Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Fissures in the rock: rethinking pride and shame in the moral terrains of Uluru
Gordon Waitt*, Robert Figueroa** and Lana McGee*
Joint management strategies of national parks are extending the pedagogical arm of reconciliation. We explore how this process is operating in UluruKata Tjuta National Park. Through our concept of moral terrains, we examine whether the embodied knowledge derived from travelling, witnessing, climbing, walking, touching and being touched by Uluru opens moral gateways between indigenous and non-indigenous people. Our argument relies upon ethnographic materials derived from semi-structured interviews conducted around photographs taken by recently returned non-indigenous metropolitan Australians. Our results explore how moral gateways are either opened or closed through the emotions of pride and shame. key words Australia Uluru tourism ethnography postcolonial geographies

*School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, New South Wales 2515, Australia email: gwaitt@uow.edu.au **Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 13346, USA

revised manuscript received 8 November 2006

Introduction: joint management, touring Uluru and national belongings

Joint management of national parks between indigenous communities and non-indigenous agencies is an increasingly common practice to help resolve tensions arising from colonization (Department of Environment and Heritage 2000; Smyth 2001; Carruthers 2003). In Australia, joint management is advocated within broader policies of reconciliation designed to engage the nation in a process of social transformation so that all Australians, whether indigenous or settler, should feel they belong. Joint management of the Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park is positioned as an exemplar (Breeden 2000). At Uluru, the process of reconciliation must operate within a park that is simultaneously an Anangu homeland, a New Age traveller pilgrimage, the heart of the settlers national rite of passage and a UNESCO-designated World Heritage location (Digance 2003). In the early 2000s these multiple roles helped motivate an estimated half-million people per annum to visit the Park, making it one of Australias most popular tourist destinations (Lowe 2004).

Following the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (1993), the Board of Management of Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park positions reconciliation as a process to be achieved by improving nonindigenous understandings of indigenous peoples history and culture (Department of Environment and Heritage 2000). Consequently, today, the pedagogical arm of reconciliation operates through Tjukurpa traditional Anangu knowledge about the creation of the world by ancestral beings and laws to fulfil responsibilities for protecting country. Guided by Tjukurpa principles, joint management requires non-indigenous and indigenous people working together, and assists in the process of reconciliation by enhancing mutual respect between Anangu and visitors. The hope is by introducing holistic values through Tjukurpa, non-indigenous embodiment would be awakened by taking on alternative normative interpretations which themselves embody the rock through Dreamtime lore. Limitations of rituals and rites of passage always confine Tjukurpa to particular moral subjects who have already satisfied Anangu requirements, which visitors would never be permitted to satisfy by virtue of Tjukurpa law itself. Therefore, the joint management structure

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and visitors ought to defer to Anangu normative authority. In this paper our aim is to investigate the merits of the pedagogical arm of reconciliation amongst non-indigenous Australians who have recently returned from touring UluruKata Tjuta National Park. As Jacobs (1996) points out, tourism and touring have long been crucial to how colonial nations have been known and inhabited by settlers. Here we specifically investigate the capacity of touring the Park to change how non-indigenous domestic tourists make sense of their national belonging in a postcolonial context. Gooder and Jacobs inform our understanding of postcolonialism as the processes by which communities benefiting from, formed through, or subjected by colonialism come to terms with that fact and its aftermath (2002, 201). To conceive Uluru as a moral terrain requires thinking in terms of a web of values layered over place through discourses that establish normative practices and belongings. Moral terrains are inscribed onto bodies through affect. To enhance this definition in this paper we draw on Foucaults cartography of power, Plumwoods (2002) intentional recognition and Probyns (2005) theorization of shame. Consequently, rather than privileging ideas of Uluru as a passive landscape to survey and visually capture, we also give attention to other more embodied ways of knowing the land. Through the spatial metaphor of moral terrain, we examine how epistemological certainties of nonindigenous Australians can be maintained or put at risk through the affective power that goes beyond passively looking at to actively listening, tasting or smelling the life in the Park, or touching, walking and sitting on Uluru, or even climbing over it. Our paper provides some insights into how policies that extend the pedagogical arm of reconciliation are operating upon non-indigenous visitors understanding of self, citizenship and nation. To examine how non-indigenous sense of belongingin-the-nation is either challenged or maintained, we focus on the emerging themes of pride, shame, guilt and disappointment. Our paper thus also contributes to the spatiality of emotion, and demonstrates how emotions do have the power to transform lives (Bondi et al. 2005). To achieve our aim we first outline our conceptual framework. We then sketch out the spatial-politics that have designed Uluru as an emotionally heightened place. In doing so we specifically tackle how joint management of UluruKata Tjuta National

Park operates to challenge ideas that mobilize performances of a settler identity cast by colonialism. Touring practices and ideas circulated about the Park have been amended through joint management policies that are working towards delegitimizing the Park as a colonial possession. Lastly, we present results of our discourse analysis of the bodily affects that bring contradictory meanings to Uluru through non-indigenous touring practices. At one level our paper is an evaluation of joint management reconciliation policies. In what ways do joint management reconciliation policies sustain experiences of Uluru as a place for all Australians through challenging understandings of the self, the nation and sense of national belonging? At another level, the particular contribution of the paper is to build upon the corpus of postcolonial geographies that has investigated questions of travel and domesticating empire by interrogating the contemporary travel narratives of non-indigenous Australians (McEwan 1998 2000; Pratt 1992; Blunt 1994; Duncan and Gregory 1999). In doing so, we address one of the key criticisms of postcolonial geographies levelled by Driver (1992), namely the prioritizing of pasts. Our paper offers insights into the making of postcolonial presents and futures by contributing to investigations that do not overlook the complex ways in which the spatial mobility of tourists are involved in the remapping of place (for example Dyer et al. 2003).

Methodology: generating and interpreting self narratives from the spatial mobility of travel
Our interest in Uluru is personal. We all enjoy cultural tourism. Having toured Uluru, we became particularly concerned with the ethics of place arising from the efforts of joint management to address the aftermath of colonization. Through reflecting on our own activities, feelings and experiences at Uluru, we became aware of how touring disrupted our way of knowing the nation. Our respondents are drawn from non-indigenous people living in greater metropolitan Sydney who returned home from a recreational trip to Uluru between 1999 and 2004. In this year, Uluru became central to the politics of reconciliation and the reinvention of the National Sorry Day as a Journey of Healing. In part, this revision was an attempt to render the message more acceptable to settler Australians who may think sorry means apologizing

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Number of time(s) respondents usually travel in year Infrequently Once a year Twothree times a year 7 6 10

More than three times a year 5 Back-packers

Categories of tourists to UluruKata Tjuta National Park Organized bus Fly-drive package Self-drive campers, tours holiday-makers caravans and campervans 2 7 16 Primary reason for and Travelling around Australia or Northern Territory over months/weeks 5 duration of visit of travel Visiting family and friends over a period of weeks 11 Inexpensive short twothree day package tour to Uluru 5 The journey

3 Travelling by car specifically to visit Uluru 6 Cost School excursion

1 Nature/ environment/ outdoors 9 The journey 1 New Age spiritual quest 2

Usual holiday motivations Difference Non-tourist destinations

10

1 Aboriginal sacredness 6

Motivation for touring UluruKata Tjuta National Park National icon Spending time Childhood with friends/family memories 16 2 1

for something they did not do. The symbolism of conducting a ceremony to begin the Journey of Healing from Uluru was captured by the then Federal Opposition Leader, Mr Beazley, who is cited as saying: The message sticks you receive today and carry off to all parts of the country, leave here from the heart of the continent to reach the hearts of all Australians (Jobson 1999, 3). Furthermore, since this date the Board of Management has begun to implement the pedagogical arm of reconciliation through the provision of Anangu interpretive materials and tours. To recruit interviewees, this project was titled: Travels to the Rock. Potential participants were approached using email-lists and a snowballing sampling technique. Three researchers, two women and one man, spent the first six months of 2004 conducting semi-structured interviews with people living in Sydney and Wollongong. The ages of the researchers were twenties, thirties and forties. Research interviews were always conducted in respondents homes. In total we spoke to 28 respondents, of which only two had previously travelled to Uluru. Most were from middle-class backgrounds, including students, retirees and those working in a variety of service positions. The majority

has an Anglo-Celtic ethnicity. There is an almost even distribution of respondents by gender and age groups between the twenties and sixties. Table I summarizes how respondents differentiated themselves by pleasure travel mobility, tourist identity and motivation. It is apparent that most respondents share a preference for independent travel and cite difference as their foremost travel motivation. Touring Uluru was often an exception to their preferred travel, given this destination was always positioned as touristy. The exception was often made because of the iconic status of Uluru in their imagining of the Australian nation. Thus, the focus of our textual analysis examines the bodily affect of touring: how respondents, by becoming part of the Park, speak about changes in their sense of national belongings. Like Harrison (2003), we relied upon semistructured interviews. However, to cope with bodily experiences, careful consideration is given to our use of semi-structured interviews built around respondents photographing practices. Following the work of Latham (2003) and Deriu (2003), throughout our interviews we requested participants to use photographs, home-made videos and souvenirs to help convey a sense of practising

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places, creating representations of self and the feelings of doing. Rather than providing respondents with cameras and creating photo-diaries, we relied upon the picturing practices of tourism. This, as Crang (1997) writes, has advantages from the fact that it is not an add-on but part of touring practices. Consequently, the practices of taking holiday snapshot can provide some insight into the confluence between recording experiences, how people portray their own lives, a mechanism for structuring travel narratives and to understand relationships with places. Our hope was that respondents photograph albums would enable them to work through the sensual experiences initially committed to body-memory that lay outside of verbal language but can be later recollected and reflected in verbal expression. Ours is an analysis of the conscious-based knowledge of Uluru generated by walking on and climbing over it; or listening, smelling and tasting its life. Many respondents obviously enjoyed the opportunity to reflect upon what they had done, felt and experienced. Interviews lasted up to one hour. Respondents recalled memories of Uluru through bodily experiences and talking about associative spaces, confirming much scholarship asserting that the process of remembering requires spatial metaphors of connection (Eco 1986; Crang and Travlou 2001; Landzelius 2003). We explored how the thoroughly spatial process of remembering contours the moral terrain of Uluru. All interviews were then digitally recorded and professionally transcribed for discourse analysis. Coding, indexing, charting and mapping of these lay geographies enabled us to tap into the multiplicity of understandings about Uluru, Aboriginality and citizenship.

Reconfiguring Uluru: from scenic landscape to moral terrain

Our concept of moral terrain is an elaboration of non-dualistic thinking to challenge tourism destinations perceived as scenic landscapes. As many have pointed out, when conceptualized as scenery there is always the potential to prioritize the Eurocentric ideas of natural landscapes, portrayed as untamed, chaotic, wild, pristine or virgin, which are integral to colonial systems of appropriation and as a way of denying the prior presence of indigenous people (Head 2000; Plumwood 2002). Moreover, when destinations are conceptualized as cultural landscapes, acknowledging traces of

prior human agency, the emphasis upon human culture has tended to hide non-human participation and prioritize perception of landscape as a scenic object for human society. Indeed, as scenery, the landscape terminology prioritizes conceptualizing the tourist as a disembodied eye, viewing the world from a vantage point often constituted as white, bourgeois, masculine and heterosexual (see Binnie 1997). The landscape, in this sense, relies upon being framed by a gaze; thus, the land becomes passive, objectified and distanced from the viewer, a panorama to be captured by the eye or recorded on film. Sight, the touchstone for the rational mind of scientific observation, remains prioritized as the only legitimate source of knowledge. In contrast to the rationalistic colonial gaze, embodied knowledge derived from running, walking, smelling, listening or tasting the land, remains designated as untrustworthy. As Brennan (1996) points out, prioritizing sight enables interpretations that rely upon neither reciprocity nor consent, allowing whatever comes under visual scrutiny to become both objectified and passive. Our intention is to offer the metaphor of moral terrain as a way to challenge the colonial dominance of visuality by emphasizing a nexus of other senses and situated values. Our metaphor of moral terrain offers a strategy to break from theoretical boundaries that have kept tourism geographies from embodied knowledge and broader notions of place ethics. Consider for example, the insights of Plumwood (2002) and Cloke and Jones (2003), wherein an environmental ethic allows us to include non-human agency within our concept of moral terrains of power. On a postmodern trident of agency, otherness and relational ethics, Cloke and Jones outline components of a non-anthropocentric ethical mindfulness (borrowing Cheneys term (1999)). Adopting Plumwoods (2002) version of the intentional recognition stance, which is designed to fortify non-human agency by reconfiguring intentionality along the lines of non-human purposes, Cloke and Jones offer both a new responsibility on the part of the human moral agent and new alternatives in the very construction and meaning of agency. The human responsibility is to open the moral community and our sense of duties to new domains of agency that resist reintroducing the controversial subjectobject dualism. This relies upon removing the conceptual barrier of otherness and its controversial subjectobject dualism erected according to the ontological blueprints of

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Enlightenment ethics, and instead relies upon thinking in terms of a relational ethics. However, addressing subjectobject dualism is more affectively charged than Cloke and Jones emphasize. As Tomkins explains, shame is the most reflexive of affects in that the phenomenological distinction between subject and object is lost (1995, 136). A final component of their trident is a relational ethics, wherein further responsibility is given to the human moral agent to be ethically mindful of both the non-human agency and human moral concern for the other as well as particularities of the relational context in which encounters occur (Cloke and Jones 2003 200). Considered in light of our Uluru study, ethical contexts emerge from the substratum of moral relatedness and co-constructedness of place. Uluru is no longer conceived as a passive background but an active presence. Unless we begin to consider the rock and its surrounding ecosystem as having an interactive interest, we will fail to grasp the holistic environmental ethic embedded in Tjukurpa principles, and hence the central purpose of the joint of management strategy: to begin understanding the cultural perspective of indigenous owners. Despite the insights of a holistic environmental ethics by Cloke and Jones, they underestimate the extent to which spatialized power differentials determine new normative frameworks. To correct for the under-emphasis of affect and power, we utilize the relationships between the concepts of cartography of power (Foucault/Deleuze) and shame (Deleuze/Probyn), in order to apprehend ontological departure points for reconceptualizing tourist geographies. Drawing on Michel Foucaults (1977) understanding of space as a strategy or cartography of power enables us to conceptualize the moral terrains of Uluru as relational struggle, in which indigenous performances of personhood collide with those performances of colonial nationhood. As Deleuze (1986) stipulates, power in Foucaults work is a specialized construct, not to be understood in terms of an ideological superstructure or economic infrastructure; that is, not merely in terms of hegemonic hierarchies. Instead, space is a strategy of power that organizes the relations between architectural, social and corporeal forces in a way that produces particular forms of behaviour. Drawing on Deleuzes (1986) engagements with the power of practice and performance, we employ the argument that affective power is always as much about being affected as it is a matter of affecting.

Embodied touring knowledge of Uluru is generated by how the feeling body may shake discursive structures, making possible alternative formations of power. Thus, we conceive the pedagogical arm of reconciliation as a potential trigger for establishing alternative flows of bodies and corporeal practices and rhythms instantiated by the moral terrains of spatialized power. Uluru is fashioned by different social orders, such as personhood, nationalism and sacredness, mimicking the multiplicity of cartographies in an unstable terrain of power. Terrains of power are always open to individual reinterpretation and the potential to be disrupted by the fleshiness of the body. Following Amin and Thrift (2002), the knowledge produced by these touring bodies is not reducible to questions of discourse alone. The theoretical use of shame strengthens the spatial metaphor of Ulurus moral terrain. Like our attendant concepts of cartography of power, shame should be considered crucially reflexive and embodied. Shame in Deleuzes (1993) sense reveals our own subjectivity and materiality. Probyn extends these senses of shame in ways that embody the political discourse.
Shame is simply that which makes us human, just as it extends radically the conception of human-ness to encompass a conception of the body that has unknown capacities. In political terms, shame also allows us to enact connections among other shamed bodies in ways that pride has missed. (Probyn 2000, 25)

Probyn argues feeling shame sets off a nearly involuntary re-evaluation of ones self and ones actions (2005, 78). Joint management of Uluru tourism depends upon these associations of shame reflexivity, embodiment and political transformation in order to achieve strength in the pedagogical arm of reconciliation. Given how Uluru is embedded within national discourses of settler Australia, we specifically focus on the affective corollary responses of pride and shame. National pride is a requirement of most nation-state citizens. Other affects, like love of country and brave patriotism, seem to fall within the larger category of national pride. Whilst designed to build national pride, tourism can ironically unleash a haunting disappointment. For instance, when national icons typically earmarked with symbolism, story and song to make pride in a superlative we flourish in national identity are removed from lived experience. The individual

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tourist plods along searching a superlative experience amidst real bodily and affective discomforts of tourist crowds and others that seem far from the grand we the spectacle is expected to bring. Disappointment of pride paves the moral terrain of shame. Shame exists as the antithesis of pride, what Probyn calls prides mirror image (2000, 25). The reconciliation of national identity for its colonial origins is covered in shame. Most colonial powers achieved the ground for national pride on the horrendous acts of indigenous land and cultural destruction. As Probyn (2005) argues, when shame cannot be admitted, for instance when the Prime Minister will not say Sorry for historical acts of dispossession, the default position for living in a colonized land becomes guilt. The simple distinction between guilt and shame, in this context, is that shame involves ones care for a situation, while guilt retracts from the care by either denying responsibility or by objectifying, rather than relating to, ones responsibility towards the other (Heidegger 1962). Our textual analysis reveals that Ulurus joint management scheme promotes a reconciliation process that depends upon a transformative pride in recognition of a shameful past, in order to move forward from polarized debates for or against guilt.

Cartography of power on the joint management terrain

They say that from their home country, all the Liru men came, headed for Mututjule. They came to spear a Kuniya. All the holes from their spears are there, in the rock. Thats the Kuniya man, speared. This is important law belonging to all Anangu, to all the traditional owners, on the ticket [drawing of Uluru] thats the poor pierced Kuniya man. (Kunbiy Peipei (Artist) Park Use Ticket, Environment Australia, Department of the Environment, January 1999)

For at least 60 000 years, this rock-place has been a cross-roads for several Dreaming tracks of indigenous cultures. For Anangu people, different rock-places are constituted as integral to personhood, lore, law and moral responsibilities towards human and non-human entities. In stark contrast, for less than a 30-year period, between 1958 and 1985, the Commonwealth Government claimed ownership, excising 1325 square kilometres from the South West Reserve to establish the then Ayers RockMount Olga National Park, managed by the Northern Territory Government. Settler ownership of a rock-place located in the Central Desert, some

450 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs, became a priority for the layering of an alternative moral terrain over this rock-place embedded in settler nationalism, which began in the colonial nineteenth century. Only in 1985, under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Act 1976, was Anangu ownership legally recognized. And, since 1986, under the basic philosophy of tjunguringkula waakaripai working together joint management policies are implemented to help centre the normative structure of Anangu law (Tjurkpa) as the most recent layer of moral terrain, evidenced in 1993 by the renaming as UluruKata Tjuta National Park. The Park is an excellent example of what Anderson and Smith term an emotionally heightened space (2001, 7). This is a primordial place-of-origin that serves both the Anangu and settler Australians, what Kristeva calls the cult of origins (1993, 2). According to Tjukurpa, the Anangu collectively bond together in place through Tjukuritja (ancestral beings) that shaped the landscape from a void, creating mountains and living creatures on journeys, whilst also leaving some of their spirit being in each. Individual responsibilities towards spirits present in particular sacred sites clustered around the base of Uluru and the potential to release their power are only shared on the basis of the right to know by the appropriate indigenous person (Layton and Titchen 1995). Tjukurpa as law establishes an indigenous terrain of power that both names the rock-place as Uluru and identifies socially infused biophysical processes, allowing them to read Dreaming tracks of their peoples on the rock face. The cult of origins carries a comparable drama for settler Australians. Many scholars argue that outback mythology explains why many white settler Australians emotional response to this monolith is pride (Altman 1987; McGarth 1991; Marcus 1997; Gelder and Jacobs 1998; Cathcart 2002; Miller 2002). Pride relies upon reading Uluru fashioned by outback myths of national settler origin drawing on the extremes and hardships of frontier lands to forge the nations distinctive colonizing people (the bushman, the drover and the pastoralist) and their universalizing egalitarian values, although these were always exclusively white, hypermasculine and heterosexual. Furthermore, if the outback is the home of the Australian nation, then Ulurus central location helps to position this monolith as its symbolic heart. Its redness and heartshape, visually legitimate the symbolism of settler identity in colonial discourse.

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The particularly nationalistic gestures made by the first ranger, Bill Harney, from 1958 to 1962, still help to legitimate the authority of the colonialnational gaze, including authorizing the construction of the fence that assists climbers to reach the summit. The metal posts, hammered into the rock, bare the piercing mark of the colonizing mentality. The vantage point the climb provides gives an opportunity to appreciate a view upon which settler citizenship and the Australian nation relies; a panoramic vista over the seemingly empty, unknown land. Whittaker echoes these sentiments, explaining the popularity of the climb as a rite of passage for notably white Australians for whom the spiritual quest, even dying for it, is tantamount to being a true Australian (1994, 318). To date, 35 climbers have been killed. At the start of the climb, five plaques commemorate the lives of those first killed. Fashioned by values of the outback mythology, climbing Uluru thus became a settler rite of passage (du Cros and Johnston 2002). Most tourists still come just to climb (Brown 1999). Yet, Breeden (2000) explains that for Anangu climbing is only sanctioned on special occasions by initiated men. This yearning for a place of national settler belonging in the outback erases the multiplicities of Anangu place names, helping to render the Anangu invisible or at best, positioned as part of the flora and fauna (Hill 1994; Marcus 1997; Rose 1997 2000). McGarth (1991) and Marcus (1997) outline how appropriation began in 1887, when explorers Ernest Giles and William Gosse renamed Uluru as Ayers Rock, beginning the idea that Uluru was a European discovery. While touring Uluru, understood as the heart of settler Australia, often brings pride and joy through feelings of familiarity and belonging, it also operates to sustain an uneven terrain of power, codified on the bodies of non-indigenous and indigenous identities. Consequently, the joint management scheme here is further complicated by competing cultural origins, belonging to an Aboriginal personhood and Australian nationhood. Joint management itself appears plagued by contradictions. The primary interpretive message is Pukulpa Pitjama Ananguku Ngurakutu (Welcome to Aboriginal Land). In 1993, to help convey this reception, the Park was renamed UluruKata Tjuta National Park, and two years later the Cultural Centre was opened. However, a car park is still located at the start of the climb. Equally, although jointly managed, Park management is embedded within complex planning and corporate governance

structures. Since 1987 facets of governance include the international environmental obligations of the World Heritage Convention, five different Acts of Parliament (including the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act 1997 (CAC Act) and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act)), as well as lease agreements (Mercer 1994; Head 2000; McVay et al. 2002). One condition of the UluruKuta Tjuta Aboriginal Land Trust receiving the title deeds was a 99-year lease of the Park to the Commonwealth, under the auspices of the then Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service (renamed Parks Australia) (Department of Environment and Heritage 2000). In 2000, the fourth plan of management came into effect. Today, a ten-member Board of Management comprised of six traditional owners, the Director of Parks Australia (Department of Conservation), the Federal Ministers for the Environment and for Tourism, and an arid lands scientist jointly manage the Park, guided by the principles of Tjukurpa. Yet, only in 2006, after 20 years of joint management, has the first indigenous person been appointed as the Board of Management Chair. Notwithstanding, alternative touring practices emphasizing Tjukurpa are materialized in the interpretive signs of the Cultural Centre, the Mala and Liru trails and guided tours with Park Rangers and Anangu elders (Kerle 1995; Layton 2001). Official trails lead away from sacred sites, and photography of these sites prohibited. These touring activities potentially open moral gateways for nonindigenous visitors by generating an embodied understanding of Aboriginal culture and the impacts of colonization. Tourists can no longer freely access and wander across the land. Sightseeing occurs at designated viewing sites and times. Public access is ticketed and tickets convey the gentle message of respect, Nganana Tatintja Wiya, We Never Climb. These interpretive materials are also designed to make visible the invisible by encouraging visitors to seek insights into an indigenous understanding that necessitates an embodied knowledge of country (Beck and Summerville 2002). However, embodied knowledge and experience of Tjukurpa also involves many constraints based upon the Anangu values. Yet, despite the rhetoric of honouring the Tjukurpa, joint management has kept the climb open seemingly for financial advantage, maintaining colonial nationalistic visions provided by the master eye enjoying the panoptic view from the summit (Robinson et al. 2003).

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Lana: In what ways was travelling to Uluru similar to your general reasons for travelling? Tony: It was more . . . it was like one of the destinations you should be able to say that youve been to. Whether or not youre particularly keen to see it, you think you should be keen to see it. A lot of people come to Australia say Whats Uluru like? They expect everybody whos Australian to have gone and seen it, so that was another reason to have gone and seen it.

Effectively circulating indigenous understandings remains challenging, particularly when many components of tourism marketing also continue to sustain the colonial mythology of the outback as the real Australia (Waitt 1999). The tourism industry pitches Uluru as the symbolic heart of the Australian nation (for example, Australian Tourism Net 2005), and one can acquire the Ayers Rock Climbers Certificates from some non-indigenous companies. Non-indigenous access has not only been maintained through the opening of Connellan Airport in 1984 and then Yulara Resort in 1985 on freehold land bought by the Northern Territory Government in 1982 adjacent to the national park; the outback mythology has been kept alive in the refashioning and renaming of Yulara Resort in 1994 as Ayers Rock Resort by Pacific Hotels (Davidson and Spearritt 2000). Altman and Finlaysons (1992) assertion holds, although the Anangu now own the land, non-indigenous tourism organizations still convey a welcome to an outback adventure and national identity framed by a frontier mythology where everyone is entitled to climb.

For Tony, travelling to Uluru is positioned as his national duty. During his visit, Tony climbed Uluru as well as visited the Cultural Centre and participated in Anangu-led walking tours. The policy and objective of reconciliation suggests these are the kind of experiences that open the visitor to a better understanding of both cultures behind the joint management scheme. Yet, his account of the personal implications of touring suggests a resistance to defining Uluru as either a non-indigenous place-of-origin or an indigenous homeland:
Lana: How would you describe Uluru?

Embodying Uluru: embodied knowledge and sense of national belongings

The reconciliation project is positioned as a moral gateway between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians by bringing a greater understanding of traditional owners to the wider Australian public and international community of tourists. However, the socio-spatial mediation and articulation of emotional associations revealed in our discourse analysis suggests pride and shame promote different affective responses to the reconciliation project. These affects reveal the moral terrains experienced behind the Rocks material reality and cultural significance. It is these affects that signal if and how the reconciliation is occurring. By studying the emotional geographies of touring Uluru, we offer insights into how we can monitor the moral terrains around the Uluru joint management structure. In our next section we explore how emotions have the power to either contract or expand the horizons of non-indigenous Australians, to either seal or create fissures in Uluru as a settler homeland.

Tony: Before I went there I expected it to be the most epic thing in the desert. But of course its not. Youre sort of familiar with it from all the images you see, so its not entirely an alien environment. Lana: What memorable experiences did you have at Uluru? Tony: The [Lira] walk was memorable because it was more informative. It just had more significance than climbing up the Rock. And you got to see some artworks, and some billabong things at the base. It was much more scenic as well. It was quite reflexive because it was a Dreaming Story. But the sign said this is just a Dreaming Story and of course its not true, which I found really interesting. Dont swim in this pool, indigenous people didnt swim in it because of this myth, which is just a story to stop people from swimming in it. Lana: Do you think you would climb again? Tony: I dont know if I would. Coz, I climb on churches as well. I dont think religion is . . . I dont know. Lana: In what ways was travelling to Uluru valuable to yourself as an Australian? Tony: It was because its constantly inferred that Australia is Uluru. I think, I think I was disappointed. I have been doing political philosophy so Im constantly re-evaluating this sort of stuff. I probably felt that Uluru was the real Australia when I was going there, but then the experience made me feel that it definitely

Preventing moral gateways through the dynamics of disappointment

Tony (student, twenties, Anglo-Australian) initially spoke about travelling to Uluru as a normative obligation or rite of passage to being Australian.

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wasnt because it is in the middle of nowhere, and theres no Australians there and all around it has been abandoned, and its not very cool. By saying I have been to Ayers Rock, I dont think it has left a mark on my soul or whatever, seeing Uluru.

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The important point to note is not whether or not his statements and practices are valid or ethical, but his experiences at Uluru failed to confirm any position from which he could speak as a young Australian. Climbing is not experienced as heroic nor as personally satisfying. There is an absence of any body memory of climbing informed by the outback mythology. Instead, he positions walking and the reflexive process initiated by the Dreamtime Stories on the interpretive signs as memorable and informative. His enjoyment doesnt appear to arise from a deeper understanding. Tony dismisses the signs content at the Mutitjulu waterhole as both spurious and just a story. Instead, his gratification appears to arise from puzzling over and understanding the sign as a mechanism of social control. Rather than having any social value to indigenous or non-indigenous people, the indigenous myth is something to decipher and then deny, the sign said this is just a Dreaming Story and of course its not true. His disappointment is associated with being unconvinced by any mythology or narrative. Tony is unable to distinguish between religion, culture, myth and morality. Tony, seemingly defiant of all mythologies, expresses neither sympathy nor empathy with indigenous people. Instead, although he initially imagined Uluru as normative place of refuge, where he would experience the superlative we of Australian place-identity, his lay geography of the Park is devoid of moral assessment through his lack of willingness to position himself as part of any collective sustained through mythology. In Tonys case, disappointment arises from the nihilism of impartiality. He seems to believe he transcends all narrative structures. However, slippages are always apparent as Tony claims the Park is not a hip place to be, its not very cool, is located in the middle of nowhere and is seemingly devoid of people, theres no Australians there. Being bodily there and finding no embodied Australian identity, he is self-erased by his moral indifference.

those who only asserted renewed national pride, self-identification as an Australian from the bodily knowledge of touring the Park is inextricably linked with racism and white colonial narratives and subjectivities. The pull is towards the normality of the outback myth, which depends on erasing any aspect of settler shame. This erasure depends primarily upon acts of appropriation experienced as heroic, an understanding of the Park as in the middle of nowhere and racist understandings of Aboriginality. For example, Rob (technical officer, fifties) flew to Uluru with his wife on a budget airfare. He wished to climb, but the path was officially closed that day and so instead he participated in a sunset tour. When asked to reflect on the personal importance of this, his first trip, he responded:
Rob: I am proud to be an Australian and I am glad weve got it [Uluru]. It wasnt life changing for me, it wasnt like a super-adventure, this is fantastic, it was just somewhere to go . . . If I had to sum it up Id say the reason I like it was because it was remote, away from people. I like remote places, the outback. Lana: In your opinion, is there any way that you relate to people differently after returning from Uluru? Rob: I didnt change. Ive always had the same opinions of them [Aboriginal Australians] and I think that the genuine Aboriginals are good people. But, its the half-castes and the quarter-castes, and the eighthcastes, and the ones that have got red hair and white skin, who reckon theyre Aboriginals are the problem. Not the dark skinned Aboriginals.

Preventing moral gateways through the dynamics of pride

Discourse analysis of return narratives also reveal connections between embodied experiences of pride in the nation and identifying as Australian. For

Robs unitary self-definition as a white Australian is clearly confirmed, if not enhanced, through the bodily experiences of flying to a Park fashioned by the outback mythology. His enjoyment stems from experiencing the remoteness from metropolitan centres and places seemingly devoid of a human presence. Reflecting on this journey, the outback mythology remains central and unchanged in Robs self-identification as an Australian. Yet, Uluru is not experienced as a symbolic heart, but simply as just somewhere to go. For Rob, his dismissal of Uluru as settler refuge arises for he clearly understands this as only an Aboriginal place. However, his capacity to understand Aboriginality is framed in highly racist terms, related to nineteenth-century European myths of racial purity and ideas of a traditional, pre-contact Aboriginal. This constructs a racialized space upon essentialist racist terminology. If the space is Aboriginal, in

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did actually think, but then I thought nah, Im not missing out on climbing the Rock! I like to respect the Aboriginal people, but I suppose not enough to not climb it. I thought, Stuff this! I came here. Im going to climb it, Im not going to say no. . . . Started climbing, and my god, you got tired after 20 metres because youre fully using your arms. And you saw people coming down, going: Oh! And sweating their bits off, puffed out to the max and youre thinking what have I gotten myself into . . . Finally, got to the top and there was nothing up the top. I expected more at the top. I was just kind of like, Oh, is this it. And there were people sitting up there who had just walked and just wanted to soak the view in. The view was beautiful. And I look at it now I kind of regret the fact, because we got really excited and started screaming, Oh my god. Everyone else was kind of sitting there soaking it up. And, I think back and go, we probably ruined it for them. . . . Because theres mobile service, were on the top going, Oh my god, were on the top of Ayers Rock! . . . We went and explored the top a little bit. Uluru is a bit crumbly. And, people had got bits of rock that were broken and scrubbed their name into the rock. So there was quite a few names. I think we wrote our names, but it would probably wash away with water.

Robs sense, then it essentially a black space, which entails that white bodies are to be deflected by that space. Any form of social interactions between the two cultures offends his embodied unitary selfidentity as a white Australian. In Robs case, he started and finished the trip with the same subjectivity. His inability to put at risk his own certainties about his whiteness and the blackness of Aboriginality prevents a moral gateway from opening to the indigenous terrain. To the contrary, Uluru composes the Anangu identity and personhood in a relational moral framework, not an essentialist, colonial, nineteenth-century concept of racial personhood, but rather as a space marking traditional meanings of what constitutes Anangu identity. This identity is fundamentally historical; meaning, it simultaneously pre-dates colonial biological determinism and is informed as a post-colonial marker, in which the Anangu are identifiable by the scars of colonial racism used to usurp their normative licence to carry out their prior relationship with place. The moral gateway to be opened is the deconstruction of race so that post-colonial normativity surrounding the Park can be realized, but this is closed by Robs racial pride. The joint management strategy requires a deconstruction of such racist presumptions in order to recognize this as a site re-organized under the Anangu normative identity. The moral responsibility of the visitor is therefore to interact with Uluru with respect to the Anangu; invoking racialized space undermines the conditions of moral respect. The embodied knowledge from climbing remains a key source of pride for some visitors who imagine Uluru as a symbolic heart. For example, Rachel (assistant nurse, twenties, Anglo-Australian) was backpacking around Australia in a car with an overseas friend. On their budget trip, Uluru was incorporated into their itinerary as an iconic, must see, Australian destination.
Lana: What memorable experiences did you have at Uluru? Rachel: Climbing the Rock. We got there, didnt expect it . . . I dont know what I expected from the climb. Had our water bottles. We got to the bottom and looked up and went oh my god. It just like, it feels like straight up. And theres just a rail, to hold on to, and we just like, we can do this, we can do this. Theres heaps of people climbing. And beside the Rock it has a sign which says something about how the Aboriginal locals wish you not to climb the Rock to respect them, stuff like that. And you kind of look at it and you think, I

Clearly, for Rachel, the colonizing mentality of settlement entitlement helps inform and interpret all her actions: experiencing the climbing as heroic, witnessing the view as beautiful, the excitement of reaching and exploring the top, invading the space with mobile phone technology, the technical incorporating of Uluru into global networks of communication, then writing her own name for posterity. Through these range of actions Rachel makes Uluru not only her space but also those nonpresent friends who learn of her achievement elsewhere. In doing so she disregards all others and is oblivious to the implications of the consequences of her appropriation for Anangu people or indeed fellow tourists. Informed by ideas of terra nullius, there are no boundaries to Rachels journey, nor space for respect for prior ownership: I like to respect Aboriginal people . . . I thought, Stuff this! I came here. Im going to climb it. In retrospect, reflecting on her actions, her sense of regret or shame is not for the traditional owners, but for breaking the silence at the top and ruining other climbing tourists experiences. In Rachels response, Uluru, fashioned by the outback mythology, is such a central object of self-satisfaction and pride that there is again no gateway opened to the moral imagination of the Anangu (or those tourists who chose to respect the Anangu culture). For Rachel, climbing Uluru continues to offer a process through

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which she expresses her understanding of settler entitlement and if not accredits, at least enhances, her legitimate membership status to an Australia derived from settler colonialism. Pride in the settler nation also operates to try and erase the shame of colonization by maintaining understandings of Uluru as a white place. For example, Janet (retired, sixties, Anglo-Australian), travelling with her partner and overseas relatives, drove to Uluru from Alice Springs. This trip was planned to enable her overseas relatives to experience Central Australia. In planning for this trip, Janet had little interest in Anagnu people. Janet gives a lucid account of how she attempts to erase shame after learning about the implications of colonization during her base tour guided by an indigenous National Parks officer. Her account clearly illustrates one response to effectively closing moral gateways opened through the heightened emotional space inspired by the Lira walk:
Janet: You suddenly feel in some way quite humble by the experience of being where we were. And being told the information by an Aboriginal person I think was a bonus, we felt for us. But then it got a little bit disappointing. We went down to, its a lookout but its just off the ground a foot or so, and youre looking at this little water hole. Its a beautiful setting. But then the guide started to become political . . . And I know when he was talking the tears were coming to my eyes and felt ashamed of being an Australian . . . It was generally that the Aboriginal people have been extremely hard done by, by well, whoever, right from Captain Cooks time through to present time. Two things, we felt it was inappropriate to start with . . . Later, [laughing] when we came back . . . Eric spoke to somebody whos doing work with the Aboriginal community in that area . . . Well, we got a different side to a story than he [the guide] was telling. I think in a lot of ways he [the guide] was quite cunning in what he did. And, I think that made me feel disappointed in him as an Aboriginal person.

Preventing moral gateways through the dynamics of guilt

For those participants who perhaps might be considered most receptive to the politics of reconciliation, our analysis suggests their embodied knowledge often became expressed in terms of guilt and a sense of displacement in the nation. Rather than working towards reconciliation through opening moral gateways, feelings of discomfort and sadness from their encounters with Aboriginality often operated to produce an embodied knowledge of being out of place. This was particularly the case for middle-class settler Australians with a national subjectivity fashioned by a love for the bush. For instance, Fiona (environmental lawyer, thirties, Anglo-Australian) drove to Uluru with her husband and two children to visit a friend and to celebrate her sons birthday. Before departing, Fiona expressed no desire to climb. Her expectations were centred on enjoying her love of the desert as scenery and meeting indigenous people. Fiona describes the distress she experienced from witnessing the impacts of colonization:
Fiona: We went out for a day with Sally. . . . We were talking to them [the Anangu] about their food and traditions. So, I guess it created a greater connectedness or an awareness of that, where youre conscious of the inequalities in our society but it was a stark reminder of how . . . I guess the whole colonization thing . . . Youve got these appalling conditions, lack of self esteem and lack of sense of self amongst the community. Its really distressing.

Her distress is triggered in response to the outcomes of dispossession. Her sense of displacement was only intensified by the fact the bush has always previously been unquestionably accepted as home.
Fiona: I love the Australian bush. I love the Australian landscape. I love being in it. But, I dont know very much about it. I dont understand very much about it. I think were [Europeans] are all superficial. Were so disconnected from the land. Id love to get more connected to it. But, theres a cultural side of me. The way Ive been brought up and the way I live. In many ways I would probably feel more comfortable living in Europe. And I think it makes you really aware that weve only been here such a short time. We are foreigners in this land.

At one level, the presence of an indigenous guide articulating an understanding of the landscape through Tjukurpa helped to authenticate Janets experiences. Yet, at another, eager to erase the shame she experienced as part of this authenticity, she rendered the Aboriginal interpretation of colonization as an invasion, positioned as both inaccurate and unsuitable. Rather than an openness to an Aboriginal interpretation, Janet positions this narrative as a deception and reinstates the legitimacy of whiteness through seeking and positioning a non-Aboriginal version as the valid voice.

After touring the Park, in relationship to indigenous people, Fiona experienced her settler Australian identity as superficial and identified herself as a foreigner, implying an illegitimate presence. She positions

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continuity of occupation with the short time of European occupation as underpinning her presence. Given her genuine respect for indigenous knowledge, prioritizing continuity of connection with the land is somewhat ironic, given the dispossession of indigenous people that occurred under colonization. Nevertheless, Fiona, as a foreigner can no longer express any national pride. Fionas distress, discomfort and displacement are perhaps expressions of guilt rather than shame for living in a colonized land. Similarly, Joyces subjectivity as an Australian is rendered unfamiliar when sadness operates with love of the Australian environment. Joyce (retired, seventies, Anglo-Australian) incorporated visiting Uluru on a camping trip to the Northern Territory to visit a friend and go bird watching. Her memorable activities include participating in an Anangu tour, listening to indigenous languages, walking around Uluru and instructing others not to climb. Reflecting on the journey, Joyce felt sadness and love:
Its always valuable because you realize whose land youre walking on. You go to the Northern Territory, its very obvious whose land youre walking on, and whose ancestors have been there all the time. I dont think as a white I can say absolutely, definitely, that Im Australian. Im a settler here. I certainly love the country. And, I certainly love the environment. But, I dont know how I can say that because to me, the land belongs to someone else. And, until weve said that, there is no way forward . . . It [Uluru] made me very sad, actually, to see.

for some non-indigenous visitors, not only through enabling them to discover their own body but also through these respondents receptiveness to another way of knowing and living in Australia. For several respondents, moral gateways opened through engaging in cultural translation, expanding their capacity to imagine and experience the Park through Anangu elder or ranger guided tours. For instance, Claire (artist, twenties, Anglo-Australian) flew to Uluru with her partner, children and friends. Before travelling, Claire imagined Uluru as an indigenous homeland. So, when reflecting on what she had not expected, she felt strange witnessing tourists still climbing:
Lana: What surprised you about Uluru? Claire: How many people still climbed, even though the fact that Aboriginal people didnt want you to climb up. And, this was clearly signed and indicated. People just didnt care. I thought that was pretty weird.

For Claire, the political identity of an Anangu tour guide functions as a moral conduit between indigenous and non-indigenous culture. A highlight of her holiday was learning about indigenous plant names, foods and beliefs during a tour conducted by an Anangu elder.
Lana: What people did you encounter on your travels? Claire: Lots of different people . . . And, there was the Aboriginal people that we met when they took us on a tour . . . It was amazing to see how that culture was working, or not working, so close to white culture. It had lots of problems. And, the ranger that met us with these people was an Aboriginal lady. She had an interesting job as the ranger. She was a go-between the white imposed culture and the original native culture. And, she had to find some way of getting these two cultures to co-exist in some mutually beneficially way. Lana: In your opinion, is there any way that you relate to people differently after returning from Uluru? Claire: Yeah. Probably the most important thing was the Aboriginal culture, the white culture, and just seeing first hand the impact that white culture has on Aboriginal people. Probably made me even more ashamed of being white, and more cautious, more aware of what Im doing in this land. And not taking it [European Australian society] for granted . . . My society here, it isnt something which can be taken for granted. It [the trip] gave me an appreciation of the whole dynamic of it all.

Joyces embodied understanding obtained from the pedagogical arm of reconciliation does not result in a sense of belonging. Instead, the opposite effect occurs through an increased awareness of her whiteness and the contradictions of her environmental identity derived from colonial possession. From the white embodied knowledge of her touring practices, she felt a non-citizen status in relationship to the Anangu people. For Joyce, primary belonging operates through attributes such as ancestors have been there all the time, and this works to displace her colonial presence. In Joyces case, what prevents her opening a moral gateway was the failure of national leaders to admit shame. Without this admission of shame, Joyce is in a position of guilt, where she cannot admit she is definitely an Australian.

Opening moral gateways through the dynamics of shame

The embodied pedagogical arm of reconciliation has generated a heightened awareness of colonization

Through experiencing an Anangu interpretation of country, Claire expresses a heightened respect for

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like that. I guess the view would have been good from up the top. I was really happy to be walking around. . . . I believe there were a few little signs along the way, so when you got to a particular point they told you why this site was relevant in Aboriginal culture. I was really looking forward to doing this walk alone, but a German tourist attached herself to me . . . I remember talking about the differences between European culture and traditional Australia culture. In that, for us visiting Europe theres a lot of really accessible things. We can go and visit a monastery or see the site of this famous thing or that famous thing, or go and visit ruins. But, for white Australian culture, or for white Australians, we walk past monuments and important sites everyday, but we dont know theyre there because theyre part of Aboriginal culture. And, we cross a stream or build a house on it, or whatever, but we dont realize that could be part of an important Dreaming Story. . . . So walking around I guess I felt it was a good chance to inspect it in a way and get close to it. As you can imagine, with that kind of formation and shape of rock theres lots of interesting nooks and crannies and little gullies and bits of wildlife and things like that around. So, I was really happy with that experience. I didnt see any need to walk over it.

all indigenous Australians through an increased awareness of her own whiteness. This consciousness arose through her body, from feeling shame about being white when participating in the Aboriginal guided tour. Rather than erasing shame through white racism of the frontier myth, the shame of confronting the rewriting of colonization evoked for Claire the possibilities of co-existence-in-difference. As Probyn remarks, it is shame that inaugurates this scrambling of frontiers, that turns the body into (the) witness of its multiplicity (2000, 23). Claire expresses this most lucidly when reflecting on the personal value of her journey.
Claire: It was so enriching seeing that environment, that space and that huge sky that Id always wanted to see . . . And meeting the Aboriginal people, too, and learning their spiritual response to the place. Just getting an understanding of that. I suppose I can say that Ive been to Uluru now. So, if I travel overseas, I can say that Ive seen Australia first.

Claires experience left her feeling enriched. This embodied knowledge helps her work towards a renewed understanding of belonging in Australia. In Claires case, the shame of belonging becomes a productive force in opening a moral gateway; acknowledging settler shame is a necessary condition for indigenous and non-indigenous people to live together in difference. Shame swings a moral gateway by providing what Plumwood (2002, 116) calls a dispositional change, wherein the colonizing group alters behaviours to avoid repeating injustices that would be equally damaging elsewhere. The dispositional change is absolutely vital to refixing Ulurus reconciliatory role in the Journey of Healing, acknowledging the colonial theft through a handing back to Anangu ownership. Alternatively, for some visitors, walking designed trails with interpretive signage at the base of Uluru are integral to mobilizing moral gateways that interconnect the imagined geographies of indigenous and non-indigenous people. For example, Simon (writer, forties, Anglo-Australian) visited Uluru whilst travelling around Australia by bus. He positioned Uluru as a national icon, and a must-see destination for all Australians. When asked about his choice of activities, he replied:
Simon: I walked around it [Uluru]. One of the things nearby is a Culture Centre. And, I think it was made pretty clear that you could walk over it, but Aboriginal people would prefer that you didnt. And I didnt have any great desire to conquer the mountain or anything

Clearly, for Simon, walking is associated with pleasures derived from exploring in close proximity the detail of items and places found along the path. Walking around, rather than walking over, consequently provides Simon with greater opportunities for him to fulfil his desire for minutiae. The interpretative signs prevent Simons walk from following conventional reflexive norms of romanticism (Edensor 2000) through helping him to reflect upon the invisibility of Aboriginality. A chance encounter with a German tourist acts to enhance this reflexive process. During their conversation he contrasts the tourist practice of witnessing the predominantly material cultural landscapes of Europe with the bodily experience of feeling the symbolic qualities of the indigenous landscape. It is this comparison with European landscapes that enables Simon to open a moral gateway:
Simon: Its [the Park] sort of like a door between the two cultures. Something that both cultures kind of revere.

Simons metaphor of a door positions the Park as a moral gateway suspended in-between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures: fundamental to Anangu culture yet always partially disengaged from it; secondary to the settler nation yet many non-indigenous people are attached to Uluru

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emotionally and historically. In Simons case the process of reconciliation operates through his shift in consciousness, whereby the invisible and embodied qualities of indigenous landscape, myth and ethnicity, are made present.

Conclusions: touring Uluru and the embodied pedagogical arm of reconciliation

UluruKata Tjuta National Park is one of Australias premier tourism destinations. Much research has focused on issues that explain the emergence of tourism as a quest for a national identity inherited from a colonial past. Following the significant land rights gains in relationship to Uluru, attention has focused on the outcomes of joint management with the Anangu. While important, what these perspectives miss is how the embodied pedagogical arm of reconciliation operates amongst nonindigenous people by creating opportunities to access indigenous knowledge through the naming and interpreting of their presence over the Park. This paper begins to explore this gap by examining the embodied knowledge of non-indigenous Australian tourists. Through our analysis of the embodied knowledge, we have illustrated the feelings of touring that prevent and open moral gateways required for reconciliation to operate between non-indigenous and indigenous Australians. Moral gateways remain closed amongst respondents who interpret tourism activities with Enlightenment rationality, are unwilling to be challenged by indigenous knowledge or have an atomistic sense of self. Rational tourists adopt a position of impartiality, their bodies remain effectively closed to the affects of tourism by the fallacy evident in the nihilism of neutrality. Equally, closure is apparent when respondents achieve a sense of national pride derived from touring rituals informed by the outback mythology. Understood as an entitlement, feelings of national pride derived from climbing, witnessing redness, vastness and emptiness, leaves no space to admit shame associated with colonization. Moral gateways again fail to open often for those most sympathetic to indigenous people. These respondents can only express guilt for living in a nation that cannot admit its shameful past. Such expressions of estrangement seem to work against a sense of reconciling Uluru as a place for all Australians. Only those tourists who admit to the experience of shame, through making felt the

invisible qualities of indigenous culture, suggest the possibilities of living together-in-difference. In these cases, moral gateways operate to assist the process of reconciliation. Implications for the Board of Management clearly arise from our research, which suggests many remain sceptical for the need for such a process and those perhaps most interested in reconciliation leave with feelings of guilt. If our role as academics is to create common ground where different voices can be interpreted in the process of reconciliation, then there is still much work to do in terms of reaching out to and engaging with the dominant white-settler group. Interpretive materials must continue to provide an Anangu interpretation and welcome to country. It is imperative that the interpretive material enables a context where shame can be admitted. Equally, visitors must also be given permission to use their body, to smell and taste the life and to literally rub into the skin the red dust of country rather than to wash it off as dirt. Guilt and fear of touring the Park results in a position where there is no space for the ethical connections made possible by shame.

Acknowledgements
Sincere thanks for the funding provided through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the scholarly input from Nicholas Gill, Lesley Head, Murray Wilson and four anonymous referees.

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