So the dilemma of the Mala community of Uluru — having to refuse to help the men from the west prepare for their dances — is said to explain why today men from Uluru and Kikingkura wear different kinds of body decoration. And when the Two Boys quarreled over the water that one, through his selfishness, concealed, they created a division in language. It was the selfish boy who first spoke a different dialect.

The characters of the Tjukurpa form the aboriginal pantheon. It is a pragmatic community of individuals with different personalities and temperaments. Soon after birth, a new arrival to the Anangu is associated with a specific ancestral being. The identity is based partly on the birthplace and partly on the child’s perceived character. Long family trees are not found in this society, but by giving each individual a personal dreaming, the community reaffirms its links to the past and constantly re-creates the ancestral world. On death, a person becomes his dreaming. To die and be buried in one’s own country ensures that this will occur.

The idea that ancestral beings shaped the landscape is known to many white Australians through the awareness of sacred sites. It is possible to think of the features at such sites as a living record of the ancestral saga, because a particular being leaves a visible imprint of his activities at a series of locations. Aboriginal people can point to them, saying, here is the Blue-Tongued Lizard men’s shelter, here is the emu meat. These stories of the mythical past are expressed in all forms of aboriginal culture. They are the core of ceremonial life, the theme of ritualistic songs, the subject of their art. In these ways, the Aborigines of Uluru keep alive the ties that bind them so closely to the rock, the great monolith under whose shadow they were born.

Peter Holden is a freelance writer living in Maryland.