Red Silence, Long Memory

Day 64 & 67: Uluru & Jigalong • My Journey to the Sea and Beyond

There are days that widen you without making a sound.
Days that leave no spectacle behind, only a deeper kind of seeing.
Uluru was red silence. Jigalong was living memory.
I do not think I left either place unchanged.

My Travel Diary - Previous Days:
1 / 6 / 7 / 20-1 / 20-2 / 21 / 22 / 25 / 26-1 / 26-2 / 27-1 / 27-2 / 27-3 / 28-1 / 28-2 / 29-1 / 29-2 / 30 / 31 / 32+Unnumbered / 34 / 35+39 / 41a / 41b / 43 / 45+47 / 50 / 57+61

Day 64: Uluru

I knew it was big. And red.
And that you’re not supposed to call it Ayers Rock anymore.
Uluru, the name it always had. I hope I’m saying it right.

What I didn’t know was how quiet it is here.

How the sky widens as you move closer to the center.
How much respect you carry inside you, even though you’ve done nothing.
How difficult it is to approach the rock without feeling like you might disturb something.

Uluru isn’t just a mountain.

It lies there like an ancient animal, breathing.
You feel it before you see it.
And when you finally do, you fall silent.

It feels wrong to take a photo.
I kept my phone in my pocket.

I arrived early in the morning.
It was still. Dry. Flat.
Out here, you can see Friday coming as early as Wednesday.

And then, out of nowhere, it appears.

Red. Rounded. Immense.
And somehow… alive.

I didn’t say a word.
I don’t think my heart did either.

Day 67: Jigalong

I arrived.

Not as a tourist.
Not with a camera or a notebook.
Just with an open heart.

Jigalong.

A place I knew almost nothing about.
But it seemed to know something about me.

Because whoever comes here carries a story,
their own
and the one waiting for them.

I arrived on red earth.
A dry kind of silence I had never felt before.

This is not a place of sights.
It is a place of remembering.

I was lucky or maybe it was something else.
I was allowed to stay.

Not as a friend. Not right away.
But I was allowed to be there.
With my questions, my respect, my silence.

I spoke with Martha.

Her face is marked by life,
not old, but full of past.

She told me:
“My grandmother walked along the fence.
Not the whole way, but far enough
to never trust anyone again.”

Then she fell silent.
And so did I.

I was allowed to stay longer than I expected.
I helped with cooking, with washing up, with gathering wood.

Not much. But enough to understand:

Here, it’s not about what you say.
It’s about how you walk. How you stay. How you listen.

Later, I met Sergio.

His great-grandparents came to Spain in the 1930s.
They fled poverty
and found work.
Built a life there.

His great-grandmother was Aboriginal.

He came back, as he said, “to complete the puzzle.”

“My father forgot his language.
I want to find mine again.”

I cried.
And so did he.

I asked what I could do.
Donate money?
Stay and help?
Start a project?

Martha just said:

“Tell it.
Tell what it feels like when children are taken from their families.
Tell how long the pain lasts.
Tell what you felt here.

Because you are the girl who can write.”

I didn’t know what to say.

I felt a kind of guilt in me
that I never caused,
but maybe I can help soften it.

Not fix it.
Not forgive it.
Just make it visible.

I bought Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence.
Doris Pilkington’s voice stays with me.

I read it in the evenings under the open sky,
while somewhere in the distance a dog barks
and the wind lifts the red dust.

I don’t know what I can change.

But I will write.

And I will never forget.

“I cried again while reading Day 67: Jigalong.
I am still a little undone by it.

There is something in this chapter that goes deeper than story for me.
It touches grief, memory, inheritance and that strange helpless feeling of standing near a pain you did not cause, but cannot ignore.

When Martha says, You are the girl who can write, it does not feel gentle to me.
It feels like being entrusted with something.
And I felt the weight of that. I still do.

I do not have a clever conclusion for this one.
Only this: I will carry it.
And I will not look away.”

If this stayed with you, don’t keep it to yourself.