Closing the climb: refusal or reconciliation in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park?

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Uluru Climb, located within Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Australia, was permanently closed to tourists on the 26 October 2019 after decades of controversy. Determined by a unanimous vote of the Anangu majority Board of Management, news of the Climb’s closure quickly captured popular, political and media attention, not all of which was positive. Drawing on two periods of fieldwork – the first in November 2012 (n = 68 interviewees) and the second in May 2019 (n = 62 interviewees) – this paper discusses visitor responses to the Climb both in terms of the ongoing coloniality evident in discourses of nationalism and individual rights and the possibility of the transformation of such views via a range of emotional and affective engagements. We highlight the prevalence of feelings of ownership, empathy and shame in the deployment of a range of views on the Climb and other cultural restrictions, as well as their political implications in the context of contemporary Australian settler-colonialism. In so doing, we position an ethic of relationality as key to the mobilisation of feelings, emotions and affects necessary to transform the outlook of visitors in the context of ongoing reconciliation debates between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.