And so were recorded the words of Uluru�s first �tourist� � William Christie Gosse, not the first man (hey, the aboriginals have been here for the last 50,000 years, remember?) to lay eyes on the Rock, but certainly the first white man to lay foot on it (he climbed it and named it Ayers Rock after Sir Henry Ayers, who was then Chief Secretary for South Australia). It was actually Earnest Giles who was the first white man to lay eyes on the Rock a year earlier, but had more pressing matters and moved on. Ayers Rock was renamed back to Uluru in 1987 when ownership of the Rock was given back to the Anangu Aboriginal people who are the heritage owners of the Rock. Since the time of William Gosse, nowadays 500,000 tourist "make a pilgrimage/visit" Uluru each year which is astounding as Uluru is in the middle of nowhere in the centre of Australia. Well, there's now rail, road and planes compared to the donkeys used by Gosse... [see panorama of Uluru]

Uluru rises 348 metres above the desert ground, and two-thirds of the rock is still underground ! It is 3.6 kilometres in length and 2.4 kilometres wide, with a 9.4 kilometres circumference on the ground. Uluru is made from a coarse, grained sandstone called Arkos, and was once part of a sea bed known as the Amadeus Basin. Massive underground forces squeezed and buckled the land, causing what is now Uluru to rise in an almost vertical formation. Over 300 million years, the sea disappeared and wind, rain and extremes in temperatures have worn away the edges leaving the scored surface of the rock and what we see today. Uluru is the world�s largest free-standing rock monolith. [see panorama of sunrise over Uluru and Kata Tjuta]

	Learn more. Checkout this video from Panorama Australia !
	Title: The Heart Of Australia - The Town of Alice Springs & the Aboriginal history of Uluru (Ayers Rock)
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