I don’t remember seeing a color as full as the yellow of the sunset at Mindil Beach . You see it in this photo, made with a bad phone model among other things, and only slightly modified with Instagram filters. They look like fake colors, they are not. Mindil Beach, the beach of Darwin, in the Northern Territory . We are in the “Top End”, the Australian frontier place , the city of the tropics on the Timor Sea , the place where what we call “civilization” is a small place in a big world where nature commands, where to bathe there they are crocodiles and jellyfish and you should stay and watch.

The sunset of the sun here is a spectacle that enters the heart.

For at least three times in the nineteenth century the English tried to found a city up here, on top of the wild continent, in the land of the aboriginal population of the Larrakia, but all the outposts left in the hands of a handful of settlers did not last: too extreme to live here, even for pioneers. The first white community to live there permanently dates back to 1869, practically a breath of time ago. Then in 1974, at midnight on Christmas Eve, Darwin was literally swept away by Cyclone Tracy, The rest is made by crossing roads with new houses, a few shops, a few art galleries, and restaurants of various kinds (including souvlaki: the taxi driver shows them to me and says that I have to understand that everything I see here “is Greek gods”).

But already at that moment, as you walk the anonymous streets with the taxi, and in a completely unconscious way, there is something that begins to capture this place, an atmosphere. Something that tells you about the extreme border you had imagined. An absence of all that we are used to giving value that is transformed, step by step, into a powerful feeling of freedom . What then is what happens in Australia: it is useless to rationalize or explain, it is the energy of the earth that leads you back to it, it is the enormity of the space that enters your dreams and turns into a place of the soul.

If I had to imagine how to walk on the moon,” I thought, “it would be like walking on the land of Uluru .” The hard and the soft, the constancy and the change. Steps suspended in absolute silence on earth that looks like sand. I bend down to touch it, take a handful and under the red surface, it turns gray. The colors are still dark, there are only four, red and black, the first colors of the world, the sage green of spinifex bushes that draw grass rings on the flat earth, and the changing sky.

There in the east it is clearing. I’m standing with my feet firmly planted on the ground. An Aboriginal once told me: “They took everything from us, but as long as we have land we have everything . ” And here, at the origin of the world, I understand why. Stop, in a magic circle with the stars above, the infinite horizon around and the strength and heart of the planet under my feet.
Then in the uniform yellow horizon a beginning of redness marks the point where the day will decide to attest its presence. Then it rises lazily like a clear ball. It is the inevitability of the day, the certainty of life. The absolute strength. Light enters the eyes flat and conquers them in a total way, with a power that cannot be avoided. It is dawn at Uluru, the great sacred monolith in the heart of Australia .

For this dawn – which before arriving here I thought was the classic story shared with dozens of tourists with cameras – it is worthwhile to come up to here, it is really worth taking a flight from Italy, then another, and yet another, to descend and rush here, to an unknown place in the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park , and wait for the oldest miracle to take place on the oldest land.