In 1936 the Foy family did something no-one had done before — they drove in convoy to Uluru for a family holiday.

At the time such behaviour was odd — and difficult to understand.

The Australian Women's Weekly called a later Foy outback trip a "strange desert quest", noting that the usual family holidays were to picturesque resort-towns close to the big cities.

Hugh Victor Foy was one of Australia's wealthiest men: a former director of the family-run Mark Foy's department store in Sydney.

Hugh Victor Foy (right) with his fourth wife and their three children. ( Supplied: Foy family archive )

In 1936 he was 69 and retired, living with his wife Isabella and their three children, Mitta, Hinemoa and Bill, in a luxurious mansion at Camp Cove in Watson's Bay.

Known for his enduring love of travel, Hugh Victor made frequent buying missions to Asia, Europe and America during his career, and took his young family on flights and cruises across the world, from England to Japan.

But this time something a little closer to home was planned: exploring the interior of Australia by motor-truck, camping with no modern conveniences or luxuries for months at a time.

The trip, which took months to plan, would be a 12,000-kilometre tour of Central Australia that visited South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia — with Hugh Victor's family joining him at times.

Hugh Victor's grandson Michael Farrell suggests such trips were "about going somewhere where no-one else had been".

"Hugh Victor just loved travelling and exploring: basically, going out and exploring was his passion," he said.

A ground-breaking Uluru holiday

Uluru — at that time, named Ayers Rock — was still a little-known attraction for most Australians.

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Revered by the Anangu traditional owners, the rock was only discovered by colonial Australia in 1873 by William Gosse, who was exploring the land of Central Australia opened-up by the Overland Telegraph Line that crossed from Port Augusta to Darwin Harbour.

But word was beginning to spread about the spectacular beauty and awe-inspiring landscapes of the rock.

In 1928, a writer for Adelaide's Saturday Journal noted that with the rise of "speedy and comfortable motor vehicles", the rock "might well become a resort for tourists who delight in the rugged and the sublime".

This kind of thinking seemed a long way in the future: while scientific expeditions had been made to Uluru, there wasn't even a proper road in.

But just a few years later, the Foy expedition made the first non-Indigenous visit to Uluru that fits the contemporary idea of a tourist journey — going there, by automobile, because they felt like it.

In the footsteps of Lasseter

One motive for Hugh Victor's journey to central Australia was to follow in the footsteps of Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter.

Lasseter was a prospector who believed he had discovered a reef of gold. He died on a mission to find the reef and quickly entered into national mythology, especially through the publication of Ion Idriess' popular 1931 novel Lasseter's Last Ride.

Hugh Victor hired Bob Buck — the celebrated and experienced bushman who had discovered Lasseter's body in the Petermann ranges just five years earlier — to guide the expedition.

H.V.Foy (centre) with Bob Buck (right) and bushman Ben Nicker, who also joined the expedition. ( Supplied: Foy family archive )

According to grandson Mr Farrell, Buck proved to be a life-saving presence for the family while touring: when young Bill became gravely ill, Buck rushed him down to medical assistance in Adelaide.

It is believed when the group returned to Sydney, Hugh Victor gave Buck a house in appreciation for his assistance on the trip.

Filmmakers Rupert Kathner and Stan Tolhurst were also hired to document the journey, and made a dramatised documentary about Lasseter called Phantom Gold (1937).

The film failed to find a distributor and was hardly seen.

The first female climber?

Isabella Foy is often credited as the first woman to have climbed to the summit of Uluru, as Indigenous women were not believed to have climbed the rock.

Isabella Foy rarely travelled after her husband's death. ( Supplied: Foy family archive )

Arthur Groom noted in his book I Saw A Strange Land that when he climbed the rock in the late 1940s, "a small pile of broken sandstone has been placed on the summit, and the usual summit tin and bottle of names are there".

Among those names are the Foy party, including Isabella. However, one hand recorded the names of the entire party, so perhaps this one hand wrote down the full party rather than the actual climbers.

So, did Isabella climb the rock?

According to the family story, Isabella would have climbed some of the way up, but certainly not up to the actual summit of Uluru.

"She didn't climb the rock," said Mr Farrell, who listened to tales of the expedition from his mother Mitta, who was at school so missed the expedition to Uluru.

He remembers Mitta saying: "Mum would have only gone the first part. She wasn't somebody who was agile or into that: she wore little high heels."

Isabella wasn't known for a love of travel, and after her husband's death in 1943, she rarely travelled again.

She told the Woman's Weekly she preferred "the comforts of a city hotel", to "this running all over the place".

Rise of the rock

At the time of the Foy visit, the rock was a designated part of an Aboriginal Reserve, but the rise in interest in Uluru saw the territory around the rock being quickly appropriated for Western touristic interests.

It was part of a growing nationalistic appreciation of the aesthetic qualities of outback Australia.

In 1941, travel writer Frank Clune wrote glowingly about Uluru for the popular travel magazine Walkabout, which was later adapted for a book called The Red Heart: Sagas of Centralia (1944).

In the book, Clune writes: "I have seen and scaled the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the Temples of Ang-Kor, the Rocky Mountains of North America, and many other grand works of man and nature — but I wouldn't swap any of them for 'Oolera'".

Road tracks were created to Uluru in 1948, and by the early 1950s, organised tours start to put "Ayers Rock" onto the tourist map, a move that also disenfranchised the Traditional Owners from their land.

The family road trip to Uluru became an iconic travel route for Australian families in the second part of the 20th century — the ultimate outback destination, and a spiritual centre for the Australian nation.

It's a route that has largely been replaced by air travel in more recent times.

Today, Uluru is a globally-recognised icon, receiving visitors from around the world.

The site was handed back to the Anangu Traditional Owners in 1985, and on October 26, 2019, the summit climb will officially close.

The future of tourism at Uluru is connected to appreciating the landscape — and the rock — from the ground.

It's changed a lot since the 1930s, but tourism at the rock looks set to remain.

A researcher with the College of Indigenous Futures at Charles Darwin University, Dr Gemma Blackwood tackles big questions about what it means to be Australian. She is one of the ABC's inaugural Top 5 Researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences.