Bruce Munro’s novel light installation enhances Australia’s ancient spiritual heart.

There’s no more iconic, totemic even, symbol of the Aboriginal heart of Australia than the great red rock, Uluru. For 70,000 years – long before Wills and Kate made it a stopover – the Pitjantjatjara people have visited, drawn life from and told stories about the 350 metre-high plug of sandstone that forces its way out of the glaring, red earth of the Great Australian Desert. It’s a brave man that attempts to complement or add anything to the vivid stories of an ancient people, but that is just what British artist Bruce Munro has done, working on a grand yet sensitive scale in his signature medium of light.

Born in Devon and still resident in rural England, the idea for Field of Light came to Munro long before Ray Stone, impressario and CEO of Indigenous tourism company Voyages, invited him to plant 50,000 delicate light-bearing stems in the desert as a front-drop to Uluru itself. “It’s been a long journey – 24 years to be precise,” he explains, just a hint of a West Country accent detectable beneath his polite, well-educated brogue. “I had a friend over here...