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Walking or driving Australia’s Red Centre is a great way to learn about geology. But even geologists agree the science is, well, complicated. Cosmos journalist Glenn Morrison takes to the hills around his Alice Springs home to ask what geotourism might bring to central Australia.
From the leaves of nearby acacias, wet bulbs of late-afternoon sunlight drip like treacle.
Sunset. My wife Fiona and I hurry up Euro Ridge on Section 1 of the Larapinta Trail, a wilderness hike winding 223km from Alice Springs west to Mt Sonder.
Behind us, the Alice Springs landscape looks more of an enormous stadium than the work of water and tectonics over the ages.
In the geology to our west is also something of the Colosseum; some call it God’s amphitheatre.
Fiona halts suddenly a few metres ahead on the shale and gravel path, waves me still.
An eagle rests beyond her. Carefully, Fiona withdraws her mobile from Gore-Tex and clicks.
Precious moments go by before the eagle lifts its wings – perhaps two metres tip to tip – to lurch from its rocky perch into a layer of warm air rising from the valley to our north.
The silence that follows brings an aching stillness.
Exploring Amadeus Basin
That walk of 2014 helped rekindle a childhood fascination with geology, and triggered an ongoing bid for Fiona and me to walk the Larapinta Trail end to end.
Doing the Trail’s 12 sections in one hit takes 15 days, give or take. Stop to smell the desert roses and it’s 20. Embarrassingly, ten years later our piecemeal bid is certainly progressed, but unfinished.
Not so lazy are an estimated 5,000 visitors each year who pull on a backpack and sturdy boots to tread the Trail.
But the Larapinta Trail is not the only show in the Red Centre.
Under an hour’s drive west from Alice are Simpsons Gap and Standley Chasm. Westward again, you’ll find major gorges and waterholes of the MacDonnell Ranges, and to the east, still more attractions. South are Uluru, Kata Tjuta, Kings Canyon. All born of the same geological formation, the Amadeus Basin.
The spectacular geology produces awe and tricky questions in equal measure, perhaps most commonly: how on earth did all this get here? As it turns out, satisfactory explanations about the geology of the Red Centre are not so easy to give.
Interpreting the landscapes
Red Centre geology looks and is complex, as many geologists agree. Questions are now being asked regarding the accuracy and scientific worth of the geological history narratives on offer for tourists and educators alike.
The questions arrive as Red Centre tourism is suffering a downturn: COVID hesitancy, a lack of flights, and widely reported social upheaval in the regional hub Alice Springs.
Visitor numbers to Central Australia were slightly up for the year to December 2023 when 571,000 visitors spent $915 million, but still down on the 796,000 who visited before COVID in 2019.
While geology won’t likely save the tourism industry single-handedly, perhaps it might help?
“The problem with the Red Centre is that the landscapes are not properly explained and interpreted,” says Angus Robinson, experienced geologist and coordinator of Geotourism Australia, part of the Australian Geoscience Council Inc.
“We take people to Uluru, Kata Tjuta, if they’re lucky Kings Canyon, along the West MacDonnells… all as individual scenic areas. Nobody bothers to explain… that the rocks are all of the same age, but have different geomorphic forms.
“No one is joining the dots.”
Of course, NT Parks & Wildlife, Tourism NT and various tour companies all produce interpretive signage, brochures or guiding spiels explaining the geology for many of the locations that Angus names. Anecdotally, many tourists report such signage and information both interesting and informative.
And there is a broader narrative of Red Centre geology, one that geologists have been developing for decades. And it’s readily available in texts and journal articles.
“But that’s too technical for the non-scientist,” another geologist explains. “The information needs to be simplified and then connected into the broader story.
“At the moment the geology is described at particular places, but the thread showing where each place fits into the bigger picture is lacking.”
And my own questions loom large. What dots did Angus want to join? Might one overarching story of the geology really make a difference? What about an Indigenous telling of the landscape?
Either way there had to be a simple way to tell this multi-faceted story, no matter how complex the science. I mean, how hard could it be, right?
The language of geology
Central Australia’s experienced geologist Christine Edgoose is a softly grey-haired, generous soul who joined the NT Geological Survey in 1981.
“Maps are my main worry,” I blurt to Chris upon arriving at the Arid Zone Research Institute (AZRI) south of Alice Springs.
Chris has co-authored geological maps, journal publications and is senior regional geologist at Alice Springs.
“Oh maps?” Chris says offhandedly. “Don’t worry, we have them already on the wall.”
We follow several corridors to an open plan ‘geology lab’, including a small library, kitchenette, and two lounges where we might talk.
And there it is. Chris’ map. A mosaic assembled from smaller 1:250,000 scale sheets taped into one monster sheet to cover 15m2 of the lab wall. Impressive, though not helping my anxiety.
Chris begins, now seated and introducing several Centre landscapes at once. “It’s fantastic in the range country, well exposed. [Then] you’ve got the basement (rocks), the much older metamorphic and granitic terrains.
“And then there are places like the Amadeus Basin. But other basins as well, sedimentary basins that sit on top, and you can see the connections; it’s a long-lived history, all pretty well exposed.”
Like any specialist profession, geology speaks its own language, replete with synclines, anticlines, dip, strike and other terms largely a mystery to the layperson.
Adding to its sometimes-impenetrable nature, geology also trades in mammoth timescales and mind-boggling forces capable of shifting whole continents.
Perhaps the timescales are the more difficult. At a very human level. I mean, can our short lives ever hope to compete with ages measured in the billions of years?
To describe the Amadeus Basin – the key geological feature in a Red Centre as seen by tourists – I propose to Chris a layer cake model, which at first she doesn’t like.
But it grows on her as we talk and later converse by email.
South–north cross section of the Amadeus Basin
Imagine the Amadeus Basin as a slab of cake. The original base layer of the cake is folded and twisted and swirled. Think marble cake, if you like. On top of this are other layers, also buckled and disrupted owing to various forces acting during the cake’s making.
This is a bite-sized portion of the Amadeus Basin today, looking like a marble cake that has sunk in the middle. The basin extends further in both directions, to the south and north.
Geology in plain English
A few days before meeting Chris, I see geologist Dr Anett Weisheit at a Todd Mall café. I’d interviewed Anett in 2023 when she launched her book, Behind the landscape of the Central Ranges: A Geological Guide to the Larapinta Trail and Tjoritja/West MacDonnell National Park.
The book features 60 educational stops along the route for the reader–walker, divided according to 12 sections of the trail, each colour coded as a self-guided experience of the region’s geology.
Like Chris, Anett believes geology – and Red Centre geology in particular – might be explained more simply. Except for one thing.
“Here in the Red Centre,” she begins, “there is quite a complex geology”.
A familiar story.
But Anett’s aim is plain English. As a first handhold on a regional geology, she writes that most rocks of Central Australia are “very much older than those of the Rocky Mountains or the Alps of central Asia”. In fact, the oldest rocks seen along the trail are from the Sadadeen Range gneiss, which “formed from molten rock (magma) about 1,800 million years ago”.
The ‘basement’ rocks are around this same age: granite, gneiss and metamorphosed sedimentary rocks. Examples can be spotted at Anzac Hill and Billy Goat Hill in Alice Springs’ central business district, all typical of basement granites.
Covering 170,000km2 of the Centre, the Amadeus Basin comprises sediments that were originally dumped into a saucer-shaped depression in the landscape then reworked. It stretches from the MacDonnell Ranges in the north to the Petermann Ranges and Uluru in the south, and from Western Australia east to the Simpson Desert.
Its sandstones, siltstones and limestones, have been since weathered physically and chemically over millennia.
Though generally thousands of metres thick, there are deeper bits of the Amadeus Basin. Near the MacDonnell Ranges, for example, some sedimentary rocks go down a whopping 14km. Some were formed under arid climates, others during wetter times, and rock characteristics vary accordingly. Even glaciation figures in the evolution of some landscapes.
These days dry riverbeds run across the grain of the landscape, having cut magnificent gorges through the ranges in wetter times, including at Glen Helen Gorge on the Finke River, Ormiston Gorge, and Ellery Creek Big Hole, swimming spots long a favourite with tourists and locals.
So even though these landscapes were all formed within the Amadeus Basin, variations in prevailing forces, degrees of uplift, climate and weathering mean any one location may well look completely different from any other.
A light bulb went on. I’d heard Angus call this “same geology, different geomorphic form”.
In the south of the Amadeus Basin, according to Parks Australia, Uluru and Kata Tjuta started forming about 550 million years ago (mya). Uluru is a course-grained sandstone, rich in the mineral feldspar. It is called an arkose, a pinkish or red sandstone primarily of quartz and feldspar, originally eroded from mountains composed of granite. Conversely, Kata Tjuta is a conglomerate, a gravel consisting of pebbles, cobbles and boulders cemented by sand and mud. Most of the gravel pieces are granite and basalt and give the conglomerate what Parks Australia calls a “plum pudding effect”.
The Basin’s north is different. Drive west from Alice Springs for a front-row seat to the upturned and eroded northern edge of the Amadeus Basin, a snapshot of a deep past when exposed and once horizontal layers were uplifted then eroded leaving steep jagged remnants.
This northern ridge is where Fiona and I had begun the Larapinta Trail. I’m reminded of swimming at Ellery Creek in the late 90s.
My best friend John and I float on our backs through the gorge on a day off. No rush, breathing in the broken geology, its double-folded faults and striations looking so much like grimaces of pain. “I could live here, John,” I sigh. He is smiling. Nodding, almost laughing.
On walks near Ellery Creek since, I sometimes daydream of standing atop one side of its grand chasm in flood, watching Nature’s violence gouge, scrape and reshape its walls.
Walking the chasm
At Easter this year Fiona and I drive 40 minutes west from Alice to Standley Chasm, or Angkerle Atwatye in Western Arrernte.
Recent rains have charged catchments, and streams are flooding across the district. Including, we’d heard, at the Chasm.
Once a tributary of the Finke River, the streambed of Angkerle Atwatye is now mostly dry under 284mm average yearly rainfall.
In wet years, however, rainwater converges at the junction of two major creeks at the back of Standley Chasm, bringing logs, rocks, and boulders surging into rapids down the creek. Floods are reportedly so strong they “reach the carpark and submerge the entrance road”.
Our plan was breakfast at the Chasm’s popular café homestead, after a walk of Angkerle Atwatye’s 2.4km-return stream trail and a rare glimpse of the gorge in flow.
The chasm’s Western Arrernte name means “where the water moves between”; and water flow has shaped this chasm for several million years.
From the gorge we follow the stream back to the café, shaded by river red gums and ancient cycads, the stream itself traversing a bed of grey quartzite and gravels between sometimes vertical walls.
Western Arrernte Woman and general manager of Standley Chasm Nova Pomare runs the Aboriginal-owned tourism operation with her builder husband.
For Traditional Owners like Nova, Angkerle Atwatye provides bush tucker, medicinal supplies and toolmaking, and is an important cultural and spiritual site.
The Chasm hosts 50,000 visitors in a good year, Nova tells me. “For some it’s a bucket list,” she says. “[And] obviously Uluru, that’s a huge draw card… but then just the Red Centre itself; the red dirt, the landscape, the people, the culture.”
In recent years, 90 cultural tours of the Chasm each season has grown to 300, which Nova attributes to rising interest in “the cultural heritage of the place”.
But that hasn’t stopped her also investing in the chasm as what is being called a “geotrail”.
The term is relatively new to Australian tourism, but familiar to Geotourism Australia, a division of the Australian Geosciences Council Ltd, newly minted this year.
Last year in consultation with Nova and her team, Angus, Anett and others developed a geotrail brochure for the site.
The brochure speaks to the short chasm walk where small changes in geology make a digestible morsel of science for tourists.
Anett describes a photo brochure that folds out then opens, a map on one panel with a satellite image as background and boundaries of the geology as lines.
“You get the names of what rock it is,” says its author, Anett. “Then points of interest along the walking trail… are all marked.”
She believes the small scale of the chasm makes a perfect geotrail. “The same would be true for Ormiston Gorge; that could be another project. Starting at the carpark, maybe the Ghost Gum Walk, then back into the valley and Ormiston Pound.”
Nova agrees there is strong interest. “I think some people are amazed by the formations of the rocks,” she says. “When they come to see the Larapinta Trail and then see up close the Chasm, or when they go to… all those places in the West MacDonnell Ranges… they’re in awe.
But Standley Chasm is not immune to the broader tourism downturn. “It’s really unpredictable at the moment,” Nova says. “We’re up and down. A lot of cancellations with the unrest in Alice Springs. Today we’re short staffed, but then you have too many staff. It’s just hard, you know. Things happen.”
Before COVID, Central Australian tourism had been growing.
Some 550,000 visitors to the Red Centre in mid-2010 had grown to almost 800,000 overnight visitors by late 2019, says Tourism NT. But that plunged to 389,000 overnight visitors by June 2021.
Similarly, Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park, which hosted more than 300,000 tourists in 2017, had declined to 164,678 in the first nine months of 2023, according to Parks Australia.
During the same widespread downturn, however, visitation to Standley Chasm grew. While other factors may well be at play, it begs the question: can geotourism help?
What is geotourism?
Australian Geoparks Network defines a geotrail as “a guided or self-guided trail of multiple (geo) sites that interprets geology and landscapes”. Several or many such geotrails may comprise a declared geopark.
Used more commonly in the United States, China and Europe, such terms are part of an international language of geotourism, focused specifically on geology and landscape.
As of 2022, there are 65 geopark members from eight different countries in the Asia Pacific Geoparks Network (APGN).
Geoparks are places where geology and nature are spectacular; think Grand Canyon or Yellowstone in the US, Shetland in Scotland or the Basque Coast of Spain; all UNESCO registered geoparks.
In March, Mount Changbaishan Geopark and five more new geoparks were declared in China by UNESCO, adding to 289 national geoparks and 41 UNESCO global geoparks already declared.
If geotourism is so successful overseas, why not in Australia?
A network of geoparks
Western Australia’s Murchison Georegion was launched in 2020 with the marketing tagline: “Ancient Lands, Brilliant Skies”. The region hopes to eventually become an accredited UNESCO Global Geopark. And there are others, if some not exactly official. Some areas are nominated on aspirational site lists, such as that created by the Australian Geoparks Network.
And there is movement at a strategic level by Australian Geoscience Council, the peak council of geoscientists representing eight societies and some 8,000 members. Angus explains.
“Two years ago, the Australian Geoscience Council launched the National Geotourism Strategy,” says Angus, “to support the development of major geotourism projects in line with what has been happening overseas.
“Its goals include geo-trail development – the Larapinta Trail is one – and enhancing the quality of interpretation of the natural environment.
“Geotourism adds considerable value to traditional nature-based tourism because it brings together landscape and geology, flora and fauna, Aboriginal cultural and post-European settlement considerations,” Angus explains.
Still, for Australia, there may be a problem with the language. And a geotrail – while Standley Chasm is one – remains a term not much heard, especially in the Red Centre.
“It’s a terminology that doesn’t resonate here,” says Stephen Jarrett, at the time the Membership and Marketing Manager of peak regional tourism industry body Tourism Central Australia (TCA). “We just think of it as tourism generally.”
Though TCA has developed its own geology webpage and says a ‘geotourism page’ would be easy enough to create, Stephen is not alone in a wariness of geotourism. Several local guides and a tourism academic I spoke with were also unaware of or had only a vague notion about geotourism.
“Australia is falling behind in this,” says Anett, who is also Geotourism Subcommittee Representative for the Geological Society of Australia. “About 10 years ago it started to be put forward in Australia.
“It started earlier in Europe; it has geoparks and geotrails and walking and driving experiences. But here we are a bit slow to catch up.”
Angus, who is also on the board of TCA, in 2011 promoted the geotrail called the Red Centre Way, a driving circuit from Alice Springs to Uluru via the Mereenie Loop Road (still partly 4WD only) and embracing Kata Tjuta national park, Kings Canyon, the West MacDonnell Ranges and highlights of Alice Springs.
But TCA is hesitant.
“It certainly could be referred to as a geotrail,” says Stephen. “But we don’t tell people that.
“We’re not saying Uluru is connected to Standley Chasm, we’re just saying: “look, it’s all beautiful. It’s all about place.
“But we’re not saying they’re connected (geologically).”
Beyond the Centre, however, the fledgling movement has more momentum, says Anett.
“In other parts of Australia where Geotourism has been a thing for at least a decade, there is more progress.
“The Blue Mountains near Sydney, national parks in South Australia where you get cave geology; they have maps, and local and regional geotourism projects.
“And tourism is more than geology,” Anett says; “it is ABC: A for abiotic, the geology; B is the biology; and C the culture.
“[In geotourism] all of that comes together, history, local knowledge, and how it connects to what you’re seeing in the landscape.”
A signature walk
If TCA’s response appears lukewarm, Parks Australia is excited by comparison.
An Uluru-Kata Tjuta Signature Walk due to open in 2025, is a four-day luxury walk of Uluru National Park sleeping up to 14 guests in high quality ‘off-grid’ tented accommodation in three locations.
Planned with Traditional Owners, the walk is promoted by the Australian Walking Company, who proposed the idea in 2021 after the climb closure two years prior.
Parks Australia’s Visitor & Tourism Services Manager for Uluru National Park, Steven Baldwin, thinks of the walk as a geotrail.
He says a broader narrative of regional geology to connect sites across the Amadeus Basin is something he says, “has absolute merit”.
From a marketing point of view, Steven says, landscape is “integral to most of what we do. And what Central Australia Tourism, NT and Tourism Australia do”.
But to leverage geotourism for a marketing advantage with international tourists, Steven warns to be careful.
“It would need to be done in an accredited way… controlled, not just: ‘Hey, let’s just call it a geopark’. There’s got to be some form of policing to ensure probity.”
Return to Angkerle Atwatye
Back at Standley Chasm, response to the geotrail brochure is positive, says Nova, based on what she’s hearing.
She sees the geotrail as a natural progression for the Chasm, part of studying the West MacDonnells more broadly.
Meanwhile, she plans to update the Chasm’s interpretive signage, some of which is “either dated or not done”, in a move to “match what the brochure says to the way Anett and her crew have done it… because they’re specialised in it”.
“I thought (the geotrail brochure) would be a great thing for us to be able to explain it under that umbrella,” Nova says. “Because people are interested, they do want to know how it’s formed.
“I thought it would be good learning for my guides to know that side of [it], as well as the Dreamtime and our way of Creation.”