5                                                                                                                                  Australians have all sorts of cheery nicknames for the thousands of miles of hot, hard continent that lie beyond the coastal crust where anybody with an ounce of common sense lives.

  So why am I smack in the middle of the hardest, hottest spot of all, swatting flies and picking burrs out of my socks? Why am I standing in a parking lot with hundreds of other people staring silently at a mound of sandstone partially buried in a sun-baked desert? Because it is the Rock. Ayers. Uluru. People are drawn from around the world to this odd bulge in the desert. It’s the most visited single spot on the continent.