Australia: Parcels arriving every day from visitors to aboriginal site
Australia’s famous and most sacred aboriginal site, Uluro or Ayers Rock, has long drawn tourists from around the world.
But now tourists who have taken chunks of rock from Uluru are sending them back to park rangers because they say the souvenirs have brought them bad luck by the bucketload.
A spokesman for the Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park, which oversees the giant rock, said some lumps of the returned rock weighed as much as 15 pounds – and that there were parcels arriving every day, many with letters describing how the rocks had brought bad luck.
Aboriginal leaders and park rangers have been holding regular “ceremonies” to return the rocks to their original place. It is illegal to remove anything from the famous red monolith, and despite strong objections from aboriginals, many of the 500,000 visitors a year decide to climb on Uluru.
