Climb: Restorative Justice, Environmental Heritage, and the Moral Terrains of Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Robert Melehior Figueroa Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #310920, Dentón, TX 76203-5017; Robert.Figueroa@unt. edu

Gordon Waitt School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Wollongong, NorthfieldAve., Wollongong NSW2522, Australia; [email protected]

Recent decades have brought environmental justice studies to a much broader analysis and new areas of concern. We take this increased depth and breadth of environmental justice further by considering restorative justice, with a particular emphasis on reconciliation efforts between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens. Our focus is on the reconciliation efforts taken by the indigenous/non-indigenous joint- management structure of Uluru-Kata Tjula National Park. Using a framework of restorative justice within a bivalent environmental justice approach, we consider the current management policies at the Park, particularly as it pertains to the controversial climb of the rock, Uluni. Our exploration of restorative environmental justice depends upon narrative analysis of embodied ecotourism affects in order to determine the capacity and obstacles of reconciliation efforts in the current management policy. Interviews with tourists from the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area supply us with cases that provide affective experiences and a postcolonial narrative analysis of touring practices that we argue are imbued with nationalism and colonial naturalism that must be transformed in order to meet the requests of the Park's traditional indigenous owners. We argue that restorative justice, within a bivalent environmental justice framework that already emphasizes other distributive and recognition measures, is vital for over-coming these obstacles for Australian environmental heritage.

Environmental Philosophy 7 (2). 13S~163. Copyright © 2010 by The International Association for Environmental Philosophy. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. 136 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT

Introduction National Parks have an odd relationship with both eeotourism and environmental jusfiee. The fundamental seale of management is at the federal level, making top-down deeision-making an essential characteristic that eould go on almost oblivious to the motivations of localized deeision-making for eeotourism and environmental justiee eoneems. Whether the eeotourism site is within or adjaeent to a National Park, or in the region of another state-level proteeted region (forest, monument. World Heritage site, ete.), the eultural and local ecological approaches that characterize ecotourism are in constant tension with the state-level ageneies. Eeonomieally, National Parks have always been something of a playground for coneessioner special interest, sometimes on par with corporately mn amusement parks. From the advent of Nafional Parks in the United States, big business, initially in the form of railroad monopolies on the brink sharing eoncession dominance with the new automobile industry and later in the form of transnafional business ehains, determined mueh of the eeonomie seeurity for setting aside vast territories for a nationalized environmental heritage. The federal-qua-business model has made utilitarian analysis work hand-in-hand with eonservation and preservation values for the existence of these parks. Loeal eommunities have been earved as gateway communities that largely depend on the business of mass tourism and corporate interests. "The more visitors, the better" has inspired nearly every principle of National Parks exeept those struggling to maintain the eeosystem relationships within and extending beyond the Park boundaries. In other eultural and ecological considerafions pertaining to both ecotourism and environmental jusfiee, the indigenous populafions related to National Parks have typically been forced out or displaced, sometimes ignored as nomadie, often too easily perceived as absent from the area beeause of colonial-induced blind-spots created by ideologieal principles of nature-human separafion in the nationalistic breaking of frontiers. Where indigenous interests have revealed themselves, enforcement of federal laws common to the modem state, such as freedom of religion, have trumped claims of appropriate usage and restrictions upon aeeess. For instanee, at Devil's Tower Nadonal Park in Wyoming, an ideal spot for elimber-savvy tourists, indigenous groups elaimed that their environmental heritage with "Bear's Lodge," the indigenous reference for "Devil's Tower," was being violated by the elimbers' determination to ascend on particularly sacred days. After debates on cultural respect and eifizen rights, the federal govemment sided with the climbing tourists on the basis of the Constitufional obligations upon federal agencies to defend the freedom of religion, which cannot legally be constrained or seen to be favouring one religion over another (Burton 2002). In addifion to displaeement and violation of indigenous environmental heritage. National Parks have presented other conundrums for environmental justiee. Mei Mei Evans (2002) captures some eritieal points regarding the remote rurality that surrounds many National Parks and the polities of race that must be traversed by people of colour who CLIMB 137 decide to cross spatialized political boundaries of race in order to get from their home location to the park site. Once at the park site, Evans observes that new challenges are faced when racial, sexist, and hetero-normafive threats surface within the park facilities, primarily from the actions and signs left by fellow tourists. In park policy circles, environmental justice has been tricky business because ecological conservation is traditionally held apart from justice concems (Gottlieb 1994). Even when ecologists, parks managers, and policy makers led their own revision to de-federalize ecological management of parks with "trusts" of experts and local interest groups, sophisticated accounts of environniental justice seemed lost in proposals (Hess 1993). For instance, Karl Hess (1993) proposed special park opportunities for economically disadvantaged citizens in his revision of the management for Rocky Mountain National Park. The problem with proposals like Hess's is that the opportunities for lower-cost entry fees and possible transportation service would be during times of off-season. These are not usually periods in which the weather or conditions of parks are ideal or survivable (especially winter in high-altitude Rocky Mountain National Park). They are not usually times that would be convenient for any traveller, let alone one less likely to have the vacation time necessary for the travel during off-season. So why focus on the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia as a case worthy of analysis for ecotourism principles and environmental justice? One reason is that National Parks have their own intemational diversity, which allows for the possibility of some instances to be more informative about ecotourism and environmental justice than perhaps others. Another reason is that National Parks are something along the lines of ecotourism for the average citizen, and therefore can serve as examples in which ecotourism and environmental justice are analysed together. Lastly, indigenous interests with National Parks have tremendous value in extending the principles and contexts of ecotourism and environmental justice. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, we argue, serves as a unique case for environmental justice because of its joint- management structure between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. The Park's ownership is under indigenous claim, and indigenous values are expressed throughout the Park's infrastructure—not always to the full desire of indigenous interests, but nonetheless present. Most of all, the joint-management structure is largely driven by values of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, and this gives it a rich study for ecotourism, in the sense of heightened tourist conscience with regard fo cultural, ecological, and economic prerogatives, all fundamentally sewn into the social fabric of environmental justice issues. For our exploration, Uluru-Kata Tjuta is a case in which ecotourism and environmental justice are inseparable and always co- informative. In this paper, we begin our exploration by briefly outlining some of the ways in which the environmental justice arena has been extended over the 138 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT past two decades. Specifically, Part I looks at the growing role of bivalent approaches in environmental justice studies. Within this discussion we argue that the restorative justice framework, which emphasizes reconciliation among other principles of justice, is an integral part of robust participation that characterizes the reeognition justice perspective of bivalent environmental justice. And, as an integral part, restorative justice brings an affective dimension to reeognition that has implications for indigenous representation and tourist attitudes with regard to the practice of climbing Uluru, the Rock. Part II further elaborates on the restorative justice framework through the joint-management structure of the Park. We provide a summary of the ways that restorative justice has been written into the moral terrain of the Park as part of satisfying land claims of indigenous Australians, Park management policy, and the environmental heritage of indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Furthering the restorative principles etched into the agenda of the Park, which is portrayed as ftindamentally respecting and promoting Tjurkurpa, the indigenous law and custom, we decipher the affective aspects of restorative justice and the motivations and polities bebind maintaining the controversial climb on Ulurii in the context of bivalent environmental justice. Part III presents the eonneetions between affective dimensions of restorative justice and geography by elaborating on our description of moral terrains at Uluru. Foeusing on affeetive dimensions of tourist practiees and indigenous law, we defend a methodological approaeh of non-representational theory and narrative analysis in order to provide a three-case study of non-indigenous Australian tourists that assesses the practices, attitudes, and effectiveness towards restorative justice at Uluru. In Part IV, our narrative analysis concentrates on the affective dimensions of touring, while taking opportunity to ftirther elaborate on restorative justice and its role in bivalent environmental justice. Ultimately, this paper is an argument that the process for achieving environmental justice at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park requires permanently closing the Climb.

I. Extending Bivalent Environmental Justice with Restorative Justice Over the past deeade, the grand narrative of the environmental justiee framework has expanded beyond the purely distributive justiee account (if sueh a pure form ever did exist) to an account inclusive of recognition justiee. Expansion has clearly been made, traversing equity in the distribution and compensations of environmental burdens, especially on the poor, peoples of colour, and indigenous communities, to the far more robust account of participatory justiee, which requires some measure of recognition justice. Within the recognition paradigm community voices, activists, scholars, and policy makers have emphasized direct respect for situated epistemologies and local voices on matters of what constitutes appropriate inclusion, respect for history, heritage, and place, and altemative ways to ameliorate environemntal injustices. CLIMB 139

Further expansion of environmental justiee studies has moved the diseourse to multi-sealar dimensions in several ways. The field has embraeed the fact that environmental justiee movements, fhough not always named as such, exist in every nation-state conceivable, and eommonly in under-developed and often under-represented regions of the intemational community. Local mobilizations and stmggles that defy narrow definitions of "environmental justice movements" have eome to illustrate the global proportions and loeal and historieal varieties of environmental justiee movements. This breadth has permitted a feedbaek loop for expanding notions of the distributive and recognition conditions for environmental justice, as well as shifted the eontent and perception of environmental burdens into a much-extended rubric that builds upon the rich anti-toxics and anti-hazards vein of environmental justiee diseourse. Land rights, trade-agreements, indigenous struggles, traditional and transformative values, racial and ethnic identity formation, food seeurity, bioprospecting, genetie engineering, gender relations and identities, as well as commitments to rethinking the eoncepts, abuses, and relations to non-human moral subjeets, are just some of the arenas to whieh environmental justice studies has effeetively brought new insights and normative aeeounts. Out of respect for these examples of theoretieal, sealar, and environmental expansion, we have adhered to a "bivalent environmental justice" framework in our tourist studies (Waitt, Figueroa, and MeGee 2007, Figueroa and Waitt 2008, 2011). Extending Nancy Fraser's bivalent ioc/a/justiee theory (1997) into an environmental justice theory invites numerous philosophieal opportunities. Some grounding similarities of bivalenee include bridging distributive and reeognition forms of environmental justice by principles of participatory parity; conceptualizing the paradigms of justiee together through a perspectival, rather than substantive, dualism; and, understanding that eoUeetivities are conceived as eo-constituted by co-original and imbricated material and eultural eonditions. Moreover, multiple levels of remedies for bivalent environmental justice must ultimately strive to ameliorate injustices through transformative remedies, in whieh the eausal nexus of the injustices is deeonstructed, overtumed, and reconstructed in order to avoid the legacy of environmental injustiees. Although mueh of Fraser's aeeount leaves an indelible mark on our version of bivalent environniental justiee, it is eritical to note that a number of philosophieal and theoretieal aeeounts of environmental justiee share approaehes with what we refer to as "bivalent environmental justice" (although not all explicitly recognizing any affinity with Fraser's bivalent foundation) (Hunold and Young 1998, Shrader-Freehette 2005, Peña 2005, Schlosberg 2007, Cole and Foster 2001). Indeed, bivalent tendencies in environmental justiee studies have grown to sueh a norm in themselves by such a range of scholars that "multi valenee" is beeoming a eateh-term for envisioning further extensions of environmental justiee. Preeisely what multivalenee would add to bivalenee remains undetermined and under-explored, but in an environmental justice framework we imagine that an inter-speeies justiee built 140 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT upon a relational ethic should produce a version of multivalence. While we concede this likelihood and have explored this potential elsewhere (Figueroa and Waitt 2008), in this paper we build our analysis along bivalent lines in order to elaborate the significance of restorative justice in bivalent environmental justice. Although justice should be viewed in a webbing network, the bivalent environmental justice approach would emphasize restorative justice under the paradigmatic side of recognition justice^ More specifically, restorative justiee offers recognition justice facets of detail in relationships between moral agents and affeetive dimensions that may otherwise be underemphasized. Recognition justice requires at least robust participation, respect for different voices and situated heritage, direct inclusion, and in many accounts a transformative vision for deliberative democracy (Hunold and Young 1998, Cole and Foster 2001, Figueroa 2006). The most common characterizations of restorative justice are indeed requirements of recognition justice, including face-to-face (or mediated and inclusive) exchanges between different parties and respect for situated knowledge and experience. Under restorative justice, the different parties are fundamentally configured as offenders or perpetrators of harm and the subjects-of-harm, often expressed in terms of a "victim," so constmed as to avoid conjuring a passive, inactive, or paralyzed moral agency. Rather, "victim" is a condition under which agency and relationship to offenders is to be transformed. At the social-ontological level, a system and scale that loeates the epicenter of justice between victims and offenders is dangerously elose to the condition Kelly Oliver (2001) has criticized in recognition justice as a duplication and reification of approaches that interpose subject and object, self and other, as the fundamental duality that initiates oppressive forces. Many would share Oliver's concem, which is why we interpolate restorative justice as a transformative remedy that is meant to deconstruct this duality in the "joumeys to belonging," to borrow Howard Zehr's (2002) phrase, by creating a variety of empathetic interactions that aim at healing and re-identifieation for all parties involved. At the same time, we heed the argument Val Plumwood (2002) makes to avoid collapsing all agency and subjecthood into a unity that fails to distinguish individuation and agency provided by self-other relationships. Indeed, as Plumwood suggests, maintaining the significance of individuation ultimately requires reconfiguring agency. In many ways she provides the bivalent direetion for this reconfiguration in her defence of the "intentional recognition stance," wherein the eonditions of agency exist under a relational ethic that challenges consciousness as the crux of agency. Daniel Van Naess (2002) describes a restorative justice framework that operates along three principles and four components (or values). The principles include (1) a condition of restoration for victims, offenders, and communities, which seems to beg the question of the purpose of restorative justice. The other two principles, (2) opportunities for earliest possible involvement and (3) a govemmental responsibility for preserving the restorative process and CLIMB ¡41

condition, do fit common aims of reeognition justiee, espeeially those that move to robust partieipation and deliberative democracy. Van Naess' four components more explieitly represent the commonalities in restorative justiee theory and practice; encounter, amends, réintégration, and inclusion. One ean see that the eriminal justice arena could provide closer elaboration for the eomponents: the terms of the meeting between the vietim and offender (encounter); the affeetive responses of shame, apology, and restitution (amends); the emphasis upon respect for the parties' eontinued productivity and well-being within their community (réintégration); and the deliberative self-determination representative of robust partieipation (inelusion). Within the analysis provided by Van Naess, we also find a number of elements that provide descriptive support for the respective eomponents, and he adds different models demonstrating degrees of restorafive justiee eonfingent upon whether or not all or some of the eomponents are aehieved. Thus, we eould achieve great progress in the efforts for vietim-offender meeting and inelusion, even to the point of apology and restitution for harms and/or damages, but not fulfil the degree of community respeet that promotes healthy réintégration and diminished recidivism: The level of detail in his systematic framework also avoids the all-or-nothing attitude for restorative justiee, beeause the system remains fundamentally in proeess. These are restorative "joumeys to belonging," and a snapshot of necessary and sufficient eondifions is missing the point of the affective, moral narrative and the self-realization that must take place. Once significant progress for restorative justiee has been made, the aftermath and lessons of harms, as well as the witnessing of trauma, remain part of the restorafive joumeying or eommunity healing. Restorative justice theory can also be characterized by its tendency to problematize the state-based justiee systems as dominating approaches that are often obstructing, appropriating, or in direct opposition to restorative prineiples (Van Naess 2002, Robyn 2002). But, we can also observe restorative justice strategies actively utilized at state and intemational levels in the truth and reconciliation arena of nation building and eultural healing. Truth and reeonciliation commissions at the state level have been proven useful in recent deeades with the nation building of post-apartheid South Africa, recognition between First Nations Peoples and the Canadian govemment/people (from national policy to the introduetion of eommunity justiee teehniques, such as sentencing eireles), and in public shaming and reconciliation trials of post- genoeide Rwanda. Eaeh of these examples has utilized its own versions and strueture, contingent upon specific communities, historical relations, state struetures, intemational relations, and their speeifie traumas. Nonetheless, eaeh exemplifies restorative justice at the scalar level of the state (some in terms of the intemational eommunity) and eaeh in ways that stretches the transformative aspeets of reeognition justiee in direet political formation, participation, and transformative revision. Our approach applies restorative justice simultaneously at different levels, shining focus between personal 142 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT affective experience and state-govemment policies that pertain to the Park's management, in order to philosophically explore and assess the restorative justice appendage or pedagogical arm of reconciliation that is built into the indigenous/settler joint-management system of Uluiri-Kata Tjuta National Park.

TI. Restorative Environmental Justice at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Reconciliation efforts to raise the normative bar of the Park and the conscience of the visitor have been the pivotal node of justice in our research, which has assisted our extending the bivalent framework to explicitly include restorative justice (Figueroa and Waitt 2008). Since 1985, the area of the Park has been recognized by the Commonwealth of Australia as Aboriginal Land, and the long-existing communities of Aboriginal peoples in area, specifically the Anangu, as the "traditional owners" (dating original community proof of habitation back 20,000-40,000 years) (Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population, and Communities 2010). Colonialism, assimilation, and racial eradication, representing overlapping campaigns of injustice against the Aboriginal peoples by settler Australians, over the past two centuries, present us with a unique opportunity to observe reconciliation efforts in an environmental justice framework. Indeed, reconciliation is central to the discourse for achieving justice between the Aboriginal and settler Australians. Although "working together" had been the purpose of the Joint-Management Committee since 1985, the Park became hamessed onto a more explicit politics of reconciliation one year after the 1998 reinvention of National Sorry Day as a Joumey of Healing, when officials gathered at Uluru as part of the "People's Apology" to deliver healing message sticks to representatives of the Stolen Generation—those "half-caste" Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children forcefully removed from their families between 1910-1970, under distorted practices and policies of racial and cultural assimilation (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 2000). The event followed the proliferation of personal apologies for past wrongs to indigenous Australians, echoing the motivation for the opening of "Sorry Books" that began the previous year. Indeed, "Sorry Books" specific to Uluru can be found in the Park's Cultural Centre. We have therefore limited our own studies to visitors since 1999, when a celebrated purpose behind the management of the Park became to form a reconciliation between indigenous and commonwealth heritage. An environmental justice framework has scholarly obligations to emphasize the local voices, grassroots efforts, and, in this case, the indigenous voices, knowledge, and perspectives for justice. However, there is a danger of indulging in a colonial analysis of our own if we were to suggest a knowledge or experience that could convey the coveted and complex identity, traditions, and heritage of the Anangu. Instead, we draw from the information the Anangu convey in Tjurkurpa (an interweaving of law, heritage, and customs stemming from Dreamtime ancestry) at the Park and in the Uluioi-Kata Tjuta National Park Management CLIMB 143

Plans, and then concentrate on the affeetive experiences of non-indigenous visitors eonveyed in our "Travels to the Rock" study: a 2004 study of twenty- eight Park visitors from the Greater Sydney Metropolitan Area. Reconciliation efforts between Aboriginal and settler Australians also involve land claims couched in more restorative-sounding terms like "handing back," referring to a whole period in which new human rights, civil rights, and land rights legislation led to giving back lands to Aboriginal communities who could meet the criteria of proving eontinuous ties to the land, plaee, and customs (Figueroa and Waitt 2008). At Ulujiu, there are a number of launching points for studying the joint-management reconciliation efforts. Is education for reconciliation effective and in the tourist's awareness? How is the health of the roek-plaee eeosystem prioritized? Is there respeet to non-human moral subjeets or the inclusion of non-human interests? Is there proper balance and implementation power in the management structure of Anangu leadership and representation with the non-indigenous scientifie and Commonwealth representation? Are the claims of respect to different environmental values, environmental identities, and environmental legacies inclusive? Our foeal point is on one of the Park's most publicized controversies, the Climb. The Climb was created, eomplete with ehain-litiked rail-supports, in 1958 by the Park's first chief ranger. Bill Hamey, during a period when the Park obviously did not reeognize the Anangu's prior heritage and cultural claims (Figueroa and Waitt 2008). The climb remains eontroversially open. "Open" means a viable option for tourists, sinee the Park maintains the elimb, maintains the basie serviees, and commits resources to reseue elimbers in danger and ward off would-be elimbers during inclement weather eonditions of extreme heat or high winds. According to Tjurkurpa, the Anangu people, and more specifically the Anangu stewards of Uluru, orNguraritja, have deep obligations that include a fundamental responsibility to the visitor and anyone harmed at Uluru. The number of visitors harmed is unknown, but to date thirty six climbing tourists have died on Uluiii, and Tjurkurpa obligates the Nguraritja to take on the feeling of responsibility and to moum as a community for a duration, which requires elosing the climb and impacts regular operations in the community and portions of the Park (Razak 2010; Director of National Parks 2010, 90). By focusing on the climb, we are able to consider a host of factors pertinent to the other launching points of studying joint-management, as well as opportunities to consider the environmental justice eoncems that underlay the moral dimensions of the Park's effeet upon tourists, non-indigenous visitors, and settler Australians. While the climb is "open" to visitors, the Park's entry tickets, broehures, and websites all convey and circulate a normative message of respect, Nganana Tatintja Wiya (We Never Climb). The joint management attempts to balance two systems of laws, the indigenous owners' system (Tjukurpa) and the non- indigenous system (Piranpa) (Director of National Parks 2010). Within the Management Plan are cultural obligations between the joint parties, with an 144 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT emphasis on Tjurkurpa and cultural reeoneiliation as part of the altemative activities to climbing the roek. Primary altematives existing for the past deeade inelude a Cultural Centre that brings the visitor numerous forms of exposure to the Anangu and trails that make up a eircumnavigating base-walk around Uluru, with minimal but quite informative and significant signage, as well as numerous ecologically unique sites and points vital for eonveying stories of Tjurkupa that are read from the rock surfaee and surrounding formations. These aetivities have provided their own eontributions to the Park's pedagogical arm of reconciliation, and wider public information and education campaigns have contributed to sharing the normative desires of Tjurkurpa, espeeially against elimbing. The education campaigns are found in the tours (by both indigenous and non-indigenous guides and eompanies). Park broehures and signage. Park Rangers, govemment websites on the Park, tourist industry media, and even academic scholarship. As part of the most reeent attempts to provide altematives to the climb, the Park has created a new viewpoint of Uluru and Kata Tjuta, Talinguru Nyakunytjaku (to look from the sand dunes), along with a new scenic road that snakes across the desert landscape. Yet the most prominent car park at Uluru places the visitor at the foot of the highly touristed and traffieked elimb. The material and eultural resourees saerificed for the climb are quite exceptional given the primary prineiple to "Never Climb." Indeed, any visitor passing the foot of the climb is confronted with a moral eontradietion foregrounded by the billboard deelaring, in many languages, the Tjurkurpa law against climbing and backgrounded by the evidence of ceaseless colonial habits sketehed aeross the spine of Uluru in the shape of a singular sear left as a legaey for the present and (unfortunately) future elimbers to endeavour. It is impossible to be unaware of the faet that to climb is an immoral incursion contravening Tjurkurpa, but apparently it is quite possible to adopt an attitude that eonseiously violates Aboriginal environmental heritage and law. On October 26, 2010, the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park held a festival in eelebration of the twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Handback (Director of National Parks 2010a). The eelebration expressed a positive recognition of the Aboriginal ownership, brought hundreds to the event, and, in timely fashion, brought some of the most heightened attention to the reeoneiliation efforts and limits of the Park's joint management (Marshall 2010). Soon after the celebration event, the Direetor of National Parks (2010) released the Uluru- Kata Tjuta National Park Management Plan 2010-2020, whieh explicitly addressed the elimb from perspeetives mimieking the triple bottom line of eeotourism: the eeonomic impacts of closing the climb, the eultural impaets of maintaining the elimb's status, and the ecological impacts caused by the elimb. Tjurkurpa is elearly expressed as the normative eenterpieee poliey on the climb, and the 2010-2020 Plan's response puts the climb on the path to an ultimate, permanent elosure, if one of the three conditions is met under the Policies section 6.3.3 (c): CLIMB 145

I. the Board, in consultation with the tourism industry, is satisfied that adequate new visitor experiences have been successfully established, or II. the proportion of visitors climbing falls below 20 percent, or III. the cultural and natural experiences on offer are the critical factors when visitors make their decision to visit the park. (Director of National Parks 2010, 92)

Advocates of climb closure have argued that conditions I and III have already been met. Condition I may be met by virtue of the new $21 million Talinguru Nyakunytjaku viewing platform (with car park, services, and scenic road), which receives annual activity of at least 3,000 visitors in addition to the previously existing tours and base-walk (Bamett 2009, Eyb 2010). Condition III may be met by the results of studies in 2003, 2004, and 2006, in which Baker's interviews of tourists revealed that up to 98 percent would still visit Uluru if the climb were closed (Popic 2005; Eyb 2010; Director of National Parks 2010, 90). Although these two conditions have quantifiable measurements and evidence to support that both have been met, they are also politically and economically charged conditions that depend upon the interests of the tourist industry and the subjective interests of tourists whose intentions and expectations are balanced against what altematives they could project themselves into (/park policies were different. Condition II presents a different puzzle in its quantifiable measurement. Thirty-eight percent of current visitors are estimated to participate in the climb, and below 20 percent permanently closes the climb. A piece of this quantifiable puzzle is precisely how park officials know the percentage of climbers, since one does not punch some card upon climbing. Another piece is that people have to make the conscious choice, which is both moral and political, to avoid climbing (weather permitting). Conditions I or III would likely have been met for quite some time in order to activate condition II, but it is II that reads as a direct and singular quantifiable proof that people will not climb. Ironically, closing the climb at any percentage of climbing activity (at current rate of climbers, the higher the better) would actually incite all the conditions, since the tourism industry will certainly avoid collapse and cultural interests would be heightened by more active usage of altematives in order to appreciate touring the Park. Moreover, the sooner the better for the fragile ecosystem of Uluru, especially if there are odd fluctuations of heightened climbing activity as the permanent closure nears and desire to "be the 'last' ones to climb Uluru" increases in touristic discourse and publicity. Thus, obstacles to restorative justice represented by the existence of the climb are going to require direct affective transformation in the expectations of visiting Uluru.

III. Embodied Geography, Moral Terrains, and Non-Representational Methodology Nigel Thriff and John-David Dewsbury (2000, 419) point out four cardinal components of a non-representational geograpby: affect, materiality. 146 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT creativity, and multiplicity. The affective component is of particular concem for our projeet. From affeet. Thrift and Dewsbury allow us to investigate the feeling-subjectivity rather than dismiss feelings as "subjecfive." Subjeetivity is relational, geo-historieally speeifie, embodied, sensuous, and performative. In this light, it is an artieulafion of "affeet" that will be useful in thinking about transformative possibilities of bodies through encounters within reeoneiliation spaees. Thrift and Dewsbury draw mueh from Gilles Deleuze's (1988) aeeount of affeet and habit. For Deleuze, affeet is not reducible to just personal feelings, or what a partieular body ean do, but rather what augmented or diminished eapaeities a body might have for relafions with other bodies. As Deleuze elaborates, "a body affects other bodies, or is affeeted by other bodies; it is this eapaeity for affecting and being affected that also defines a body in its individuality" (1988, 123). Here, the important point for our argument is that affect goes beyond experiences as individual emotion and enables an exploration of the relations between bodies and things. Helpful to our projeet is Brian Massumi's translation of "affeet" as "a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state to another and implying an augmentation or diminution of that body's eapaeity to act" (1988, xvi). A conneetive line of thinking applies to habit. According to Deleuze, habit, understood as the "a priori eonditions under whieh all ideas are formulated and behaviour displayed," gradually reduces the potential of the body to do things otherwise (1988, 60). Considered in this light, visifing and then elimbing Uluru ean be understood as a eolonial habitual gesture that helps to constitute the threshold of settler national identity. For these visitors, non-indigenous Australians respeeting Tfurkupa easts a moral disturbance upon colonial habits by disclosing the demands of reconeiliafion, foreing visitors to think, to consider the unseen heritage, and to open new relationships with other bodies (organisms) and non-living entities. In addition to these insights on affeet and habit, we were inspired by scholarship asserting that the process of remembering requires spatial metaphors of eonnection (Crang and Travlou 2001; Landzelius 2003). To heighten the memory of Uluru through spatial association we depended upon respondents' photograph albums that enabled them to work through the sensual experienees initially eommitted to body-memory. Although immediate affeet may be absent an adequate verbal language for the sensory body, experienees ean be later recollected and reflected in verbal expression. Holiday photographs, as Mike Crang (1997) writes, have advantages from the fact that they are not an add-on but part of touring practices. Non-representafional approaehes are interested in becoming or bodies- in-formation, and thinking the body through plaee leads us to an affeefive ontology of relational ethics or an account oí moral terrains (Waitt, Figueroa, and McGee 2007; Figueroa and Waitt 2008, 2011). Moral terrain exists as the web of values layered over places through discourses that establish normative praetiees and belongings. Normative interaetions with plaee are refleeted in CLIMB 147 a repertoire of embodied values and performative habits that are found in individual experiences, sometimes expressed in the accounts of body-memory from the individual's narrative of an experience. Nonnative elements of moral terrains include embodied narratives about what behaviours are permissible, who belongs where, how we perceive the moral status of other bodies (human and non-human), and the ways in which we establish moral, social, and political identities in embodied relations to space and place. Reflecting on the account that moral agents give of their experience allows us to gain insights on the multiple moral terrains that exist in a place and the ways in which different moral agents are held in moral relations. Some spaces reveal dominant moral terrains through embodied accounts of behaviour, revealing underlying beliefs and perceptions that detail the texture and nuances of a moral terrain. Competing routes and moral joumeys reveal the ways in which moral terrains establish privileges of certain embodied agents at the disadvantage of others, and indeed even a set of injustices impacting the interpretative and experiential lives of other agents set in that relational space. At least four notable moral terrains have been progressively layered over the rock-place of Uluru: (1) the indigenous moral terrain of the Anangu, (2) during the late nineteenth century, the colonial moral terrain of "Ayers Rock" as a settler homeland that has sustained a variety of expectations and perceptions, (3) the conscientious, ecologically and culturally aware tourists, ranging from individuals invoking the universal spiritual moral terrain of "New Age Travellers" to those who respect the Anangu request outright, and (4) since 1986, the postcolonial moral terrain of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Board of Joint Management. In the next section of our paper we consider some of the affective responses that follow from the current status of the climb to determine how visitors respond to the climb and the broader potential for restorative environmental justice.

IV. Touring Narratives on the Climb: Colonial Naturalism, Shame, and Resistance Initiating the "Travels to the Rock" study in 2004, we restricted ourselves to interviewing twenty-eight visitors living in Greater Sydney Metropolitan area and who toured since 1999.' The participants were recruited through a "snow-ball" sampling strategy, emails, and web-page publicizing. Most of the participants were from middle-class backgrounds and included students, retirees, and those working in lower and higher service positions. There was an almost even distribution of respondents by gender and across decade age groups from twenties to sixties. While all our participants were non-indigenous

1. Although the tourists in this study were interviewed six years ago, the practices and attitudes towards the climb remain relevant if not representative of many of the responses to the climb represented in major media reports over the past year. The only primary differences are the lapses in time, which indicate just how slow the reconcili- ation process has been, and the explicit Uluru-Kata TjuUi National Park Management Plan 2010-2020 conditions for permanent closure of the climb mentioned above. 148 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT

Australians, within its homogeneous population of primarily European and British origins there is some diversity between the ethnicities, such as Anglo- Celtic, Chinese, Dutch, and German. Participants consented to a semi-structured interview with their personal snapshots available. The outcome was that each interview built a travel narrative based upon a sharing of vivid and unique memories of touring motivations, practices, and experiences. Travel narratives often lasted over one hour All narratives were digitally-recorded and professionally transcribed for analysis. In agreement with the participants, their actual names have been changed, but their narratives remain verbatim, again with a full-awareness that interpretations would be applied to their interview transcripts. Our analysis is guided by an investigation of how participants understood and negotiated experiences arising from their touring actions, rather than making character judgements about individual persons. Following the advice of J. L Wiles, M. W. Rosenberg, and R. A. Keams, the type of narrative analysis employed here "focuses on how people talk about and evaluate places, experiences and situations, as well as what they say" (2005, 89). The point of narrative analysis is to be sensitive to how each respondent negotiated the demands of reconciliation in the Park, rather than trying to establish a unitary experience. For this paper, we have selected out three narratives as "ease studies" to illustrate different affective dimensions of non-indigenous tourings of the Park, specifically with respect to the climb.

Mike Despite requests by the Anangu, even a pop version of conscientious, ecocentric. New-Age spiritual tourism can mobilize myths of Ulurii as a settler homeland through climbing and witnessing panoramic views from the top. We can trace these along pivotal points of environmental heritage, national environmental identity, and colonial naturalism. Mike is an Anglo-Celtie visual artist in his twenties. Growing-up, he always went on overseas family holidays; however, for the past couple of years he has travelled independently in Australia for pleasure. Mike articulates his preferred holiday choices as "natural places," destinations he understands as being devoid of humans because of their remoteness from cities.

Lana: What generally appeals to you about destinations that you visit on vacation? Mike: At the moment I like nature. Different types of natural beauty. Travelling and exploring the bush. At the same time, out in the desert, but I'd never been before. It's so far away and there's nothing out there. It's so empty. It's fijn. Being so far away from everything, and knowing there's nothing between you and whatever is thousands of kilometres away.

Consequently, Mike was eager to join the four-wheel-drive "safari" from Sydney to Alice Springs that his father and three of his workmates organized. CLIMB 149

Mike reealled that climbing Uluru was always the anticipated highlight of this road trip.

Lana: Tell me about some of the experiences you were particularly, looking forward to doing before you departed?? Mike: Uluru was coolest, because you're travelling to a totally natural landmark, not a city, but a monument made by the earth, just amazing. Lana: Were you looking forward to climbing Ulum before you left? Mike: Totally. That was something I think every Australian wants to do, stand on top of Ayers Rock. Lana: Are you a big climber? Mike: Not really. I like to though. When 1 was younger, I climbed everything.

Mike's anticipation of the elimb carries an embodied expression of a eolonial mentality. Despite the association of Uluru as a monument, the nationalism- imaginary of this roek-plaee is unsatisfied by mere presenee or exploration of the roek-place, but by the eolonial appeal of a climb. Moreover, referencing the monument as "Ayers Rock" may be aeeepted as an habitual praetiee, but common knowledge that "Uluru" is the Aboriginal term and now the name for the National Park exists far and wide among the Australian eitizenry. A conscious choice, either to maintain the habit of an Anglo-naming system (whieh could be out of respect to avoid Aboriginal refereneing situated as a white-commonwealth Australian), or to keep the name in avoidance of a new name, is attaehed to a set of beliefs and feelings about that place. The eolonial imaginary of "Ayers Rock" becomes more complicated and possibly insurmountable when referenced as "Uluru," a landmark that has Aboriginal normative primacy. Instead, in the antieipated embodiment suggested by his unqualified desire to climb, Mike gives his account of Australia's environmental heritage by regarding the climb as an act "every Australian wants to do." The physieal challenge of the elimb eaptures the affective quality of an initiation ceremony, a national spiritual quest, or a rite of passage to becoming a true Australian. For Mike, standing on top of Uluru, positioned as "Ayers Roek", is inextricably linked to eolonial myths of settler Australia, positioned as a national duty rather than a disrespeetful act towards the Anangu. Aboriginal primaey presupposes that Uluru marks a long-existing human settlement. This is contrary to the environmental heritage that eomes from a nationalist Australian account of the outbaek and bush, where Uluru marks out the heart and spiritual eenter of the Australia. Ironieally, "Ayers Roek" refers to a diseovery of the bush as unsettled, a eolonial contract upon claiming land and places that are unused, unpopulated, and un-owned, whereas "Uluru" refers to an oeeupied area, long-used, long-populated, and long-acquired in a long-existing environmental heritage. Prior to his departure, Mike never questioned his nationalistic entitlement and personal desire to climb, in part because of his erasure of people from "far away" natural plaees. The moral terrain of being in a "natural place" elearly differs from his daily moral terrain. 150 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT which is teaming with people and social constraints upon various freedoms. Out in natural places, the expanse away from people presupposes a freedom, if even from people, that marks out a new moral terrain with different normative limits. To be sure, responsibilities come with the moral terrain of natural places, but this natural place involves recapturing normative conditions of moral terrain recalled from his previous enjoyment (freedoms) of his bodily ascensions elsewhere. Ironically, the freedom one possesses on the naturalized moral terrains reinforces nationalistic entitlement that comes with being "far away" from people. Additionally, Mike's pre-departure preparation included reading the sequel to James Redfield's (1993) Celestine Prophecy, a New-Age novel that for many of its readers doubles as a religious treatise outlining spiritual self- enhancement through a nine-point explanation of the author's ideas about spirituality, human destiny, and the cosmos. The crux of Redfield's message is that the universe is made up of energy, which is ever-evolving into higher forms, while at the same time grounding some universal interconnection. The final stage, from humanity to some state of intelligent transcorporeal being, involves humans leaming to acquire and direct psychic energy by connecting to pristine nature rather than competing for each other's psychic energy. Mike captures this in his interpretation of Redfield's influence:

Mike: At the time, I was getting into reading spiritual books, like the Celestine Prophecy. I think I was reading the second in that series, the Celestine Vision. So, I was into thinking about synehronicity and energy. Everywhere I went it seemed to be flowing out of everything. Thinking about the Aboriginals, how they perceived reality, and how the earth has its own consciousness.

It is unclear how "consciousness," in Mike's sense, reveals subjecthood or agency, but his account suggests that the agency of the earth, especially the Rock, beckons his colonial ascension against the agency Uluru requires in Anangu law. There is the co-constitution of Uluioi as a monument and expressive in its own consciousness as earth. In this way, Ulurii is able to be regarded as a spiritual (if not sacred) site (albeit named "Ayers Rock"), offering the tourist transformation in the aseension of moral terrains (spiritual levels) via the white-settler national mythos of climbing. Mike's co-constitution of Uluru as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment and national membership is further revealed in the way he spoke about his first impressions of Uluru, his dismissal of the Anangu request to not climb, and his embodied spiritual experience of this place achieved by climbing to the top:

Mike: When I got to Ayers Rock, I couldn't help but think of it as being a giant heart of Australia. While we were there, we went on a tour which told us about the different caves. Shamans used different caves for different reasons. Women have a cave to give birth in. But, I really felt that 1 had to CLIMB 151

climb it. When I was there with my little brother, even though you're not supposed to climb it because its sacred, 1 just felt that 1 had to. Because it was just there, beckoning me. So, my brother and I climbed it, and it was so amazing. So mueh bigger than anything I ever thought. And, you're standing on top of it, a tree, a normal sized tree, looks like a blade of grass, that's how big it is. It was really eool to elimb it, eos you could just feel [pause], all I ean say is the energy. It is so invigorating to elimb it. When 1 was standing on top, on the end where you walk, standing with my brother and looking at the view, 1 saw a butterfly on the horizon flying towards us. For some reason 1 was staring at it, mesmerised by it. Because 1 was reading the Celestine Prophecy and thinking about attention, and how attention is energy, I decided to beckon the butterfly, if you know what I mean. I've got my hands in front of my face, like this. And, sort of, wished the butterfly to come to me and it fully flew from the horizon straight towards me and stopped, right here, right in between my hands. And I was standing with my brother, and was like, "Check this out." For a good two minutes the butterfly was just hovering in- between my hands. And then, I just let it go. 1 had to go and just meditate, just next to the tree. Funny enough, there's a tree growing on top of it. I just went under that, meditated for a bit, came down. Yeah it was so cool.... Because it is so big, people are drawn towards it. But, it also gives you energy. I was high, fully high, excited and happy. Blissful. The whole experienee, elimbing it, it was an adventure. Lana: How did the Aboriginal wishes and signage fit into your desire to climb? Mike: 1 think the faet they let you climb it if you want is unto itself, is enough pennission for me to be able to climb it, because I can acknowledge it as a sacred site Actually, standing on it, and feeling the energy gave me an appreciation for their perspective a bit more, even though they say you're not supposed to climb it. I climbed it anyway. But, that's just the way 1 am. I'm not going to not elimb it.

Mike illustrates how the body, through its aetion and practice, is a source for sensing this roek-plaee as saered. As a New Age spiritual seeker, Mike tells of how the energies of the Roek reach back and speak to him, "beckoning" him to climb (as if a moral authority in its own right), and how the butterfly performs for him through his control of physic energy. He demonstrates how the affeetive capacity of the embodied sense of the saered from these sensory- invoked moral relations with Uluru both confirmed his subjectivity as seeking spiritual enlightenment of a New Age pilgrim and justified his deeision to knowingly disregard the request of the Anangu not to elimb. His spiritual endeavour ascends his consciousness to eolonial moral terrains reeonfigured in a spiritual universal. If it is all about energy and the energy ealls you, then moral energy knows no boundaries. If the Anangu are naturally more spiritual, and they request that you do not climb, but are presently unable to legally stop you from elimbing, then the moral terrain for spiritual energy defaults to the colonial morality that invokes universalist elaims. 152 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT

While Redfield's novels may provide some good general principles by which to live one's life, as readers may argue, as a philosophy his work is fundamentally flawed. As illustrated by Mike, the ordering of his body to the "correct" embodied performance to sense the sacred energies of this rock- place, according to the New Age spirituality of Redfield, dulled his affective capacity to be receptive to the Anangu apprehension of the spiritual. For Mike, his sense of bliss arising from ascending the rock only affirmed the energy forces generated by the rock and his universal notion of the sacredness of this place and confirmed some universalistic assumptions about indigenous faith. Consequently, when Mike was questioned if the trip gave him a better understanding of Aboriginal people, he replied:

Mike: It just gave me a better appreciation of Australian landscape, 1 suppose. Feeling the energy in these places. 1 just can't deny it. You can feel it. Lana: Is that energy the same as the Aboriginal spirituality? Mike: I leamt that Aboriginals are just like every other indigenous culture. They have their beliefs, and Shamanism, and that kind ofthing. And, the Shamanistic beliefs are similar all around the world. And, Ayres Rock seems to be a centre of energy, just like any other sacred site around the worid, even man-made ones, like the pyramids. . . . Points of energy, points which have high energy have natural landmarks to show you where these special energy points are, and that's what makes them sacred. ... I suppose that's what the trip did for me, made me feel that energy, not just know that it's there. It's common sense, but actually, just to feel it yourself, it was great. The butterfly wouldn't have come into my hand if it wasn't anything special.... Just connecting with that universal Aboriginality.

Mike apparently transcends his daily environmental identity as a New Age pilgrim by coming to Uluru and affirming the sacredness of thjs rock-place as he also confirms the homogeneity of indigenous faith, "Shamanism." His appreciation of the Anangu ironically separates the people from the rock- place in order to connect all the people to all sacred-landscapes that appear to have a non-anthropocentric value in their self-generated spiritual energy (consciousness). Connecting to the energy of the placé circumvents his need to connect with the people, since colonialized-place speaks to a universal environmental identity rather than rules govemed by myth, in this case. Shamanism. It is by virtue of the vestiges of colonial tendencies to naturalize and universalize spaces that double-meanings of "nature" can be applied to indigenous peoples. They are closer to nature in one sense, and nature is something that can be connected to universally for all people. In the latter sense, "nature" is accessible to all, despite its non-anthropocentric values; colonial environmental identity always permits humans to appropriate the meanings and norms of the place. In the former sense, indigeneity's virtue of proximity to natural places and essentialist environmentalism makes their rules CLIMB 153 about elimbing Uluru a eulturally specific superstition—Shamanism—that can be disregarded for the latter universal meaning of "nature." In this context, the moral terrain of the climb is pitched as ascension beyond mere morality to a metaphysical realm of connection or universal access. Restorative justice measures, such as reconciliation between the Anangu and settler Australians through respeet of different customs, especially on Anangu land, is dramatically tilted in the purview of the current nationalist environmental heritage. Uluru, especially under the guise of "Ayers Rock," is a national totem for all citizens of Australia. And the strongest normative pull for that totem is elimbing it, despite the joint management and Anangu desires to uphold Uluru as a restorative justiee totem, in which proof that reconciliation is at work is that the cultural messages, community laws, and environmental heritage of the Anangu are actually reflected in the embodied resistanee to elimb of one's own accord. According to Mike, all indigenous people are the same at some measure of the past, and we all have the power, if directed in the proper manner, to connect to our "indigenous" energy. Mike makes the eontroversial claim that the intensity of bodily highs from climbing provided him with a way of connecting to the spiritual world of all indigenous people. His embodied knowledge confimis the arguments of scholars (Hill 1994; Marcus 1997; Gelder and Jacobs 1998) who have each examined the ironies that Aboriginal sacred spaces take on when New Age spirituality operates as an ontology that is ambivalent, usually due to some modemist version of primitivism. The seholars have speeifieally noted this ambivalence towards Anangu authority. Whatever his experienee of reconciliation with nature, his elimbing experience was always fashioned within a New Age normative order rather than the specific norms of Tjukurpa. Mediated by the Celestine Prophecy, the affective capacities from climbing enable Mike to relate to other bodies according to their participation in some universally similar spiritual quest, but never speeifieally to the Anangu law or environmental heritage.

Alice An Anglo-Celtic shop-assistant, bom in the 1950s, Alice longed to relive her teenage family holiday of driving to Central Australia, but prohibitive travel costs had always prevented the holiday. Then, reading an advertisement for low-cost air travel to Alice Springs, an opportunity emerged for Alice to realize her dream. She plaruied a five-day holiday, positioning driving to Uluru as the highlight. In preparation for the trip she only read a few Northem Territory tourist broehures, so her familiarity with this plaee and expectations for the holiday were primarily based upon her teenage memories. In December 2000, Alice spent two days with her family at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. During this time she witnessed the sunrise and sunset on the rockfaee. Over the two days of her visit, the climb was officially closed due to excessive temperatures. 154 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT

Although not participating in any tours, she walked parts of the Mala and Mutitjulu Walks and visited the Cultural Centre. Aliee aeknowledged, given her previous visit as a teenager, that this family holiday was something she "wanted to do more so than everybody else." However, Alice expressed dismay reflecting on her first impressions, imagining the resort being closer to Uluru and the roek as a baek-drop to her evening drinks.

Lana: What were your first impressions of Ulum? Alice: I couldn't believe that the rock was so far away from the actual area of civilisation of the resort. That you can't even see the rock from there. So, that disappointed me in some ways, because, I felt, 1 expected to come out of our hotel accommodation and be able to sit out, and have a drink, and be able to see the rock. That's what 1 was expecting, and it wasn't, it was something like 25 kilometers away. And, I would like to have been able to have spent the aftemoon sitting around, or the day sitting around, and being able to see it as part of my experience. And, so that amazed me. I just couldn't understand why, when you had so many places to build a resort, why the rock isn't visible. I guess, thinking, is it because it's a commercial gesture, whereby, you've got to pay to go into the national park, then get to see the rock that way. I don't know. I would have been happy enough to pay my money before I got to the resort, so the resort was closer to the rock, so I could actually see it. 1 was really disappointed that I actually had to drive into the national park to see.

Her disappointment arose from her inability to enter a elose visual relationship with the rock while surrounded by resort eomforts. These expeetations are eritieal earmarks that distinguish mass national park tourism from ecotourism. Indeed, trying to make sense of the invisibility of Uluru from the resort, Alice appears oblivious to Anangu Native Title and their wishes to prevent uncontrolled spatial and temporal access of visitors over their land. Instead, the colonial mentality of user-pays entitlement is used to make sense of the distance separating the Park from the resort. For Aliee, driving becomes a hardship rather than a respeet for prior ownership. Some disappointment dissolved when she adapted to the spatial-distancing between the Park and the Resort.

Alice: On the day we arrived, we arrived in the aftemoon, so we went out there and drove around the rock. Very, very, very hot. Lots of flies. And, then, drove baek to watch the sunset. Then, the following day, I was going to go for the sunrise. None of them [her family] went with me. "I've seen the rock," is the answer I got. And, I went, "What! You've come all this way, 1000km retum joumey, and you're not going back out to the Rock." ... So, went out on my own in the dark, and, drove the 25 kms out there, hoping I wasn't going to hit any kangaroos in the dark, went out and saw the sunrise. I thought I haven't come out all this way to miss out on the sunrise. 1 did what I wanted to do, and that's all that mattered to me. CLIMB 155

When asked to reflect upon whether her understanding of people, the environment, herself or Australia had changed from this visit, her answer was always a resounding "no." Teenage memories of driving to Central Australia with her parents leff her with a strong understanding of this as an Aboriginal place. Her capacity to understand Aboriginality remained framed by nineteenth- century European myths of ideas of a traditional, pre-contact Aboriginal:

Alice: We had experiences that 1 still have in my mind, such as Aborigines coming up with spears to the car and us in the middle of nowhere, and they didn't speak English and, we didn't know what do. We were quite frightened.

Consequently, when reflecting on whether she had leamt anything from touring the Park, Alice gives a contradictory understanding of Aboriginality, people she understatids as simultatieously deficient yet privileged through compensatory Commonwealth govemment strategies promoting land rights and social welfare:

Alice: 1 expected to see the Aboriginal community more civilized than what it was when I was a teenager only beeause I believe that, 1 don't mean to be racist in any shape or form, but, I just felt that so mueh is being done for Aboriginal people nowadays in comparison to what it was before and there's far more acceptance by the community of Aboriginal people. . . . About the Cultural Centre, I was really disappointed that there was no Aboriginal people working there You would think that just because you're Aboriginal someone would want to just do artwork, and someone would want to work in the shop, to be there, to be proud of their heritage. ... In the resort we only came across some that were in the bar area, drinking. ... It hasn't changed anything to do with Aborigines for me.

One the one hand, Alice claims she is not a racist. On the other hand, her expectations are of "more civilized," harder-working and more visible (stereotyped) Aboriginal people. The eontradietions of sympathy and disappointment in Alice's narrative illustrate what Gelder and Jacobs (1998) argue characterizes "postcolonial racism." They point out that there is no clear demarcation point when someone may feel that a particular group is receiving more attention than their 'minority' status deserves. In the Cultural Centre she focuses on who works there, as if the spectacle would include a "real life" Aboriginal person.She never questions her certainties that people managing, owning, and working in the Cultural Centre do not self-identify as Aboriginal. Instead, she only evokes stereotypes of Aboriginality drawing on her certainty that seemingly restriets Aboriginal people to the resort bar and consuming alcohol. The Resort shapes environmental identity in its own moral terrains. In this instance, it circumscribes a normative terrain that offers the tourist a reified negative perception of Aboriginal people in its bar, while at the same time being a space intended for alcohol consumption, which is a mass tourism activity 156 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT that completes the experienee. For Aliee, the embodied knowledge derived from touring Uluru seemingly provides a context in which her understanding flourished of Aboriginal people as lacking yet credited with more attention than their status in soeiety deserves. The paradox of postcolonial racism is that despite Aliee's acceptance of ethnic diversity, her resentment towards Aboriginal people is fueled by her sense that they are gaining "too mueh" govemment support. Aliee's further certainty that Aboriginals have reeeived too much is illustrated by how a particular eneounter with a seventy-year-old Aboriginal man, in the telegraph station in Aliee Springs, became the most memorable moment of this trip. This encounter provided her with a counter-narrative to the claims regarding the Stolen Generation.

Alice: We spent hours listening to him talk. He was fabulous. He was an Aboriginal who didn't believe he was part of a Stolen Generation. He was brought up by white people, he was taken from his family. ... He reckoned that had white people not taken him as a child, because he was only three and nearly died at the age of three, he said "I would not be here today. I would not have survived. 1 would not have lived through it." . . . And he was amazing to listen to.

In Aliee's narrative, the situated experienee and self-perception of the Aboriginal man offers a path for her colonial patemalism; a healthy scepticism of Aboriginal claims of eolonial trauma from the sixty-year campaign of forced removal is warranted. These mulfiple experiences with Aboriginal peoples over the duration of Alice's life-travels to the region draw further contradictions of postcolonial racism. Although Alice provides an admission of pride in a mulficultural Australia and Uluru as an indigenous place, pride is situated with her disappointment towards indigenous Australians as laeking "eivilizafion" and gaining "so mueh." Postcolonial racism operates with nafional pride and works against reconciliation to confirm eertain normative assumptions of an Anglo-Celtic "majority" in a multicultural Australia. When reflecfing on if her trip had challenged her understanding of the nation, Aliee had no reservation in emphasizing how touring Uluru strengthened her sense of pride in her self- identifieation as Australian:

Alice: I'm proud to be an Australian. I'm proud of our eountry. And I'm proud we have so much. So, whether it be Uluru or whether it be the south coast of New South Wales or any other plaee, I think it's all part of being proud to be Australian and what Australia is, and the people who are in Australia, the mixture of us all. I'm just proud of the whole lot of it.

Wilma Wilma's narrative begins framed by the normative of eolonial enfitlement, but ultimately refleets a shift under the normative motivations spurred by shame. CLIMB 157 a common topic debated in restorative justice theory. Wilma, an Anglo-Celtic married woman aged in her forties, with three twenty-something children, is employed as an administrative assistant. With family she had travelled extensively around Australia in a caravan. Wilma's three-day fly-in holiday in June 2004 was a surprise, booked by her partner, who wished to celebrate his fiftieth birthday by climbing Uluru. Some ten years earlier Wilma and her family had climbed Uluru. The pleasures derived from witnessing places as landscape understood as aesthetic scenery had always been integral to their preferred holiday plans. As Wilma explains, valuing holiday places as aesthetic landscape, Uluru had become a must-see holiday destination.

Linda: How do you generally pick where you want to go for a trip? Wilma: It's mainly places that we haven't been before but would have thought about going for quite some time. It's usually the landscape of the place, particularly in Australia. Places of interest that we've wanted to see for some time. So we mainly stay away from cities.... Living in Australia 1 think it's [Uluiu] just one of those places you want to go and see. It's totally different to city life. The landscape's so different. I think people are just drawn to it [Uluru].

While her partner was most excited about the prospect of (re)ascending the Rock, for Wilma, climbing the second time around held no particular attraction. Instead her expectations were based on recalling the awe she felt from the physical proximity of the enormous rock-surface, rather than euphoric bodily memories of reaching the summit.

Linda: So what expectations did you have, since you'd been there before? Wilma: Hmm, 1 don't know. Because, I was just over awed by the rock the first time around, you wondered if you would have that same experience again. And, it was great to experience the size of the rock. You'd forgotten really the size of it. ... But in particular we were to spend an evening called Sounds of Silence Dinner.^

However, the itinerary did not unfold quite as planned. Wet weather the previous week and low hanging clouds meant that, while the dinner could go ahead, the climb was closed. Instead, of climbing, Wilma and her partner visited the

2. The Sounds of Silence is a five-star, three-course, silver-service, outdoor dinner experience held on a sand dune at sunset, where the resort is out of sight and Uluru and Kata Tjuta provide the distant back-drop. Dinner includes items such as kangaroo steak, crocodile appetizers, and Australian wines; entertainment includes a didgeridoo player (despite the fact that the didgeridoo has no connection to the Aboriginal communities of this region) and an evening study of the desert sky (astronomy and astrology by a planetarium-like guide). Whatever the enjoyment of this dining experience, it also epitomizes another privilege of colonial entitlement. 158 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT

Cultural Centre and happened by chance to join a two-hour National Parks guided tour of the Mutitjulu Walk. For Wilma, this guided tour became one of the most memorable and transformative parts of the trip. Wilma described vividly how her understanding of Uluiu changed from listening to a non- indigenous guide giving an Anangu interpretation of the rock's significance.

Linda: Did you leam anything from what the guide was saying? Wilma: He said you don't climb up on the face of the Statue of Liberty. Or you don't climb upon a statue in someone's town square. So the ranger was saying, so why should we crawl all overthis? Just because it's in a natural format, what Abodginals regard as, not so much a statue, but not exactly sacred either, but you're climbing all over their place of residence. . . . You just see it so differently to the way that the Abodginal people would see it. So you saw the rock very much in a different way. Because, the firsttim e I went there, I climbed it. Something I now feel ashamed of having done. Whilst I don't believe what they believe, but I do recognise this is their place. Neil was going to climb, but 1 wasn't. I was choosing not to climb. So you had a much better ideas of what was actually happening there at that rock, so much more that just seeing a physical feature on the landscape. So much more.

For Wilma, no longer was the Rock understood as a distant, aesthetic landscape but an embodiment of the Aboriginal people. From the perspective of how the Anangu understand the rock, the embodied knowledge of climbing became a source of shame. Drawing on the affective capacity of shame has the potential to reveal an individual's subjectivity and materiality. As Elspbeth Probyn claims, feeling "shame sets off a nearly involuntary re-evaluation of one's self and one's actions" (2005, 78). Shame is also a eontroversial subject in restorative justice theory. On the one hand, it is posited as an altemative to retributive punishment and ean better involve victims, offenders, and communities. Public shaming has received merits in restorative venues of truth and reconciliation, especially in instances of "radical evil" where the collective behaviour of people has overtumed the moral compass to the point that individualized retribution of guilt fails to properly address the collective commitment to do harm, or the proportional respect due to victims (Dmmbl 2000). However, even arguing in support of the benefits that shame could provide restorative strategies. Zehr (2002) also summarizes scholarship in which some have argued that shame is an affect at the heart of violence, wherein violenee is the result of the agent attempting to thwart shame. Additionally, he references examples where shame has been over-experieneed by some marginalized and oppressed groups so that it loses its meaning. In other cases of marginalization, publie shame in the form of soeietal alienation has actually galvanized some groups to retaliate violently. A eommon referenee among the restorative justice debates around shame is John Braithwaite's Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989), whieh defends shame on a number of grounds. Considering just a few, shame is argued as an affect more appropriate to the moral psychology of the CLIMB 159 irrational behavior behind severe and/or eolleetive atrocities. The rational choice approaeh eaptured in retributive schemes of guilty/non-guilty pleas generates defensive postures and falls out of line with the need to realign a moral compass. Braithwaife's restorative justice eontribution on shame is perhaps most productive at his distinetion between disintegrative versus reintegrative shame, wherein the former alienates, humiliates, and stigmatizes the agent, but the latter plaees shaming in a larger eontext of community involvement and resolution (Braithwaite 1989). Of course, Braithwaite reeognizes that the erux of this distinction is that interdependent relations between the agent and eommunity make most of the difference for eft"ective réintégration. What we leamed from tourist accounts of shame eoineides with the restorative justice debate: it could move the agent in a defensive posture or open a new moral terrain towards reconciliation (or ultimately both). The affective capacity of shame eaused Wilma to see Uluru in new ways. This time, she chose not to climb, despite how Anangu moral struetures are neither eodified within her personal faith nor eoineide with her partner's desire to climb. Furthermore, the affective eapaeity of shame and her new appreeiation of indigenous relationships with Uluru travelled with Wilma outside of the Park boundaries. For Wilma, the affective eapaeity of shame operated to disrupt her eolonial habits of perception, status quo, and reeognition.

Linda: So your experiences at the Rock, did it have an impact on you personally? Wilma: In a different way. The first time 1 saw it [Uluru], it was just the physical size. But this time round, the greater impact was listening to the Ranger, and what the Aboriginal people had done there in the past and what they're doing now. That was more an impaet, had more appreciation of what they're trying to achieve out there. You see the Aboriginal people in the hotel. You see Aboriginal people, this was their way of life, but that's been removed. They're now in the 21^' century, but they still practice their law. Linda: Did gaining all that knowledge change you as an Australian? Wilma: 1 think so. You have a perception and because you don't have the opportunity to have interactions with Aboriginal people you have a certain pereeption of what the media's feeding you. . . . Everyone would go with a partieular mindset as I did. . . . Because of what we're fed on TV is the Aboriginal getting dmnk or sniffing petrol. So, I think there is an opportunity there for Australians to leam that we need to be reeeptive to their needs. How they fit in, how their children fit in. Because 1 think a lot of Australians have a mind set that they're just given handout after handout, after handout. And, they're drinking it away, or, they're not doing anything.... So, I think that if I met an Aboriginal person now, that I'd have more respect. Not that 1 didn't have respect, but 1 have a greater understanding of where they're coming from. Because, 1 think it's difficult for them to get it across. So, I think this is a good way. 160 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT

By the tour guide's mediation between Wilma and an Anangu interpretation of Uluru, Wilma exemplifies a way that shame can become a productive affective capacity, enabling her to rejeet perceptions that inform postcolonial racism and to work across differenee towards a more inclusive nation. For Wilma, the dynamics of shame symbolizes one motion where the embodied pedagogical arm of reconciliation successfully operated through guided tours towards the aim of mutual respect. Shall we consider this a case representing Condition III of the Management Plan's policy on permanently closing the climb? Perhaps, in a backward-looking manner, we can accept Wilma's claim that the climb is an unacceptable reason to visit Uluru, and cultural and natural factors provide the most reasonable and morally sound motive for a tourist. However, it would appear that it took both the closure of the elimb and the altemative tour opportunity, whieh may not have been experienced if the climb were open, in order to generate the experienee of shame that brought Wilma to a reconciliation that changed her beliefs and behavior. Ultimately, this shifted perspective renders the respect to not climb Uluru an important sliver, certainly one symbolic of addressing environmental justice struggles at the Park.

Closing Reflections In this paper we have sought to investigate the bodily affects of travelling to Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. The experience, motivation, and putative joy of climbing this rock-place are highly controversial. While climbing appears to remain somewhat central to sensing the euphoria of the collective "we" of many settler Australians, as well as to the creation of ecological and spiritual encounters that adds value to touring the Rock, for the traditional owners the sensibilities of climbing violate a long-held environmental heritage. Today, all considerate visitors are welcomed onto Anangu Land and requested to respect a plea. Do Not Climb, a request eonveyed through numerous avenues including the park entry information sheet, travel brochures, the Cultural Centre, most tour-guides, the world-wide web, and an undeniable sign at the base of the climb. Part of our exploration is to describe how the multifaceted post-colonial moral terrain is navigated by and around these pedagogieal arms of reeonciliation. We have also studied how the Park visit challenged everyday habitual practices, recognition, and perceptions of settler Australians from Greater Metropolitan Sydney. A qualitative measure of how effective the reconciliation efforts are depends upon whether the narratives of visitors express any transformative affects, beliefs, and behaviors have been brought baek home. Our three case studies were deliberately selected from settler-Australians who made no mention of motivation to leam about Aboriginal eulture in diseussing their travel plans. However, sentiments and norms illuminated touring behaviour when participants reflected upon their feelings about visiting Uluru. Participants reflected upon how they feel about restorative justice as it pertains to experiencing the Park. Although generalizations cannot be CLIMB 161 drawn from these three participants, our three narratives point towards the difficulties faced by the Board of Management in extending the pedagogieal arm of reeoneiliation to the least prepared visitor through the complexity of motivations, travel histories, memories, and embodied moral terrains that eaeh visitor brings to the Park. Indeed, we argued that the ereation of the affeetive capacities of national pride and spiritual bliss prevented transformafion of habitual praetiees and perceptions assoeiated with the eolonial imaginary, even as it gets evoked in New Age spiritual entitlement. In eontrast, when touring practices evoked shame, for example through listening to a guide providing indigenous knowledge of this roek-place, transfomiations beeame apparent in the visitor's perceptions and practices towards Aboriginal people both within and beyond the boundaries of the Park. According to Probyn (2005), the affective eapaeity of shame operates through a mirror phenomena; to feel shame is to feel oneself. In the eontext of touring Uluru as an Anangu homeland: settler Australians who feels shame are those likely to be those who feel, and then understand, themselves, perhaps for the first fime, as eolonizers. Shame has important implications for how the proeess of reeoneiliation operates in the Park. As Probyn underseores: "In politieal terms, shame also allows us to enaet connections among other shamed bodies in ways that pride has missed" (25). Shame must be earefully navigated in restorative justiee, and it must be elosely monitored in the reeonciliation process. But reintegrative virtues of shame provide a lesson for what reconciliation measures could be available to shift consciousness and tourist behaviours. Certainly, some normative corollary of reintegrative shame is needed to inspire respeet for indigenous environmental heritage as part of the national pride visiting the Park evokes. We have argued in this paper that affects of this magnitude are quite possible at the Park, and such affects offer vital resources for the pedagogical arm of reconciliation of joint management, espeeially towards the goal of permanently closing the

References Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. 2000. Submission to the Stolen Generation Inquiry. In Australian Human Rights Commission, 14. Sydney, Australia. http://www.humanrights.gov.au/Social_Justice/native_title/ nt issues/children.html

3. We are espeeially grateful to the traditional owners, the Anangu community, for sharing the rock-place and their environmental heritage. The participants over the past six years, in the studies that help to make up our larger "Uluru Project," have been ex- ceptional in sharing their personal experiences. We thank Lesley Head, Nicholas Gill, and Murray Wilson for their ongoing eneouragement, inspiration, and assistance. And Sarah Conrad deserves our appreeiation for offering her untiring assistance and sugges- tions in the many discussions regarding restorative justice. 162 ROBERT MELCHIOR FIGUEROA AND GORDON WAITT

Barnett, R. On the Dark Side of Uluru's Sunrise. The Australian. October 24. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/on-the-dark-side-of-ulurus-sunrise/ story-e6frg6po-1225790736848 Braithwaite, J. 1989. Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burton, L. 2002. Worship and Wilderness: Culture, Religion, and Law in the Management of Public Lands and Resources. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Cole, L. W., and S. R. Foster. 2001. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press. Crang, M. 1997. Picturing Practices: Research Through the Tourist Gaze. Progress in Human Geography 2\ (3): 359-373. Crang, M., and P. S. Travlou. 2001. The City and Topologies of Memory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19:161-177. Deleuze, G. 1988. Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre- nia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population, and Communities. 2010. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park: Park Management. In Parks and Reserves. Canberra: Government of Australia, http://www.environment.gov.au/parks/ uluru/management/index.html Director of National Parks. 2010. Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park Management Plan 2010-2020. Canberra: Government of Australia . 2010a. Festival Program. Twenty-fifth Anniversary Handback Fes- tival—October 26, 2010. Canberra: Government of Australia, http:// www.en vironment.gov.au/park s/uluru/visitor-activities/festivalprogram.pdf Drumbl, M. A. 2000. Punishment, Postgenocide: From Guilt to Shame to "Civis" in Rwanda. New York University Law Review (75) 5: 1221-1326. Evans, M. 2002. "Nature" and Environmental Justice. In The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy, eds. J. Adamson, M. Evans, and R. Stein, 181-193. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Eyb, L. 2010. People Power Could Signal the End of Uluru Tourist Climb. Heritage Key, February 17. http://heritage-key.com/blogs/lyn/people-power-could-signal- end-uluru-tourist-climb Figueroa, R.M. 2006. Evaluating Environmental Justice Claims. In Forging Environmentalism: Justice, Livelihood, and Contested Environments, ed. J. Bauer, 360-376. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe. Figueroa, R.M., and G. Waitt, 2008. Cracks in the Mirror: (Un)covering the Moral Terrains of Environmental Justice at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. Ethics, Place, and Enviroment 11 (3): 327-349. . 2011. The Moral Terrains of Ecotourism and the Ethics of Consumption. In Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction, eds. T. Lewis and E. Potter, 260- 274. London: Routledge. Fraser, N. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition. London: Routledge. Gelder, K., and J. M. Jacobs. 1998. Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. CLIMB 163

Gottlieb, R. 1994. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Moveñient. Washington, D. C: Island Press. Hess, K. 1993. Rocky Times in Rocky Mountain National Park: An Unnatural History. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Hill, B. 1994. The Rock: Travelling to Uluru. St. Leonards. Australia: Allen and Unwin. Hunold, C, and 1. M. Young. 1998. Justice, Democracy, and Hazardous Siting. PoliticalStudies 46:82-95. Landzelius, M. 2003. Disinhedtance Politics: Spatializing Abject Histodes of Wodd War 11 Sweden. In Rethinking Heritage: Cultures and Politics in Europe, ed. R. S. Peckham, 192-204. London: I.B. Tauds. Marcus, J. 1997. The Journey Out to the Centre: The Cultural Appropriation of Ayers Rock. In Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and "Our" Society, eds. G. Cowlishaw and B. Morris, 29-51. Canberra: Abodginal Studies Press. Massumi, B. 1988. Translator's Introduction: Pleasures of Philosophy. In Deleuze and Guattad, 1988. Marshall, A. 2010. Crowds Mark Uluru H-and-Back Anniversary. ABC News, October 26. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stodes/2010/10/26/3048499.htm Oliver, K. 2001. Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peña, D. 2005. Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Popic, L. 2005. Should You Climb Uluru? The Guardian, December 17: 7. Probyn, E. 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Plumwood, V. 2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Razak, I. 2010. Climb Closed After Man's Death on Uluru. ABC News. Apdl 26, 2010. http://www.abc.net.au/news/stodes/2010/04/25/2882194.htm Redfield, J. 1993. The Celestine Prophecy. New York: Warner Books, Inc. Robyn, L. 2002. Indigenous Knowledge and Technology: Creating Environmental Justice in the Twenty-First Century. The American Indian Quarterly 26: 198- 220. Schlosberg, D. 2007. Deflning Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shrader-Frechette, K. 2005. Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thrift, N., and J. D. Dewsbury. 2000. Dead Geographies—and How to Make Them Live. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18:411-32. Van Naess, D. 2002. The Shape of Things to Come: A Framework for Thinking About Restorative Justice. In Restorative Justice: Theoretical Foundations, eds. E. G. M. Weitekamp and H-J. Kemer, 1-20. Portland, OR: Willan Publishing. Waitt, G. 1999. Naturalizing the "Pdmitive": A Cdtique of Marketing Australia's Indigenous Peoples as "Hunter Gatherers." 7bMrá/?/Geograp/i;'e.s 1 (2): 142-163. Waitt, G., R. Figueroa, and L. McGee. 2007. Fissures in the Rock: Rethinking Pdde and Shame in the Moral Terrains of Uluru. Transactions of the Institute of British Geography 32: 248-263. Wiles, J. L., M. W. Rosenberg, and R. A. Keams. 2005. Narrative Analysis as a Strategy for Understanding Interview Talk in Geographic Research. Area, (37) 1: 89-99. Copyright of Environmental Philosophy is the property of Environmental Philosophy and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.