Chamber's Pillar Historical Reserve Indigenous Land Use Agreement
The extract of the ILUA from the Register of Indigenous Land Use Agreements describes the area covered by the agreement as follows: 'The Park means all that parcel of land near Maryvale in the Northern Territory of Australia containing an area of 340.2 hectares more or less being the whole of Northern Territory Portion 843 more particularly delineated on Survey Plan B312 lodged with the Surveyor General, Darwin.' The ILUA area falls within the Central Remote Regional Council ATSIC region.
This passage of Journey to Horseshoe Bend gives an account of the Aranda story of Itirkawara. European anthropology and historical accounts have also mapped the Itirkawara myth. In 1894 members of the Horn Scientific Expedition visited the Pillar and the anthropologist Baldwin Spencer wrote about the site in his report. The account included a version of the Itirkawara myth, which he claimed referred to ‘Alcheringa’ times (Mulvaney, 116). Many years later Spencer would write again about Itirkawara and Idracowra. His account includes a detailed description of the site and recounts the naming story as it is indicated in JTHB. Spencer writes: ‘Chambers Pillar has the form of a tall column rising from a broad pedestal about three hundred yards in circumference and one hundred feet in height. The column itself rises about seventy feet higher and is oblong in section, one side measuring about twenty-five and the other fifteen yards in length. It if formed of friable sandstone, similar in appearance and character to the variegated sandstones at Engoordina and Crown Point. The base of the column is cream-coloured, the upper part bright red with a thin capping of dark-coloured, hard, silicified sandstone that has protected the underlying softer rock. The column is completely isolated and, standing out against the blue sky, the yellow sand-hills and dull green Mulga scrub, with a few old battered desert oaks dotted around it, forms a striking object in the otherwise dreary and monotonous landscape.
‘The column has naturally attracted the attention of the natives, who account for it by saying that in the far away times that they call Alchera, there lived a very great fighting man who journeyed westwards across the country, killing all the men whom he met with his stone knife and taking all their women captive. One night, on his way back, he stopped here and, for his sins, he and the women were turned into pillars of stone, which seems rather hard lines on the women, who had done nothing except by captured. Chamber’s Pillar represents the man and the turrets of Castle Rock the women. The white men call the place Idracowra, which is a corruption of the native name Iturka worra, or the evil man’ (Spencer, 55)
During the early settler and exploration days Chambers Pillar was used as a camping ground. Given the scale of its height on the landscape, explorers also used the site to leave messages for one another. White men also carved their initials into their pillar to show they had been there. Some of the names engraved on the rock include William Willshire, H.G. Swan, C. Eaton Taplin, B.C. Besley and F. Wallis.
References: D.J. Mulvaney, Encounters in Place: Outsiders and Aboriginal Australians 1606-1985, University of Queensland Press, 1989
Baldwin Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia, vol 1, Macmillan and Co, Ltd, London, 1928
John McDouall Stuart is credited as the first white man to see Itirkawara and it was Stuart who named the rock formation ‘Chamber’s Pillar in honour of his exploration patron James Chambers.
