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ULURU(AYERS ROCK) BY BOB MITCHELL

Uluru is the Aborigines' (the indigenous people of Australia) name for what was formerly known to non-aboriginal Australians as Ayers Rock. It represents their spiritual centre in 'Dreamtime' which is not a creation myth, per se, but a myth of formation. In this painting my good friend and sometime mentor, who is now deceased yet he lives on in the Ether which we are all part of, R. (Bob) Mitchell, depicts its centrality in both earth and sky in the sunburnt arid red sand hills of central Australia. Bob spent many a time with traditional Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory feeding his thirst for knowledge of their forty thousand year old culture. Among other things they taught him how to make 'natural' paint from red ochre and the like. At one thousand one hundred feet high and five and a half miles round it is the largest monolith in the world! It is located in a kind of Australian 'Sub-State' called the Northern Territory which lies centrally north on the mainland.