Ayers Rock: closing the climb John Perkins has written a piece for Online Opinion on why the Ayers Rock climb should not be banned. I agree with his sentiments. National Parks are secular places and if landowners want to enforce their dated belief system on visitors then it ceases to be a National Park and must be run as a private park without government support. Short extract below. Read the whole thing at Online Opinion The climb should not be banned. To pretend that their myths are true, does not benefit the Anangu. It divorces them from reality. The creationist beliefs are more pervasive than other fundamentalist beliefs, and harder to compartmentalise. It is a spiritualism that is hard to reconcile with modernity. It is a cultural loyalty that must inevitably lead to a degree of epistemic confusion. The veneration of such superstitions is counter-productive and actually serves to perpetuate their relative disadvantage. To climb the Rock is a natural human aspiration. The vi...
Our mountains belong to all of us. The Right to Climb them and bask in their views that inspire awe and wonder is as old as the human genome. This long-established cultural tradition is under threat by a small group of bureaucrats determined to impose their way on the rest of the world. It is right to Climb because we have the Right to climb. If you don’t exercise your rights you lose them. Don't let petty nanny state bureaucrats take them away.