ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANA –
“Most of us think of it as Ayers Rock, largest monolith in the world, a great Australian tourist attraction second only to the Great Barrier Reef. However, the Yankuntjatjara and Pitjantjatjara people see it as Uluru – major centre of the dreaming tracks which criss-cross Central Australia.
During the Dreamtime, the ancestral beings left their mark as they travelled across the landscape. The Two Boys who quarrelled, the Hare Wallabies, the Pythons, the Blue-Tongue Lizard and Tjati, the Red Lizard, all helped to create Uluru – Ayers Rock. The activities of the heroes which are recorded in rituals, epic song cycles, stories or myths, also established the rules of Aboriginal social life.
Robert Layton describes how religion, subsistence patterns, and land ownership all form part of a living culture, despite the fact that the Yankuntjatjara and Pitjantjatjara have lived like refugees in their own country for the past hundred years. He traces the history of their dispossession and their relations with bureaucracies, cattle stations, missions and police.”
- x, 139 p. : ill. (some col.), maps ; 22 x 28 cm. reprint of original 1986 edition. #270625