Yulara

Uluru and Kata Tjuta stand in the country of Aṉangu, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people, who have lived across this part of the Western Desert for tens of thousands of years and whose law and stories, Tjukurpa, are tied to particular caves, waterholes and features of the rock. Europeans reached the area in the 1870s: Ernest Giles saw Kata Tjuta in 1872 and named it Mount Olga, and William Gosse reached the monolith the following year and named it Ayers Rock after Sir Henry Ayers, then the Chief Secretary of South Australia.

The land was part of an Aboriginal reserve before a section was excised from the Petermann Reserve in 1958 for a national park, and through the 1960s and 1970s motels, a campground, an airstrip and a shop grew up at the foot of Uluru itself, causing erosion and damage to a place its owners hold sacred. The answer was to move the visitors out. A new village was built beyond the park boundary, low and screened by dunes, and Yulara opened in 1984; the leases on the old motels at the base were ended and the site rehabilitated.

On 26 October 1985 the title to the park was handed back to its Aṉangu owners, who leased it back for 99 years to be run jointly, and in 1987 the park was inscribed on the World Heritage list for its natural and cultural landscape. In May 2017 a First Nations national constitutional convention met at Uluru and issued the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Climbing Uluru ended on 26 October 2019.

Yulara is unusual: a town with no history of its own, built in a few years to serve a place of great significance to other people. Almost everything a visitor does here is shaped by Aṉangu decisions about their country. Tjukurpa sets out what may be told to outsiders and what may not, which is why some cliffs and caves carry signs asking that they not be photographed, why guided walks explain some stories and stop short of others, and why the long-requested end to climbing the rock was eventually made law.

Aboriginal art is the strongest cultural presence in the village. Art centres and galleries sell paintings from Western Desert communities and punu, wooden objects carved and marked with a hot wire, and artists often work in view of visitors. Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara are living languages here, and palya, meaning good or fine, is the word most visitors pick up. The resort runs training and employment programmes intended to put more Indigenous staff into the hotels and tours.

The other culture is that of the workforce. Staff come from across Australia and overseas on seasonal contracts, live in housing rented from the resort, and create the sociable, transient atmosphere of a remote work camp: early shifts, shared houses, sport and barbecues in the cool of the evening, and a constant turnover of people.

About a thousand people live at Yulara, and nearly all of them work in tourism — in the hotels, the campground, the restaurants, the shops, the tour companies, the airport, the park, the school, the clinic and the police station. The village and its hotels are run as a single resort, sold in March 2026 by the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation to the tourism company Journey Beyond, so one employer is responsible for most of the housing, services and jobs.

The day is organised around heat and light. Kitchen and housekeeping shifts start before dawn, tour buses leave for sunrise, the middle of the day is quiet and shaded, and the village comes out again in the late afternoon. Flights arrive and leave in a cluster, and the population of visitors turns over every few days.

Everything is freighted in from Alice Springs, about 430 kilometres away, which is also where residents go for a hospital, a hardware store or a wider choice of shops. Water comes from bores, solar panels supply part of the power, and waste and supplies travel long distances. Staff turnover, the cost of living and the shortage of housing are the standing local problems. A few kilometres away inside the park lies Mutitjulu, the Aṉangu community at the base of Uluru, which is a residential place rather than a stop for visitors.

Food at Yulara is resort food, and there is no competing town to keep prices down. The Town Square holds cafés, takeaway counters and a bar for casual meals, and the hotels have the sit-down restaurants, ranging from buffets to a few more formal rooms. Several menus lean on native ingredients: kangaroo and barramundi, quandong and desert lime, wattleseed, lemon myrtle and the small sharp bush tomato known as kutjera.

The most distinctive way to eat here is outdoors. Long-running dinners are held on cleared ground away from the village lights, with tables under the open sky, a buffet of native-influenced dishes and someone to point out the southern constellations once the meal is over. Inside the park itself there is only a small café at the cultural centre, so most people carry water and food with them.

For anyone watching costs, the village supermarket is the answer, and the camp kitchens and barbecues at the campground are busy every evening. Aṉangu bush foods from this country include the witchetty grub, bush tomato and ground seed cakes, and tours led by Aṉangu guides explain how they are found and prepared, which is a different thing from finding them on a menu.