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Steve Hill with the Uluru rock he believes has brought him ''nothing but bad luck''.
Photo: Tim the Yowie Man |
“I was a complete idiot to take it, I should have just left it there,” laments Steve Hill from the Weston Creek suburb of Stirling.Hill believes a string of bad luck, including costly repairs to his 4WD, following a visit to Uluru last year in which he illegally souvenired a small rock, is “more than just coincidence”.
“My friends and family told me not to take it, but I did,” says Hill, who believes he has joined a long list of other jinxed tourists who have pocketed rocks and sand from the outback landmark only to subsequently fall victim to the so-called ‘‘curse of Uluru’’.
Hill says it was during a solo trip to Australia’s spiritual heartland last June “while walking around the base of Uluru, I saw this rock and just had to have it”.
“Google maps indicated I was at the old campground where Azaria Chamberlain went missing, so I thought I’d take a small rock as memorabilia, you know, to put on the mantlepiece back at home”.
Hill admits that although he’d heard of the curse prior to his visit, he “thought it was a load of baloney, so decided to take the rock anyway”.
“When I called my daughters and told them what I’d done, they thought I was crazy and told me to take it straight back, but I didn’t.”
Since pocketing the rock, Hill has since been subjected to a long line of misfortune that has cost him more than $13 000 in repairs to his 4WD and considerable heartache.
“First, on the way home through outback Queensland, kangaroos started jumping at my Prado, it was just crazy, instead of moving out of the way, they were actually slamming into the car,” says Hill, who eventually “limped across the NSW border and into Bourke for repairs”.
“I’ve driven extensively through the outback and never seen such behaviour from kangaroos. It was at that point I started to think maybe I shouldn’t have taken the rock and that maybe I’d fallen victim to the curse”.
But for Hill, his bad luck was only just beginning. A couple of months later while driving in northern Queensland, the engine in Hill’s Prado “started blowing blue smoke and then blew up”.
“The mechanics are still mystified as to what caused the engine to fail,” says Hill, who believes “it was no doubt a result of the curse”.
Not surprisingly, the rock has never made it onto Hill’s mantelpiece. “I thought it was too risky to take inside,” explains Hill, who stashed it on a shelf in his garage where “friends won’t even touch it for fear of falling victim to the curse”.
Hill says he has “constantly felt nervy since taking the rock” and when, recently, all the photographs of his ill-fated trip to Uluru “mysteriously vanished” off his phone”, he decided “enough was enough”.
“I’ve been planning a trip to Cape York for some time, but have decided to not only bring it forward to next month, but also make a 3000-kilometre detour via Uluru,” says Hill.
“I’m going to return the rock; it’s just something I’ve got to do. I know exactly where I took it from, so as soon as I get to Uluru, I’ll be returning it.”
Before his run of bad luck, Hill had dismissed any curse as “new-age mumbo jumbo”.
Hill isn’t alone in returning a stone stolen from Uluru, it’s just that most others return them via the post. In fact, each year the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park head office receives dozens of parcels containing souvenired rock and sand, sent by guilty tourists from all around the world.
In some cases, it has taken troubled tourists up to 40 years to return their rocks. The largest return to date weighed in at 32 kilograms.
Most of these ‘‘keepsakes’’ are returned with an apology note, hence why in 2004 social researcher Jasmine Foxlee of the University of Western Sydney coined the returned items as ‘‘sorry rocks’’.
Of those seeking forgiveness, Foxlee’s research indicated that almost 15 per cent write of bad luck associated with the rocks.
While the park staff welcome the gestures of returning rocks to Uluru and also the nearby Kata-Tjuta, it has become a complex managerial issue. “To return them to the wrong spot would be disrespectful to the local Anangu people, the traditional owners of Uluru,” reports Foxlee.
“As a result, the rocks are usually placed in a neutral space, a creek bed, not far from the Uluru Cultural Centre.”
While Anangu law governing life and land does not recognise a specific curse associated with removing rocks, there are consequences for disrespecting the land.
An Anangu elder once made the following statement about people visiting his country: ‘‘They hear a little about this place and a little about that place and they put it all together in one bucket and shake it up. Everything gets broken and mixed up, and when they pour it out in their own country to try to remember, they don’t know what pieces go together. They should take it home in their hearts. Then they’d remember.’’
Curse or nor curse, these words of wisdom will no doubt be echoing in Steve Hill’s head when he sets off on the long drive to Uluru next month. Fingers crossed he has a safe journey.
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