Welcome to Roon Soup, a weekly podcast about magic, culture and the paranormal.

My name is Gordon and I shall be your host.

It's the May solo show this week and I wanted to convey some of my impressions and experiences

being at Ulluru and in Australia's Red Center last week.

So I suppose we begin inevitably with me with cycles.

So I had been there before as a kid. I was about 12 and it obviously impacted me. I was thinking

about it on the plane on the way back and it was Kakuin in particular but also Uluru was sort of the inspiration for my first book.

When I got home I got a little exercise book from school

and started recounting on a day by day basis what

we'd experienced and doing little drawings and so on I was intending to give it to

my paternal grandfather he's the one who had that experience in

Nauru and New Guinea and so on and I thought this would be something he'd

appreciate. Forever we would have. I didn't finish it and then he died. So an abandoned project but nevertheless it kind of

never really occurred to me that I effectively began writing starships

at the age of 12. But from a cycle perspective, there were sort of three main differences in the intervening 20 and a bit years.

Firstly, we climbed Uluru, which is a nitty no-no culturally. We certainly didn't know that at the time.

This is kind of one of the changes that you noticed. So whilst you still technically can this year climate,

you are strongly encouraged not to, and from next year you won't be able to.

And not only because it is supremely sacred to the Ananu, who are the

traditional custodians in the area, but they're also understandably upset when people fall

off it and die, which several do a year. And I kind of get that.

Mother didn't come with us on the climb, so it was my father took myself and my little brother. So if I was 12, he was 10, and whilst he's a fat

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