stone cairn that is it at the top of Uluru. Both of these pictures, apparently, are instances of the misuse of images of Australia's best-known national park.

Climbing Ayers Rock has been controversial for some years. The message from Parks Australia, the government body that manages the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, is that Anangu would prefer people not to scale the monolith. To add support to this message there is a large sign at the base of the climb reinforcing the Anangu view.

Anangu object to people climbing on the basis that the route that tourist footsteps now follow is the same that was used by one of their Dreamtime ancestors. To Anangu this route has deep religious significance and shouldn't be trifled with by something as insignificant as a bit of sightseeing.

This is where the Anangu objection to Bromley Climbs Uluru kicks in. Bromley is not just doing something that the traditional owners don't want people to do, he is being disrespectful as well.

The Bromley book came out in 1993. Since then it has sold about 45,000 copies and has become a firm favourite for many hundreds of Australian children. It has been reprinted seven times and copies have made their way around the planet. But until recently there was nothing that Anangu could do about the book, despite their objections.

Then in mid-2000, the Australian Parliament passed the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) regulations. Buried deep within these regulations were some unusual rules which gave the Director of National Parks the power to ban all filming, photography, painting and even sound recording in a handful of Australian parks. And one of them was Uluru.

At present all commercial photography of Australia's most famous icon requires a permit even for something as simple as a postcard. Photographers who apply for a permit have to fill out a 14-page form at least four weeks before they visit Uluru and then have to present all of their pictures for approval before they can be published.

The pictures for the Bromley book were taken in 1986 when the Campbells were on an extended holiday trip around Australia and it took until 1993 before they were eventually published. But the new regulations meant that all of the book's images would have to be submitted to the park authorities before another printing would be allowed.

The Campbells first became aware that there was an objection to their book in March last year, when they received a wordy letter from Susan Koo, the media and information officer for the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, which includes Uluru. The letter told them, in fairly blunt terms, that the Bromley book contained "inappropriate images of Uluru" which should be "removed from your publication as soon as possible".

For the Campbells, who are ordinary suburban people with day jobs that support their creative activities, the Koo letter was a shock.

"It came absolutely out of the blue," says Patricia Campbell, "and we were completely gob-smacked.

"As a common courtesy when we were travelling around Australia we always went up to the people in charge, whether it was a national park or some other tourist attraction, and asked if we could take some pictures of our little bear.

"The gate ranger at Uluru thought it was all tongue-in-cheek, thought that Alan was a bit of a joke - a big tall guy with a bear under his arm - and let him through.

"Everybody knew what we were doing and Uluru was no exception."

But the political scene at Uluru has changed dramatically since 1986, when it was still quite okay for Australians to call the world's largest monolith Ayers Rock.

In the past 17 years a raft of regulations has been put in place within the national park, which has progressively placed more and more of the scenery off-limits for commercial filming, photography and painting. The park service definition of commercial intent is so broad that it includes photography for children's books, for magazine and newspaper articles and images that are used on websites or business cards.

Parks Australia, the government body that helps to manage the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, is unrepentant about these changes. When the Bromley bear affair was first reported in the Australian media in March, Brooke Watson, the park manager told The Weekend Australian Magazine, "In other parts of the world indigenous people's views are often trampled over. We are trying to create indigenous empowerment here".

Watson's perspective is backed up by that of Canberra-based Peter Cochrane, the director of national parks. According to Cochrane, the Aboriginal traditional owners have told him that "they consider their culture respected and protected by the sorts of restrictions that they have asked the Commonwealth Government and Parks Australia to put in place.

"These restrictions help to ensure that traditional owners continue to feel positive about tourists and other people visiting their land," he said.

But these official attitudes don't rest easy with many people in the Australian media who have been affected by the rules and regulations that govern Uluru.

Late last year, Lee Mylne, the president of the Australian Society of Travel Writers, wrote to Brooke Watson at Uluru asking that a simpler system be adopted for visiting media.

"We do respect that the Anangu people do not wish to be used as filming fodder," she told Watson. "But Uluru is an icon that travel journalists wish to photograph and write about without having to go through a tangle of applications and guideline agreements forms, let alone paying a fee to do so."

Other media people have been less circumspect. Ron Moon, the former editor of the magazine 4x4 Australia, has said that the regulations that cover filming and photography at Uluru are a case of "the Federal bureaucracy having gone stark raving mad".

And last year, Cameron Murphy, the NSW president of the Council for Civil Liberties, told the Sydney Morning Herald that the Federal regulations were a disgrace, adding that the photography controls limited the media's freedom of speech.

The Campbells don't want to be drawn into an argument over white rights versus those of the park's Aboriginal community. But they do point out that there is a great unfairness in the fact that what they originally did in 1986 - taking photographs of a teddy bear apparently in the act of scaling the rock and then publishing them - was completely legal at the time.

"It's ridiculous that they can make these rules retrospective over things that we did way back in the past" says Alan Campbell.

The Campbells are also indignant about the fact that the Central Land Council is now acting on behalf of the traditional owners when Parks Australia dropped the Bromley case last year because it had the potential to become a hot potato.

As one Sydney radio station commentator observed, given the grave economic and social problems that face most Aboriginal communities in central Australia, the CLC "might well have better things to do with their time and money".