The first step to discover the Australian outback is to be equipped with a car and to think about all you may need traveling for many kilometres in places where there is practically no traffic and petrol stations are very rare – as people would have been repeating hundreds of times before your departure. Those recommendations may have made the thought of this journey even more fascinating and increased the sense of adventure. Everything becomes real in Alice Springs: travellers buy water in tanks, not in bottles and the car is actually a 4×4 SUV with bull bars, exhaust stack, beacon and radio to communicate. Only the sat-nav is missing because – as they explain – there are very few forks along the road and you just need to follow the signs.
MacDonnel Rangers Mountains guide you out of the town and lead you on the road that penetrates into the Australian desert. The mountains have flat and rounded tops, dark brown sides sculpted by the time and come up from a reddish soil that only occasionally lets trees or green and yellow bush sprout. Discreetly, without intrusive boundaries, the terrain gives space to the road, a ribbon of asphalt that unfolds rising and falling as far as the eye can see.
Short detours along the road bring you to discover wonderful gorges. Rock paths penetrate into narrow canyons. Bright red-orange stone walls rise steeply for metres and metres until they meet the deep blue of the sky. Along a dry riverbed the Ochre Pits, pit of brown, red, yellow and white ochre, used to provide natural dyes to Aborigines. In every direction the space is full of bright and dusty colours.
Going on for kilometres without meeting anyone, losing the sense of time and the mobile phone signal. Feeling the strange sensation of having a break from the world, of being far away and out of reach: for a moment it is confusing, then pleasantly relaxing.
Suddenly the road comes to an end, as to say that you are now ready to approach the real heart of the continent, the most intact part of it. Continuing this way means entering into a reality where there is no space for asphalt, just a strip of dirt road. Here people feel a new connection with the earth and their souls bounce, as the cars they are sitting in: these are the Aboriginal Territories.
After many kilometres of endless reddish expanse dotted with shy greenish shrubbery, the Red Centre Way comes to the end close to the Kings Canyon. Its spectacular gorges split the rock like enormous cracks: you can’t help thinking about the activity of the time, impossible to measure but has patiently piled up rocky layers with different shades, as if it wanted to leave a visible sign of its work. At the bottom some brave gum trees succeeded to pass its roots through the stones on the ground and show an unlikely green crown on top of a thin white trunk. Walking on the rocks, sometimes climbing on them and feeling with the hands the heat of the sun imprisoned inside them, stumbling on the irregular soil, getting dusty. I hadn’t felt so close to the earth before for a long time, this strong, concrete, solid element – that is why we are scared when it trembles and shakes.
South of the canyon the road turns grey again, all around the orange tones of the earth triumph in soft sandy dunes, which give the landscape a gentler appearance. Walking on the untouched sand, feeling your feet sinking into it, looking at the footprints you left behind: if you grew up on the beach, these feelings are very familiar. They say that people born close to the sea always look for stretch of water in the distance: just for a moment there it is, a rippled and clearer surface surrounded by green spots of vegetation on the horizon. But if you look better they are actually waves and reflections of earth and sand, there is no water – at least no longer.
It is a picture dominated by the orange, sometimes turning to the shades of yellow-earth, sometimes becoming dark brown; it is a picture where distances are so big that everything looks like a small dot. Here the aboriginal inhabitants wander, absent from our eyes but present all around thanks to stories, legends, places considered sacred and thanks to their paintings, also made of warm colours and small dots.
Among the places sacred to the Anangu population Uluru (Ayers Rock in English) is for sure the most famous in the world. In the middle of the Australian continent, kilometres away from cities, the enormous rock stands out majestically on the flat skyline and exerts a magnetic attraction over the travellers. It is impossible to turn away while its sides take on different shades and its shadows get longer at sunset, until the darkness comes to hide it for a few hours. A real, deep, silent night, in which millions and millions of stars make the heads of those looking up spin. The queen of the southern skies, the unmistakable Southern Cross, guides the disoriented people. The first ray of sunshine brings back the call of Uluru that rises from the shadow and wears the tones of sunrise together with the rocks of Kata Tjuta (The Olgas) nearby.
Getting closer to the rock and feeling smaller and smaller as it becomes more and more gigantic, feeling the majesty and the sacredness of its shadow, walking around it reading Aboriginal myths and identify in the folds of the rock signs of ancestral creatures, who used to live in the Dreamtime, the time of creation. An inexplicable, irrational, magic suggestion is all around.
From the plane one last look at the red Australian earth, whose wrinkles prove the passage of time and its patient and millennial activity on this young continent: signs of wind, of waters that are no more here but that once must have filled those ponds and what today, seen from up here, appear like windy sandy streets.

June 2013