Landscape photographers, including you, are losing rights

Nor do the Uluru rules explain what was said to me in 1993 in an off-the-record comment by the then park manager at Uluru. While I cannot repeat the specifics of what he told me it was clearly evident that the rationale for the Uluru rules was far more mundane than the cultural reasoning that he kept repeating when the interview was on the record.

Readers of this article may wonder why the issue of filming and photography at Uluru actually matters to them. Aside from the issue of freedom of expression it should matter to them as taxpayers.

In late 2009, a new “sunrise” viewing area, costing $21 million, was opened within the national park. Yet only four years earlier in August 2005, a traffic and parking study that was commissioned by park management suggested that a new sunrise viewing area - one which would have been consistent with the park’s infrastructure master plan - could have been built at perhaps one-tenth of this cost.

This potential viewing area would have used the site from which Stanley Breeden took the Anangu-approved cover shot for his 1994 book. Yet instead, citing cultural concerns related to photography which did not exist in the early 1990s or even when the park’s infrastructure plan was adopted in January 2000, Parks Australia allowed a reasonably minor project to become a massive undertaking.

A new road was built to access a viewing area on the southern side of Uluru, which is ultimately the wrong side of Uluru as far as winter-time photography is concerned. Meanwhile just a few kilometres away from where tourists are being bussed to this Talinguru Nyakunytjaku viewing area - dubbed the Peter Garrett Memorial Viewing Deck by one cynical commentator - Anangu children in the township of Mutitjulu remain without a swimming pool during the hot summer months.