Spectacular nightly drone shows take off at Uluru

At Uluru, not even the renowned natural light shows provided by the Central Australian sunrises and sunsets are enough any longer. Nowadays to really rock visitors, you need to dazzle them with one of the world’s largest drone shows.

Using more than 1100 drones, along with lasers and light projections, the new Wintjiri Wiru attraction illustrates a chapter of the local Anangu’s Mala (rufous hare-wallaby) ancestral story between Kaltukatjara (Docker River) and Uluru.

With two shows each night, including a three-hour sunset dinner featuring a menu of native produce, it’s an ancient story portrayed by new technology, and the first Indigenous story of its kind told on this scale and frequency.

Wintjiri Wiru, which means “beautiful view out to the horizon” in the Anangu language, was three years in the making, and is a partnership between Voyages Indigenous Tourism Australia and the local Anangu communities, with a 10-person working group of senior Anangu from Mutitjulu and Kaltukatjara guiding the project.

“What we’ve experienced has often been people rushing in with ideas and developing them, and suddenly there are these things happening that we haven’t feel part of,” says Sammy Wilson, a member of the Anangu Consultation Group.

“So it was really important and great that we were acknowledged as having the cultural understanding of this place and that we were involved in working together to bring this to life.”

With tourist numbers yet to recover in Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park – visitation in 2022 was 45 per cent down on 2019 – the show offers a chance to reinvigorate tourism and encourage repeat visits to the Red Centre. This has been bolstered further by the simultaneous launch of the new Red Centre Light Trail.

Marketed as a six-day road trip, the Light Trail takes in Wintjiri Wiru and Bruce Munro’s enduring Field of Light at Uluru, Alice Springs’ 10-night Parrtjima – A Festival in Light (held each April), and Munro’s Light-Towers sound-and-light installation at Kings Canyon, which opened last month. Nature’s contributions are the spectacular sunrises, sunsets and stargazing across the region.

The writer travelled courtesy of Voyages Indigenous Tourism Australia.