Kata Tjuta

Kata Tjuta is thirty-six domes of conglomerate about thirty kilometres west of Uluru, and the tallest of them is higher than Uluru. It receives a fraction of the attention, and the reason is instructive: there is far less that its owners are willing to have said about it.

Uluru has a substantial body of publicly shareable material, accounts that Anangu have chosen to tell, interpreted at the cultural centre and on the base walk, because they decided those could be told. Kata Tjuta does not. The published position, stated through Parks Australia in joint management with Anangu, is that much of what Kata Tjuta holds is men's knowledge under Tjukurpa: not to be told to women, not to be told to uninitiated men, and not to be told to visitors. Parks Australia says that much and stops.

So this entry stops there too, and the stopping is the content rather than a gap in it.

What can properly be said: two walks are open, the Valley of the Winds and Walpa Gorge, and the remainder of the range is closed to visitors. Photography is restricted in specified areas. The domes came into the same arrangement as Uluru at the handback of 26 October 1985, held under Anangu freehold title and leased back to the Commonwealth with traditional owners in the majority on the board. Kata Tjuta was never open to climbing, so it escaped the long argument that ran next door.

The temptation this site presents is worth naming, because a reference work feels the pull of it. There is more material available. Twentieth-century ethnographers recorded a good deal about Kata Tjuta, and it sits in published books and in university libraries, and some of it is online. It could be quoted with a citation and would look like scholarship.

It was collected without the consent of the people whose knowledge it was, from informants who in some cases were not entitled to give it, and published by men who did not ask. The fact that restricted material was written down by an outsider does not release it. The relevant permission is held by Anangu now, and it has not been given.

The pressures on the place are the ordinary ones: aircraft overflights, photography in areas where photography is asked against, and the standing expectation that sacred country ought to explain itself to people who have travelled a long way to look at it. This entry declines that expectation, which is the only respectful thing available to it.

Kata Tjuta is geologically a completely different kind of rock than its more famous neighbour, and it is governed by the same handback agreement that changed who owns Uluru.

A different rock than Uluru

Where Uluru is a single sandstone monolith, Kata Tjuta is composed of conglomerate, a mix of pebbles and boulders cemented together, forming thirty-six separate domes rather than one continuous formation. Its tallest dome, Mount Olga, actually rises higher than Uluru's summit, a fact that surprises visitors who assume the more famous formation nearby must also be the taller one.

The same handback, extended

Kata Tjuta was included in the same 1985 land title return to the Anangu covered in this entry's companion article on Uluru, and is managed under the identical joint arrangement with Parks Australia, since both formations fall within the same national park and the same body of Tjukurpa law governing their significance.

What this entry does not describe

As with Uluru, specific Tjukurpa narratives tied to particular features of Kata Tjuta are restricted under Anangu law, and in some cases restricted further by gender or ceremonial status even within the community itself; this entry accordingly describes the site's physical and administrative facts rather than the closed knowledge attached to individual formations within it.