Foreign Correspondence: Australia from central casting

For foreign visitors, "The Rock" sits at the heart of our country, both literally and metaphorically.

Produced in association with Ayers Rock Resort and Tourism NT.

There's a David Sedaris line about his dad not believing that he's been to Australia, even though he's actually been twice. Sedaris, indignant, points out that he's been to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. "No matter," says his dad. "In order to see the country, you have to see the countryside."

Sails in the
Desert is
part of Ayers
Rock Resort,
which offers
accommodation
from camping
to five star. — Sails in the Desert is part of Ayers Rock Resort, which offers accommodation from camping to five star.
Photo: supplied

In my experience of Americans, extensive enough that I've sold a few on the concept of "drop bears", this rings true. "Countryside" inevitably means one thing: the outback. And nowhere says the outback more than the Red Centre.

I couldn't count the number of times I was asked while living in the US if I'd seen Uluru and had to shake my head in shame. More embarrassing, just about every American I knew who had come to Australia had visited. They raved about the space, the sky and their sense of spiritual connection – to a landscape, I fumed to myself, that wasn't even their own!

Enough was enough. I planned a trip. But arriving at Ayers Rock Airport last year, I found still more Americans had beaten me to it. The tourist breakdown remains half foreign: many from the US but also Britain, Germany, Japan and, increasingly, China.

For most Australians Uluru is a short flight away, but for these visitors just being there was a "bucket list" moment.

A great thing about Ayers Rock Resort – it's called that to distinguish the commercial operation, run by Voyages Indigenous Tourism Australia, from the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park – is that they know this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for their guests.

Regardless of budget, there's a real effort to provide a host of unique encounters with "the rock". Made of arkose sandstone, Uluru is the world's largest monolith. More accurately, it's an inselberg – an isolated mountain or hill rising from a plain in a hot or dry region – 600 million years in the making. (All these facts you've heard only start to make sense once you've biked around the rock's 9.4-kilometre circumference at daybreak and noticed all its nooks and crannies.)

A
room in Desert
Gardens Hotel. — A room in Desert Gardens Hotel.
Photo: supplied

The resort's flagship experience is Tali Wiru, an elaborate tasting menu dinner, complete with wine pairings, served on a dune at sunset. On the evening I attended, the sky turned an incandescent purple as I got talking to an American couple who had come all the way from Washington, DC. Their trip to Australia was the first of their empty-nest retirement.

They'd been to Kakadu – he'd been keen on photographing the bird life there, she loved hiking through the monsoon forest – and now, at Ayers Rock Resort, they were especially interested to learn more about Australia's Indigenous culture.

Ayers
Rock Resort is
20 kilometres
from Uluru. — Ayers Rock Resort is 20 kilometres from Uluru.
Photo: supplied

Voyages is committed to employing Indigenous workers, who now make up 38 per cent of the workforce. In addition to meaningful interactions with staff, the couple from Washington also enjoyed a visit to the gallery on site, where an Indigenous artist is in residence year-round, and attended a free dance performance.

It was apparent they felt like they'd learnt more about Australian history than if they'd clung to the coastal cities.

That humbling sense of brushing up against the intricacies of another culture was something I'd been conscious of, too. In that sense, we – the Americans and I – were all foreigners under that blinding canopy of southern stars.