False Ayer's Rock or Pseudo Uluru

FALSE AYER'S ROCK or PSEUDO ULURU


Taking the legendary Lassiter's Highway west
Into a vast Northern Territory distance the first
Flat-breaking upthrust abutment that gets to see you
Looks to green players just like Ayer's Rock or Uluru.

And your novice heart leaps up as it did for you
As a child when travelling in the old family car
For being the first one to sight that beachy sea
But admit it, you still don't know where you are.

South of Lassiter's way where Ulura could be
And should be and and most eventually will be
A Mount Conner rises with similar upthrust presence
From the spinifex plains like a great monolith.

Artilla, the Aranda called it, or Attilla, reminding us
Of a warrior of a conquering stony face who was in our face
And appropriate for an Inselberg horseshoe-shaped mountain
Set like a Steppe-ridden hero amid a vastness of wild plain.

A flat-topped mesa, 859 metres (2,818 ft) above the sea
Nobody much climbs it, or even stops to look at it, nor
Even to click their cameras aimed at it in rays of setting
Sun, after that initial excitement comes the vast neglect

Like many places out of the way of Iconising, Mt Conner draws
Us not after that first intrigue, as if it does not have a glory,
Or a fascinating story, nor those long-layered geological runes,
In conglomerates, sandstones, siltstones and rippled mudstones.

As if it does not have a beauty in pebblestone Inindia beds,
Its sheer scarps, its preciousness as an erosional remnant of
A Cretaceous geomorphic surface, or its riches in its Cambrian,
Its Middle Cryogenian, its Ediacaran or Micaceous niche wonders.

Attila or Mt Conner falls back into our irregular blindspot, passing
Into our regular bad-habit of neglect, for places not sexed-up into
Our taught-map, those everyday erasure places our great Joseph Furphy
Named as the true ideographical centres of this self-same Australia.

* * *

* * *
Mount Connor from the air

* * *
Mount Connor taken from high inflight