The Last Morning They Were Allowed
The winds arrived before dawn on October 25, 2019. Rangers at Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park were watching them — 50-kilometre gusts rolling across the desert floor — and for a moment it looked as though nature itself was going to resolve the argument. Climbing was routinely closed in high winds. If the gusts held, the hundreds of tourists who had queued in darkness at the base of the steep western face — some of them camping illegally on roadsides for miles around because every hotel and campsite within range was full — would miss their last legal chance to stand on top of Uluru. Permanently. The ban took effect the following morning.
The winds calmed three hours after the scheduled opening. Around 1,000 climbers began their ascent up the chain handhold on the rock's face. An Anangu onlooker standing at the base booed them.
That scene — the long column of tourists moving up the red flank of the rock while its traditional owners watched from below — contained the whole history of the previous sixty years in compressed form. The Anangu had been asking people not to climb since 1985, the year the Australian government handed the land back to them. They had watched 37 people die on the rock. They had watched tourists defecate near sacred waterholes and drive golf balls from the summit and strip naked on the most spiritually significant point of their country. They had been told, again and again, that the economic value of the climbing route outweighed their objections. They had been offered the title deeds to their land and, five minutes later, asked to sign away the terms they had been promised.
Uluru is not just a place where something happened. It is the place where the question of whose relationship to a landscape is permitted to matter was fought across six decades and finally, belatedly, settled. The Anangu did not lose this fight. What they lost was the time it took to win it.
Ayers Rock: How a 500-Million-Year-Old Site Got a Colonial Name
The rock existed long before any human being arrived in Australia. The sandstone that forms Uluru was deposited as sediment roughly 550 million years ago, compressed and buried kilometres underground, then tilted almost vertical by geological forces and gradually exposed by hundreds of millions of years of erosion. What stands above the desert plain is the tip — most of the formation extends five to six kilometres underground. Its surface changes colour through the day, moving from deep ochre through burning orange to violet at dusk, because of the way iron oxide in the rock reacts to different qualities of light.
Archaeological evidence places human presence in the Uluru region at more than 10,000 years. For the Anangu — the Pitjantjatjara people, traditional custodians of this country — the rock and the landscape around it have always been alive with meaning. The waterholes around its base, the caves in its walls, the ridgelines and formations visible from its summit: all are embedded in Tjukurpa, the Anangu belief system that encompasses law, ceremony, relationships between living things, and the responsibility to care for Country across generations. Climbing the rock was not something Anangu did. The path up the western face crosses a route of deep cultural significance, traditionally restricted to initiated men. The summit was not a vantage point. It was not a challenge to be conquered.
William Gosse Names Someone Else's Home
In July 1873, William Gosse, a surveyor employed by the South Australian government, became the first European to reach Uluru. He climbed it. Then he named it. He called it Ayers Rock, after Sir Henry Ayers, then Chief Secretary of South Australia — a bureaucrat who had never been within a thousand kilometres of the place and had no connection to it whatsoever. The name was added to official maps and stayed there for more than a century. In doing so, it rendered invisible what the Anangu had always called it: Uluru — a proper noun, a place name carried for thousands of years, erased from every government document for the better part of a hundred years.
The dual name Ayers Rock / Uluru was officially adopted in 1993. Uluru became the sole official name in 2002.
Australia's Tourism Machine Discovers the Rock
Tourism at Uluru began in the late 1930s, when the Australian National Travel Association — formed explicitly to promote domestic travel — identified the rock as a powerful marketing asset. A massive red monolith rising alone from the flat desert, roughly in the geographic centre of the continent: visually arresting, symbolically legible, easy to put on a poster. The Anangu were not consulted. Their relationship to the place was not part of the pitch.
The first dirt road to Uluru was built in 1948. Tour buses began operating in the early 1950s. In 1950 the Australian government declared Ayers Rock National Park — taking formal control of land the Anangu had managed for millennia — without their consent. In 1958, Kata Tjuta (the Olgas), the cluster of red rock domes 25 kilometres to the west, was added to the park. Motel leases were granted in 1959. An airstrip followed. A climbing chain was installed in 1964, extended in 1976, to make the ascent easier and increase visitor throughput. None of these decisions involved the Anangu. The rock had been converted, in the space of two decades, from a sacred site into a recreational attraction generating revenue for the Northern Territory government.
Under Aboriginal welfare policies of the 1950s and 1960s, Anangu families were actively discouraged from living near the rock. The land that had sustained their ceremonies and culture for thousands of years was, in the language of the Australian state, a national park — which meant it belonged to everyone, which meant in practice it belonged to whoever was monetising it.
The Handback That Changed Everything Except the Climb
By the 1970s, the Aboriginal land rights movement had produced its first major legislation. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, passed under the Whitlam government, allowed First Nations people to claim land where traditional ownership could be demonstrated. The Anangu could demonstrate it — their occupation and stewardship stretched back thousands of years. Their problem was that Uluru–Kata Tjuta had already been declared a national park and was specifically excluded from the Act's provisions.
The stalemate held through the Fraser years. The Anangu lobbied continuously, working through the Central Land Council, documenting their connection to country, pressing the Commonwealth to amend the legislation. They were asking for recognition of something that had never stopped being true.
Bob Hawke's Promise and the Compromise Nobody Asked For
In November 1983, freshly elected Prime Minister Bob Hawke announced that his government would amend the Aboriginal Land Rights Act to allow the Anangu to claim title to Uluru–Kata Tjuta. The announcement included the Anangu's ten-point plan for the park's management. One of those ten points was explicit: climbing Uluru would be prohibited.
What Hawke actually delivered in October 1985 was most of that plan — but not that point. The climbing ban was quietly dropped before the handover ceremony. The reasons given were economic. The Northern Territory government was already furious about the handback; its tourism industry depended on the climbing route. In the lead-up to the ceremony, a sustained and at times vicious campaign argued that transferring the rock to Anangu ownership would alienate it from the rest of Australia. During the ceremony itself, a light plane flew low overhead trailing a banner: Ayers Rock for All Australians.
Pamela Taylor, whose father Tony Tjamiwa had been instrumental in the years-long campaign for the handback, was present at the ceremony. Her overriding memory was relief. "We were just so happy," she later told NITV. "After all that struggle, all the talking, the fight to get it back — that it was finally going to be given back." The relief was real. So was the price they had been asked to pay for it.
The 99-Year Lease and the Fine Print of Justice
On October 26, 1985, Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen passed the title deeds to Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park to the Anangu traditional owners at a ceremony at the base of the rock. More than 2,000 people attended. Standing before them, Stephen said: "Today we stand not merely in the centre of our continent, at its very heart, but beside what has become one of our national symbols — what Aboriginal Australians know as Uluru."
Five minutes after the handover, the Anangu signed a 99-year lease returning management of the park to the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service. They would sit on the board of management, with an Anangu majority — but access to the rock, including the climbing route, would continue.
Like Robben Island becoming a symbol of freedom, or Soweto becoming synonymous with resistance, the 1985 handback was a genuine milestone in Indigenous land rights. The Anangu had their land. They had their name on the title deeds.
What they did not have was any mechanism to stop people climbing it. The Anangu spokesman Kunmanara Lester told the assembled crowd that while Anangu did not want people climbing Uluru, it would be permitted — for now. It was a concession extracted under what Sammy Wilson, three decades later, would describe as feeling like someone holding a gun to their heads.
Thirty-Seven Deaths and the Grief of Being a Host
The Anangu concept of responsibility to visitors on their country is not rhetorical. When someone comes to Uluru, the Anangu feel — as hosts — accountable for their wellbeing. The climbing route runs across a culturally significant section of the rock, and it is genuinely dangerous. The western face rises at an angle severe enough that inexperienced climbers regularly freeze partway up and descend backwards. Summer temperatures at the summit can exceed 45°C. Winds shift without warning. There are no bathroom facilities at the top, and no bins.
The Chain on the Rock
The climbing chain, installed in 1964 and extended in 1976, was placed there to increase visitor throughput, not out of concern for the Anangu. By the 1990s, the numbers climbing were large enough that the pale scar of the path was visible from a distance, worn permanently into the rock's surface. Between 2002 and 2009 alone, 74 climbers required medical rescue. Many had underestimated the heat. Others had fallen.
At least 37 people died on the climb between the 1950s — when the Australian government began keeping records — and 2019. The final recorded death came in July 2018, when a 76-year-old Japanese tourist collapsed on the steepest section of the ascent and could not be revived. He was helicoptered to the clinic at Yulara, where he was pronounced dead. He was the 37th person to die on the rock since records began. Every death caused grief in the Mutitjulu community — the Anangu settlement at the base. The Anangu felt responsible. They had not asked these people to come. They had asked, repeatedly, that people not attempt the climb. The deaths happened anyway, on their country, in sight of their homes.
"They've Got No Respect"
The deaths were not the only source of anguish. Because there were no facilities at the summit, tourists who climbed Uluru urinated and defecated on the rock, and their waste washed down with the rains into the waterholes around the base. Those waterholes are sacred to the Anangu. They are also critical habitat for native reptiles, birds, and animals. By 2019, the waterholes near the base of the climb were contaminated with bacterial runoff accumulated over decades.
Tourists stripped naked on the summit. Photographs showed them posing for comedy shots. At least one group drove golf balls from the top. Others chipped pieces from the rock as souvenirs, until so many pieces were being taken that the park eventually launched an initiative accepting them back by post — and received hundreds of parcels.
Rameth Thomas, an Anangu man, put it simply to the BBC: "That's a very sacred place, like our church. People right around the world they just come and climb it. They've got no respect."
The sign erected at the base of the climb in the 1990s read: The climb is not prohibited, but we ask you to respect our law and culture by not climbing Uluru. For most of the subsequent three decades, the majority of visitors who read it climbed anyway. At the peak of visitor numbers in the early 2000s, around three-quarters of all park visitors made the ascent.
The Long Campaign to Close the Climb
The numbers changed slowly. By 2010, the proportion of visitors choosing to climb had dropped from 74% to around 38%. By 2015, it had halved again, hovering at approximately 16%. This shift came partly from years of educational work by the park management and Anangu community, and partly from a broader change in Australian attitudes toward Indigenous rights. The "Please Don't Climb" signage at the base became progressively larger and more prominent. The cultural centre at Yulara introduced an "I have not climbed" register — a book where visitors could record why they had chosen to respect the Anangu request — which reframed non-climbing as a deliberate act rather than a passive one.
The Economics of Disrespect
Throughout this period, the Anangu remained under sustained pressure from the Northern Territory government and the tourism industry to keep the climb open. The argument was always economic: visitors came to climb. Close the route and visitor numbers fall. Fall in visitor numbers means fall in revenue and, by extension, the funding that flowed back to the Mutitjulu community.
Sammy Wilson, chairman of the Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park Board of Management, described this pressure in terms that left the power dynamic clear. "Whitefellas see the land in economic terms," he said, "where Anangu see it as Tjukurpa. If the Tjukurpa is gone, so is everything." He was not speaking abstractly. During the board's deliberations, Wilson stated that over the years the Anangu had "felt a sense of intimidation, as if someone is holding a gun to our heads to keep it open."
The management framework had always contained a provision: if the proportion of visitors choosing to climb fell below 20%, the board was empowered to close it permanently. By 2015, the number had already dropped below that threshold. The Anangu had met, on the Australian government's own terms, every criterion required to enforce the ban.
The November 2017 Vote
On November 1, 2017, the Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park Board of Management voted unanimously to close the climb permanently, effective October 26, 2019. The date was chosen deliberately: the 34th anniversary of the 1985 handback. The prohibition that had been stripped from Hawke's original agreement would take effect on the anniversary of the day the compromise was signed.
The announcement triggered an immediate and grimly ironic response. Within weeks of the closure date being set, visitor numbers began climbing sharply. By July 2019, monthly visitor counts were 26% higher than the same month the previous year — more than 57,000 people in a single month. Ranger Greg Elliot, the park's ranger-in-charge, called it "climb fever." Tourists were camping illegally on roadsides for miles around Yulara. A 12-year-old girl fell 20 to 30 metres while descending during one of the busiest weeks, fracturing her hand and injuring her ankle. Rangers dealing with the surge had no time for routine park maintenance, cultural programmes, or the work the Anangu had been hoping the closure would allow them to focus on.
The final rush was its own kind of argument. Years of declining climb rates had convinced the board that the time had come; the surge of last-chance climbers demonstrated the depth of resistance to the Anangu's position that persisted across large sections of the visiting public.
Climb Fever: The Last Day
The final day of legal climbing — October 25, 2019 — was a scene the Anangu had spent thirty-four years waiting to witness. The winds arrived first, as described: the high gusts that threatened to make the closure happen one day early before calming mid-morning. Around 1,000 climbers made the ascent through the course of the day. The queues at the base of the chain began forming before dawn, in darkness.
The Anangu onlooker at the base who booed them was not performing for any camera. Indigenous academic Marcia Langton posted on social media that afternoon: "A curse will fall on all of them. They will remember how they defiled this sacred place until they die, and history will record their contempt for Aboriginal culture." Australia's Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Ken Wyatt — himself of Aboriginal descent — called the spectacle equivalent to "a rush of people wanting to climb over the Australian War Memorial."
Wilson's statement, released that day, was quieter. "The land has law and culture. We welcome tourists here. Closing the climb is not something to feel upset about but a cause for celebration. Let's come together, let's close it together."
Late in the afternoon of October 25, the last climbers came down. Workers immediately began removing the chain from the rock's western face. By the time the ban took effect the following morning, the handhold that had been there since 1964 was gone.
After the Ban: What Uluru Looks Like Without the Chain
The economic collapse predicted by opponents of the ban did not materialise. Visitor numbers at Uluru–Kata Tjuta had already been trending upward for years, driven by cultural tourism rather than the climbing route. The centre of gravity of the visitor experience shifted toward what the Anangu had always offered: base walks, guided cultural programmes, sunrise and sunset viewing, explanations of the landscape and its meaning. The "I have not climbed" register at the cultural centre, which had once been a novelty, no longer had any purpose — because no one was climbing.
The waterholes around the base remain contaminated from decades of accumulated human waste. The pale scar of the climbing path is still visible on the rock's western face from a distance — the compression of hundreds of thousands of footsteps into sandstone crystal does not reverse in years, or possibly decades. Full recovery of the surface, Anangu land managers estimate, will take generations.
The question of how to handle sites that carry simultaneous weight as natural wonders, tourism assets, and living sacred places is one that arrives in different forms around the world. Stonehenge was freely accessible until 1977, when visitor erosion forced the restriction of physical contact with the stones. Easter Island continues to navigate the tension between Rapa Nui cultural authority over the moai and the volume of international visitors the site generates. In each case the underlying question is the same: when a landscape is sacred to the people who have stewarded it for thousands of years, whose right to determine its use carries more weight?
Australia's answer took sixty years to arrive. The 2019 ban was not a radical act. It was the completion of something that should have been settled on October 26, 1985, when the title deeds changed hands at the base of the rock and a light plane flew overhead trailing a banner that read Ayers Rock for All Australians.
The banner is long gone. The name on the title deeds has not changed.
Visiting Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park
Uluru sits in the Northern Territory of Australia, approximately 450 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs. The nearest settlement is Yulara — also called Ayers Rock Resort — 20 kilometres north of the rock, which has hotels, a campsite, restaurants, and the Uluru–Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre. The park is open year-round, though summer temperatures between November and March regularly exceed 40°C and some trails close on extreme heat days.
Park entry fees apply. The Cultural Centre at the base of the rock, run jointly by Parks Australia and the Anangu community, provides context on Tjukurpa and on the land rights history that defines the site — it is the right place to begin any visit. The 10.6-kilometre base walk circumnavigates the entire rock, passing caves containing rock art and explanatory panels, with sections where photography is requested to stop out of respect for sacred sites. The restrictions are marked clearly. They are not optional.
Kata Tjuta, the cluster of 36 domes 25 kilometres to the west, has its own walking trails — including the Valley of the Winds walk, considered among the finest in central Australia. Guided cultural tours led by Anangu rangers offer a depth of context that no self-guided circuit can replicate.
The sunrise and sunset viewing areas on the eastern side of the park offer the colour-shift experience that has drawn visitors for a century: the rock moving from deep red through orange to violet as the light changes. This is what the Anangu have always said was the real thing about Uluru. The climb, they said for sixty years, was not the real thing. Standing at the base of a 550-million-year-old formation as it changes colour in the desert light, on land whose custodians have been caring for it longer than recorded history — that is the real thing. They were right.
FAQ
Is it still legal to climb Uluru?
No. Climbing Uluru has been permanently prohibited since October 26, 2019, under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Anyone attempting to climb faces significant fines and potential prosecution. The chain handhold that previously assisted climbers was removed on October 25, 2019 — the day before the ban came into effect. Rangers enforce the prohibition actively.
Why was climbing Uluru banned?
The ban reflected the long-standing wishes of the Anangu people, the traditional custodians of Uluru, who had asked visitors not to climb since 1985 — when they first received the title deeds to the land. The climbing path crosses a section of the rock of deep cultural and ceremonial significance under Anangu law. The Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park Board of Management voted unanimously to close the climb in November 2017, citing cultural significance, environmental damage, and the fact that fewer than 20% of visitors were then choosing to climb — a threshold that had been set in the management framework as a trigger for closure.
How many people have died climbing Uluru?
At least 37 people died on the Uluru climb between the 1950s — when authorities began keeping records — and 2019. Deaths resulted from falls, heat stroke, dehydration, and cardiac events. Between 2002 and 2009 alone, an additional 74 climbers required helicopter evacuation. Every death caused distress to the Anangu community, who felt a cultural responsibility for the safety of visitors on their country.
When was Uluru handed back to the Anangu?
The formal handback ceremony took place on October 26, 1985, when Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen presented the title deeds to Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park to the Anangu traditional owners at a ceremony at the base of the rock. The Anangu simultaneously signed a 99-year lease returning management to the Australian Parks and Wildlife Service as part of a joint management arrangement. Prime Minister Bob Hawke had originally committed in 1983 to also prohibiting the climb, but that provision was dropped before the ceremony took place.
What is Tjukurpa?
Tjukurpa (pronounced "chook-orr-pa") is the foundation of Anangu law, belief, and culture. It encompasses the creation period in which ancestral beings shaped the landscape, the ongoing relationships between people, animals, plants, and Country, and the responsibilities those relationships create. It is not simply a religion or mythology — it is a complete system of law and knowledge governing how the land is cared for and how people relate to each other and to the natural world. Uluru is embedded in Tjukurpa at every point: its formations, waterholes, caves, and surface record events and meanings passed down across generations. The section of the rock crossed by the climbing route has specific significance under Anangu men's law.
Can visitors still experience Uluru?
Yes. Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park remains open and actively welcomes visitors. The 10.6-kilometre base walk, guided cultural tours, ranger-led programmes, and the Anangu-run cultural centre all offer ways to engage with the landscape and its history that the Anangu have long considered more meaningful than the climb. Kata Tjuta, 25 kilometres west, has its own extensive trail network. Sunrise and sunset viewing areas remain among the park's most popular features. The prohibition is specifically on ascending the rock — not on visiting the country around it.
Sources
- Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park: Uluru Climb Closure — Parks Australia (2024)
- Handback of Uluru to the Anangu — National Museum of Australia (2023)
- Closing the Climb: Refusal or Reconciliation in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park? — Jana-Axinja Paschen, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change (2021)
- Australia's Uluru Closing to Climbers: Why It Matters — Robert Reid, National Geographic (2022)
- Uluru Handback 30th Anniversary: The Road to Victory — NITV / SBS News (2015)
- 20th Anniversary Handback: A Brief Background — Australian Government, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (2005)
- Acknowledging the Handback of Uluru–Kata Tjuta — Australian Government Indigenous.gov.au (2023)
- 40 Years Since Uluru Was Returned — Amnesty International Australia (2025)
- Japanese Tourist Dies Climbing Uluru — CNN (2018)
- Tourists Flock to Climb Uluru Before It Closes — SBS News (2019)
- Uluru Climb Rush: Rangers Under Pressure Before October Ban — AAP via Yahoo News Australia (2019)
- The Strange, Sad History of People Climbing Uluru — Vice (2019)
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