“THE PEAKS”; a celebrated painting by Albert Namatjira. Gaugin would certainly have been in his element in the painting of Arunta's country. The average Arunta chooses landscapes, where they can give vent to their sense of colour, of rhythm, of line and of decoration. Their work tends to be uneven, but much of it is interesting. Most of them alter, change and distort the natural outlines and shapes which they see before them, and then either heighten or tone down the colours in sympathy. The imaginative quality thus acquired is not always liked by the public and less by the critics unless they have been to Central Australia and can fully evaluate the alterations introduced during painting. Of these younger painters Edwin Pareroultja is generally content with broad effects and strong colours, but he reveals also a strong decorative sense, when he divides his pictures into planes of contrasting colour. On the other hand his brother Otto, whose work is somewhat reminiscent of Van Gogh, loved continuous coiling, wavy forms, and the complicated networks of sharply angular and jagged diagonal lines, and highly elaborated patterns; but Otto learnt his decorative devices from nature, not from Van Gogh. The Central Australian landscape is full of intricately traced natural patterns. The broken cliff faces are criss-crossed with lines, wrinkles, and cracks. The trees, because of their sparse foliage, reveal all their limbs and branches and do not cast heavy opaque shadows as do the European deciduous trees in summer. Throughout the day, the tracery of their shape shifts on the ground as the sun rises in the sky, then descends. From the first, Otto Pareroultja has been interested in these patterns, in the tracery of these delicate shadows, also in the flow of lines and in rhythm. His colours are always heightened; and the natural network of lines and shadows is elaborated by conscious design till it becomes an involved pattern that is entirely original. His striped “tiger like” ghost gums are of special interest. It was Battarbee who first thought of using curved lines running across the length of trunks and limbs to indicate the rounded smoothness of the white ghost gums. Otto Pareroultja has multiplied these half rings and placed them all over the trunks and limbs of his trees. His ghost gums now show the common alternate black and white rings that were once put by the totemites on the trunks of many sacred totem poles. This practice is in close harmony with ancient Arunta mythological tales, according to which many of these old gums had arisen from poles abandoned on their travels by the original totemic ancestors. Ewald Namatjira at one stage worked concentric circles into his tree trunks and for awhile he introduced a tracery of sharp and jagged lines meeting at sharp angles into his imaginative representations of rocks. Walter Ebatarinja has often spread clusters of dots and groups of short parallel lines as dashes resembling cicatrices into his landscapes. The blotchy appearance of some of the rock-strewn slopes and much of the foliage is also intentional;