A NEW DAWN
BACK IN THE CITY AFTER MY FIRST VISIT to the Red Centre, I found myself feeling proud of the red dust that still clung to my walking boots – a physical connection to a not-so-distant memory. And, months later, I read about Patti Smith’s lifelong desire to visit Uluru in her waking-dream-like memoir Year of the Monkey – how the soles of her shoes were already red long before she finally made it there three years ago. I wondered what it was that had a punk pioneer from New York dreaming about a remote part of Australia for so many years. And why people from all corners of the globe are so magnetically drawn to this iron-rich monolith in the desert outback.
Bruce Munro, a so-called Pom like me, first travelled to Uluru in 1992 as part of a farewell trip after living in Australia for eight years. It was then that he conceived, in his sketchbook, the idea for – the solar-powered installation of 50,000 spindles of light that come to life at night in the shadow of Uluru. On the rooftop of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, overlooking a behemoth of a cruise ship docked at the cruise terminal, a very different kind of monolith, I ask if he can pinpoint what had inspired him back then. “It really happened over a number of
