It was 36 years ago today, began the email from my journalist colleague and nationally renowned poster artist Chips Mackinolty in Darwin reminiscing that on 26 October 1985 the return of Uluru-KataTjuta – Australia’s greatest icon – to the Traditional Owners (TOs) was formalised by the Governor-General Sir Ninian Stephen.
The title deeds were passed over and the TOs signed an agreement to lease the park back to the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service for 99 years. A board of management was established with a majority of Anangu (Aboriginal) members. The park continues to be jointly managed but is rarely out of the news. Climbing ‘Ayers Rock’, named in 1873 after Sir Henry Ayers, the Chief Secretary of South Australia, was ended in October 2019, despite some (white) opposition.
In 2015 a TO named Reggie Uluru said, ‘The land was being returned to its original owners, so we were happy. Long ago Anangu were afraid because they were pushed out of their lands. And because of that Anangu left. But now a lot of people want to come back. That’s good. It’s our place, our land.’
The handover was immortalised in a photo published widely and held in the archives (and displayed on the website) of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. Along with the TOs and Sir Ninian were two white dignitaries, Labor Ministers Clyde Holding and Barry Cohen. Ten years earlier an icon of their own, Gough Whitlam, had participated in another memorable photo shoot, pouring sand into the hands of Vincent Lingiari to mark the return of traditional lands in the Northern Territory to the Gurindji people.
Dominating the Uluru photo was a striking piece of poster art, signed by the TOs, that was presented to the Governor-General to mark the occasion. The original poster also resides in the Museum. It was designed by Chips Mackinolty, a well-established poster artist who had achieved a reputation with silk-screened works done at The University of Sydney’s Tin Sheds that promoted inner-city music gigs and political demonstrations, and pilloried mostly conservative Australian governments.
Mackinolty, who still lives in the NT amidst working stints in Lebanon and Sicily, recalls clearly how the Uluru-KataTjuta handover poster was created, and most particularly where the design was done – in Wollongong, as far away from the central Australian desert as could be imagined.
Here, Chips Mackinolty recounts the background to an artwork and an event that will be remembered as a key image of Australia’s history…
From Uluru to Wollongong and back
There was always a sense, living at Mutitjulu in 1985, of heightened expectation, but also of unreality. As the year advanced, the Hawke promise of land at Uluru-Kata Tjuta being returned to its traditional Anangu (Aboriginal) owners seemed to fade and reappear as national attention focused on the interminable and frustrating negotiations that preceded the date of the handback ceremony.
Anangu, the Central Land Council and representatives from the Pitjantjatjara Council were in endless meetings with the Commonwealth and Territory governments, and the projected date of the handback seemed to change with the regularity of the tourist bus arrivals at the Ininti Store at Uluru. This was a time at the Rock of radio telephones, no faxes, radio or TV, and newspapers arrived a day late, so the machinations of national and Territory politics seemed distant and remote as preparations were made for Manta, or Land Day.
An early memory is being woken just after sunrise to help try and chase a Mike Willesee television crew which, typical of the exploitative cynicism of parts of the media at the time, had just carried out a dawn raid on the Mutitjulu camp. You know the line: “can you trust the people who live in conditions like this to manage Australia’s greatest icon?”
As it turned out, we drove all over the park trying to find them, but they’d disappeared. God knows what would have happened if we had succeeded in cornering Mike Munro and tried to demand the videotape be returned.
Another memory is of being on the fringe of the last meeting the Northern Territory Conservation Minister, Steve Hatton, had with traditional owners in his last attempt to persuade them to accept Territory rather than Commonwealth control of Uluru. A picture of Hatton, poor bugger, looking distinctly uncomfortable, as Tony Tjamiwa told him: “We are all agreed that there are two major problems at Uluru: tourists and feral cats. You look after the tourists, and we’ll look after the feral cats—we eat them!”
But my strongest memory of the time is not of Uluru, but time spent in, of all places, Wollongong.
Community adviser Ross Johnston, an unlikely devotee of the fine art market, had come up with the idea of producing limited edition signed prints commemorating the handback, along with T-shirts and explanatory brochures. It would make a few bob for the community, as well as providing an enduring record of the historic event.
So resources were found to fund the venture and Brossy Brumby and myself were packed off to the Redback Graphix studio on the New South Wales south coast to work with Redback’s Michael Callaghan in designing and producing the limited edition.
The Redback studio was as far from Uluru as imaginable. Situated in an old beachside kiosk building, you looked directly out at the Pacific Ocean breaking on a north Wollongong beach. And it was cold. Not the cold of the desert, but that of winter winds and rains coming from southern oceans.
For Brossy Brumby, once the designs and words were finalised—“Nyuntu Anangu maruku ngurangka ngaranyi”, “You are on Aboriginal land”—the time at Redback was pretty boring. He certainly hadn’t volunteered to be factory fodder, printing and racking prints, posters and T-shirts. So he explored the streets and parks of Wollongong, disappearing for hours at a time, often in the company of a bloke called Sav, a cheery punk seeing the sights of the Steel City with a man of the desert.
One night Brossy discovered one of Wollongong’s roughest pubs: working class and a serious hangout for junkies, punks and bikies. He had also gone back to a junkie’s flat for a few drinks after closing time. Hardly a safe haven for a green chum from the bush.
Talking about it over breakfast the next morning he said he’d had a great time. They were good people, he said, and wanted to know all about Uluru and Anangu. They were happy, he said, to learn about land rights and what the return of Uluru-Kata Tjuta meant to his people. He said it was much better than Alice Springs where, even if he could get entry to a pub, he was treated with contempt by staff and patrons alike. “And not only that, but they looked after all my money for me. I left it there so can pick it up later.”
Michael and I looked at each other, expecting the worst. He’d gone, as it turned out, cashed up with his entire travel and expense money for the trip--$700—and had come back from the pub with less than $20in his pocket. It seemed a tough way for Brossy to learn that his companions of the night may not have been as innocent in their quest for knowledge of Aboriginal land rights as they seemed.
There was not much optimism at pub opening time that morning, but the barmaid from the night before was on deck. Seeing Brossy, she cheerfully went to the till and produced the Mutitjulu envelope with $680 intact. He’d barely needed to buy a round all night.
As they watched TV on the night the Governor-General and Anangu traditional owners held aloft a framed limited edition print on 26 October 1985, it is doubtful the patrons and staff of the pub knew they had played a part in preparing for the ceremony of the return of Uluru.
Wollongong, and in no small way the junkies, punks, bikies—and barmaids—of that town, had made an unsung contribution to the success of the Uluru handback. They had proved to one Anangu man that Australians of goodwill can be found in the most unexpected places.
First published in Take Power like this old man here: an anthology of writings celebrating twenty years of land rights in Central Australia, Central Land Council, 1997.
