‘The Project ’ co-host Steve Price said on Monday he owns a piece of Uluru , the sacred monolith in the centre of Australia.
Price was boasting during a segment on the news program about mementoes he’d taken from ancient tourist sites.
“I’ve got a little piece of Uluru and I’ve got a piece of the Colosseum,” he said on air.
When questioned by his shocked co-stars Carrie Bickmore and Peter Helliar, Price replied: “it’s just a rock.”
“You’re just saying that to make people very annoyed at you,” Bickmore quipped.
Price went on to discuss another artefact he had “pinched” from the Berlin Wall.
“I got a bit of the Berlin Wall but I think it might just be a rock because I didn’t go over there with a hammer and chisel and knock it out,” he said.
“I pinched it off the wall.”
The comments come almost a year after hordes of people rushed to climb Uluru days before the site was permanently closed.
The ban came into effect on October 26, 2019 and marked 34 years since the site was handed back to the traditional custodians of the land, the Anangu people.
The news of the closure caused thousands of tourists to ignore calls from Indigenous Australians to stay off the rock and images went viral of hundreds of people queuing to scale Uluru.
“A curse will fall on all of them,” writer Marcia Langton wrote on Twitter at the time. “They will remember how they defiled this sacred place until they die and history will record their contempt for Aboriginal culture.”
Nearly 400,000 visitors flocked to the Australian landmark in the first half of 2019, government data shows.
“It is an extremely important place, not a playground or theme park like Disneyland,” Anangu senior traditional owner Sammy Wilson said in a statement last year.
“We welcome tourists here. Closing the climb is not something to feel upset about, but a cause for celebration.”
HuffPost has reached out to The Project for further comment from Steve Price.
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