The first time I visited Ayers Rock, I hitchhiked the 1,800 miles from Sydney along sandy roads once used by Afghani camel traders, and finally arrived at the monolith feeling like an escaped convict.

This was about 25 years ago, when the base of the Rock was little more than a scrappy tourist ground — but it was also a strange, haunted place, where Stephen King-like things would happen.

It was here that the cry “a dingo-ate-moy-baby” (made internationally famous by Meryl Streep in the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark) once split the air; not long after I was there, a drunken truck driver deliberately crashed his semi-trailer through a motel bar when he was refused service, killing five hapless customers.

After my first restless night camping beneath the stars, I felt pretty unhinged myself: at 4am, I lurched out of my sleeping bag, determined to be the first on the Rock before dawn, and arrived at the summit just in time to catch the sun as it consumed the desert like a nuclear blast.

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For better or worse, the Red Centre is more of a controlled environment these days, as I discovered on a recent repeat pilgrimage. Uluru, as Ayers Rock is now known, has been returned to its original owners, the Anangu people, along with the surrounding 120,000 hectares, which are leased back to the government as national parkland.

The old tourist zone is gone; in fact, camping is forbidden within Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, and only a handful of hiking trails are available to the public. Almost the only place to stay overnight is 11 miles from the Rock, in an artificial township called Yulara, which has all the ambience of a foreign-worker’s enclave in Saudi Arabia.

To observe Uluru’s famous colour changes at dawn and dusk, most visitors now drive to designated parking areas — as if attending an ecological drive-in cinema. For me, the question was: How could I recapture my original exhilaration — the outback’s trademark sense of space and freedom — while observing the new rules?

Step one was to book into the only place where you can still wake up and go to sleep with a view of the Rock: Longitude 131°, a luxury camp at the edge of the national park, where the “tents” have marble floors, king-size beds and solar-heated bathrooms.

From here, I could ponder the great moral question visitors face today: to climb or not to climb? On my first visit, I had only the haziest idea that for 40,000 years or so the Anangu people have considered Uluru sacred, and prefer visitors to stay off. Still, every year, thousands of people ignore the Anangu’s polite signs posted by the trail head and hoist themselves up anyway.

By the time the Rock had darkened to a starlit indigo, I’d come to a verdict: I wouldn’t feel great about climbing the dome of St Peter's in Rome or a mosque in Mecca, so I’d better stay on accepted ground here.

Instead, next morning, I set off on the more respectful plan B, circumambulating the base just after dawn: the Rock was doing its thing, glowing as if lit by an inner flame, but, up close, the surface was pitted and pockmarked, concealing ancient rock art in overhanging caves. I then drove 30 miles west, to the park’s other geological freak, the Olgas — or Kata Tjuta, to be correct. This vast pile of red-sandstone domes rising sheer out of the desert is at least as awe-inspiring as Ayers Rock: in fact, it’s as if 20 Ulurus had been cut in half and stood end on end.

Heady stuff — but I was still itching for the old-style outback. Luckily, this is not hard to find: I rented a 4WD, threw some camping gear into the boot and plunged into the wilderness for three days, taking the 500-mile back route to Alice Springs via the West MacDonnell Ranges.

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