The Rock: Travelling to Uluru

by Barry Hill

This travel and cultural guide takes the reader to Uluru, the sacred place to Aborigines, via the landscape, the history of the Aborigines and explorers, and the literature of this special place.

319 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Barry Hill is a multi-award winning writer of poetry, essays, biography, history, criticism, novels, short stories, libretti and reportage. His major works include Sitting In (1992), Broken Song: TGH Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (2002), and Peacemongers (2014). Each book has been groundbreaking in different ways: deeply, originally researched, crossing genres, multi-disciplinary, combining the personal with the generically philosophical. As a writer Hill's voice is informed by his Australian working-class and militant union background, which has been distilled by his higher education. After a decade working as a teacher, educational psychologist, and a journalist in Melbourne and London, he has been writing full-time since 1976-mainly based in Queenscliff, Victoria, but with stints at the Australia Council flat in Rome, where he finished poetic/dramatic works on Lucian Freud and Antonio Gramsci, and returns to Central Australia. In recent decades he has deepened his studies in Chinese and Japanese, which is in keeping with his long-term interest in Buddhism. Hill's voice is unique, and his insight both profoundly important and capable of taking the reader to places not glimpsed before or imagined visible. This collection of essays, reviews and reportage amply demonstrates the quality and enduring importance of Hill's contribution, in these genres, to Australian literary and intellectual life.

Reviews

[Janelle Trees · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lived in this part of the world for about 5 or 6 years. This is my favourite book about the place. Hill does a good job, attempting the describe the ineffable. In writing about his experiences--this is quite a personal (as well as scholarly) book--he conveys the tone, the feeling, the weirdness and the impact of Uluru (and Mutitjulu and Yulara) in an impressive and extraordinary way.
I have referred back to the book and re-read it since my first reading in 2012. My father gave it to me. Grateful to have it in my library.