This article is composed of extracts from Rex Gilroy’s: Uru - The Lost Civilisation of Australia [copyright (c) 2001 Rex Gilroy, Uru Publications] [the name Uru is the registered trademark of Uru Publications]
What is it like to suddenly realise that you are the discoverer of an hitherto unknown ‘lost’ civilisation?
Words cannot describe my feelings at the moment I realised I had made such a discovery, and the enormous importance it had for Australian, and World history.
I suppose the nearest description one could give of my feelings would be to compare them with the excitement of Heinrich Schliemann, when he discovered the ‘mythical’ lost city of Troy in 1873. In the course of my researches over many years, I had observed that the ancient myths and legends of our Aboriginal people speak of a race of ‘culture-heroes’ who inhabited the land in the long-ago ‘Dreamtime’, and had passed on much of their culture to the Aborigines.
These ‘culture-heroes’ are variously described as being pale or white-skinned; that they shaped many natural geological features, and erected many, often truly monolithic rock formations, and worshipped the Sun, Moon and Stars. They gave the Aborigines laws and passed on elements of their religion, such as Sun, Earth-Mother and Sky-Father worship, and taught the Aboriginal warriors the manufacture of the boomerang and the use of the woomera in spear-throwing. These traditions convinced me, over thirty years ago, that an advanced megalithic monument-building people had inhabited Australia.
Yet, when I published my theory in the press, I was immediately attacked by establishment archaeologists and historians, with cries of ‘impossible’ and that I was wasting my time searching for something that was nothing more than an Aboriginal myth!
Nevertheless, my theory led me on a search which culminated, one January day in 1965, while exploring dense scrubland overlooking a Blue Mountains valley, in the discovery of an extensive culture centre of crumbling sandstone mounds, altar stones carved in the forms of Serpent and Eagle motifs, and other mystery structures. One, obvious ceremonial structure was a tree-covered 15m tall mound composed of sandstone boulders and rubble. On its western side stone slab steps led to the summit, where I found, upon a flat base, facing east, a large altar stone whose flat top had been carved in the form of a serpent.
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URU - The Lost Civilisation of Australia
The altar, standing on an north-south axis, measured 1.7m long by 70cm wide by 1.2m tall. The serpent, carved in relief in a curved aspect, bore a groove at its northern [head] end representing its mouth. Beside the altar was a large boulder bearing a long, deep groove, obviously used for sharpening a stone knife.
Had human sacrifices once been performed here? I later measured the mound’s base a 315m in circumference.
Another, much larger altar, carved in relief in the form of an eagle, was found in 1973 a few kilometres away, reached by climbing a 6m tall sandstone rock.
The eagle measures 72cm long from head to tail, by 1.28m wide from its left [barely depicted] wing to outstretched right wing, which like the beak points south. Once again, this altar faces east. Having met my wife Heather the previous year we were now a ‘team’ determined to locate, map, measure and photograph every megalithic site we could find..
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In 1974 we were shown two 3km long alignments of granite standing stones by a farmer in the Bathurst district, west of the Blue Mountains. These structures, totalling hundreds of stones, had been erected on a north-south axis. In the months ahead we discovered many more granite structures - crude stone circles, temples and massive standing stones erected upon bases of cut stone blocks. Over the next 20 years we were to discover there were great numbers of altars, even carved stone heads, alignments and many other obvious astronomical formations, covering an area of about 10 square kilometres, and that there is a perpetual flow of natural earth electricity flowing throughout the alignment and circles making up the borders of the vast astronomical centre.
To what use was this electrical energy put by the builders. The large carved stone heads, up to 2m tall, have high foreheads, with eyes, nose and mouth toward the base and appear in both male and female forms. At the time of my first discoveries of these heads I reasoned, correctly as it turned out, that the female heads depicted the Earth-Mother and the male the Sun-god, principal deities of the old earth-worshipping megalithic cultures. During 1974, at the Bathurst district megalithic centre, and other sites on the Blue Mountains, I identified examples of ancient rock script. This script included symbols reminiscent of ancient Sumerian, yet also Celtic and Phoenician in appearance, intermixed with others of a unique character, often with images of humans and other characters.
My first attempts at translating this script were largely unsuccessful, although one word kept repeating itself at script sites hundreds of kilometres apart - ‘Uru’. Gradually I would come to realise this word was the name of the people responsible for this culture. I would also uncover the names of the principal deities of this people; Aea, their supreme being; Nim the sun-God and Nif the Earth-Mother. The eagle depicted upon altars I eventually learnt was I-na, ‘the Eagle of the Sun”, who, as inscriptions have revealed, carried the Sun across the sky each day in his beak. There are many more deities in the Uruan pantheon, and much has been learnt of their religion from the rock inscriptions, including names of kings and queens who ruled widely-scattered kingdoms throughout this continent. This information is revealed in full in “Uru - The Lost Civilisation of Australia”.
I maintain, on various grounds presented in my book, that the Uruan script was the earliest written language known to mankind, THE ‘mother’ script from which the later written languages developed, in the course of the spread of this civilisation out across the earth at the dawn of history. If indeed the Uruan script is the earliest written language, then it was developed in Australia before the earliest [officially] known script, developed in the Mediterranean around 3500 BC My book reveals fossil human evidence showing that the earliest modern humans evolved in Australia, from Homo erectus who had earlier entered this continent from south-east Asia. The Uru were descended from these first modern people.
Their language displays features of a ‘proto-Aryan’ character, as was the megalithic culture which they spread across the Old World, and which would in various ways, influence the later rise of Sumer, the civilisations of India, the Mediterranean, Middle-East and Western Europe. I have found the name ‘Uru’ synonymous with ancient megalithic sun-worship sites up through island south-east Asia and across mainland Asia to Europe, wherever the megaliths were erected. Examples of Uruan script have been found across the Old World, as well as across the Pacific as far as the Americas. Lately my wife Heather and I have uncovered megalithic structures in New Zealand, at which Uruan rock script has also been found. Just how old this script is remains unestablished for now, but it was certainly already long in use by 10,000 years ago.
The limitations of space preclude greater detail in this article, so the reader will have to wait for the release of my book (available to order now) to learn the full story. When the ancestors of the Uruans arose in Australia, I believe the natural world around them began to influence their thinking. Like all primitive stone-age people, they were fascinated by the stars and wondered what they were; the movements of the Sun and Moon: and seasonal climatic changes. And gradually was born a primitive nature-worship. Both they and their Aboriginal neighbours would have observed how quickly plants grew from the earth after rainfall, so in their simplicity, they imagined the earth as a female, the great Earth-Mother; frequently fertilised by the rain [ie semen] of a great Sky-Father, to give birth to all plant, animal and human life.
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URU - The Lost Civilisation of Australia
In time, as the importance of sunlight in the cycle of life was realised, the worshippers came to believe the Earth-Mother and Sky-Father had produced a child, the Sun-God, depicted as a serpent as we have seen. The Earth-Mother bore her child in a cave in the east, from where he arose each morning to be carried across the sky to the west, where he slept in the Underworld, or ‘died’, only to rise again in the east each morning.
In the course of their earth and solar worship, the Uruans observed the rising and setting of the Sun, Moon and stars, and that they often rose in alignment with certain natural features; a mountain peak, large rock, etc., and this led to a primitive “star cult”, the worshippers erecting their own stone markers in line with natural features, with which the Sun, Moon or planetary body rose in alignment, and ultimately a more sophisticated megalithic astronomical science was born which aided the
Uruans in their development of agriculture, as well as in their maritime activities, which, as my book reveals, saw them construct ocean-going vessels with which they explored and colonised the farthest reaches of the ancient world.
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Modern-day observations at the Australian megalithic sites reveals the Uruan astronomer-priests were aware of the Summer and Winter Solstices [22nd December and 22nd June respectively] at a remote period.
At one extensive astronomical stone arrangement site in the New England district of northern NSW, which covers an area of about 1,000 acres, Heather and I have mapped out several large circles whose stones have been arranged to plot the summer and Winter Solstices. In March 1991 we began uncovering yet another extensive megalithic astronomical culture centre, high up in the ranges north of Tamworth covering at least 10 square kilometres. Here stands a massive phallic-shaped granite tomb, and at another site a massive granite dolmen, both weighing 50-60 tonnes each.
There is also a 15m wide circle of large granite boulders, a couple of metres to the south of which lies a large weathered carved stone head, once erect but now lying on its back. It has a high forehead with eyes, nose and mouth toward the base. A nearby rock inscription identifies the circle as “the temple of Nim the Sun”. The head is that of Nim and is similar to others found elsewhere throughout Australia.
About a kilometre to the south of this stone circle and head, lying among the crumbling remains of an enclosure of huge granite boulders I later found another, smaller stone head, almost Mayan in appearance, bearing a flattish head upon which is engraved the message “Nim the Sun”.
Scattered about the hills hereabouts Heather and I have uncovered a large number of altar stones and collapsed structures, the remains of probable small shrines. Over a five year period we uncovered dozens of stones inscribed in Uruan script; votive offering stones, day-to-day messages, even a grave marker, and a number of small stone heads of ‘household deities’ once kept in the huts of the Uruan workforce hereabouts, at least several thousand years ago. The Uru civilisation’s demise is complex and the reader will have to obtain my book to find out the details. Yet this remarkable people have left behind them a mass of rock inscriptions which tell us much of their daily lives, their fertility festivals, the names of their monarchs, their scientific achievements, which included experiments with flight, aided by crude hang gliders, often used in their “Bird Man” cult ceremonies, particularly on the Blue Mountains west of Sydney.
This region is surely THE major culture-centre of the Uru, for thousands of rock inscriptions have so far been found over a wide area and untold thousands may yet await discovery. Here stands a large Uruan sphinx, part man, part reptile in features, weathered with age, and which for various reasons discussed in the book, may be at least 10,000 years old. It faces a huge, three-sided, flat summit astronomical pyramid, shaped from a natural mountain. It location is one of my most closely-guarded secrets, but photographs of the sphinx and pyramid will be a feature of the book. The mountain is littered with uruan glyphs and in the summer months it and its sphinx guardian are unapproachable, due to the countless snakes that literally cover the area. The Uru traded with one another over vast distances of the continent, exchanging animal hides, weapons, stone for manufacturing tools, precious stones for decoration, ochres for body paint, bush foods such as yams etc.
Much of this trade was carried out via waterways across Australia, many of which are long dried-up, such as those which formerly covered much of what is now Sydney’s western suburbs.
Before these waterways dried up with the close of the Ice-age, Uruan rafts and canoes, and larger watercraft, voyaged between widely-scattered settlements, and over lakes where now houses and highways now stand. Before the massive land developments of the suburbs, which began in the 1950's, there were a number of large terraced, tree-covered hills in the Fairfield and Prospect district, as well as outside Liverpool and several other localities now heavily built on. These terraced hills were carved out in the form of four-sided stepped pyramids.
Similarly, in the Seven Hills district, there existed until bulldozers moved into the area in 1972, a number of apparent ‘grave mound’ type structures, some of considerable height, and which early 19th century settlers of the area had been informed of by Aborigines, held the remains of ‘culture-heroes’ who shaped the landscape. In 1955 at Lansvale on the Georges River outside Cabramatta, fragments of primitive stone-age period pottery, including an almost intact bowl, were dug up by a resident. Nearby, crude stonework, the remains of apparent ancient human structures, were unearthed during the construction of a house. Found at a depth of 2m., these stones were thoughtlessly discarded by workmen in nearby Prospect Creek.
“Uru - The Lost Civilisation of Australia” will, I believe, prove once and for all that Australia, the fabled ‘lost paradise’ of mankind, was the origin of the Atlantis legend, and I present what I believe, is a mass of evidence to demonstrate this fact.
