When Anangu storytellers recount their genesis stories, they often point to the rock’s features to substantiate their claims. Because the stories sometimes summarize the detail of the epic song cycles, different men may tell the same story in different ways, and on successive occasions one can learn more and more of the details in a narrative that at first seemed a simple story with little significance. Let me retell some of the stories that I have heard told in the shadow of Uluru.

Arisen from slumber. In the beginning, before there was any life in the universe, the world was a flat, featureless plain extending to the horizon. It was unbroken by mountain range, watercourse, or any typographic feature. This was the Tjukurpa.

The essence of life then stirred in the land. The characters of the Tjukurpa rose out of the desert plain where, for countless ages, they had been slumbering. Some appeared as giant humans, others were equivalent to plants or animals, and still others were unlike any known living creature.

These mythical people behaved like Anangu today; they made fires, dug for water, and performed ceremonies. They then traveled widely, leaving behind an altered landscape as a result of their activities. The features of the landscape are the places of great battles, shelters, grinding stones, and digging sticks.

Anangu believe that the bodies of Tjukurpa men and women were often transformed into isolated boulders or piles of rock. The places became sacred, and Aborigines born near a sacred site automatically became members of that particular dream ancestor’s clan or totem. The journeys undertaken by the Tjukurpa ancestors are perpetually relived through stories and songs. And sites of special importance along the paths they traveled are often named to retain special significance.

The great creators of the land were also the forebears of the Aborigines themselves. And since everyone claims descent from these mythical beings, it follows that every man, woman, and child is linked, though myth and genealogy, to his tribal country.

Great events in the Dreamtime

There is no single story describing how Uluru came into being because the Anangu do not look upon it as a single spiritual object. Its formation and specific characteristics are the outcome of several stories, which are not necessarily connected.