Mount Sonder, West MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia (Albert Namatjira)

A watercolour by Albert Namatjira (1902 to 1959), a Western Arrernte artist of Ntaria/Hermannsburg in Central Australia and the founder of the Hermannsburg School, showing Rutjipma, known in English as Mount Sonder, part of the West MacDonnell Ranges (Tjoritja) and his father's Country. Painted toward the end of his working life, it is characteristic of his mature style: airy, luminous ghost gums against layered ranges rendered in the introduced medium of watercolour. Namatjira took up the European watercolour tradition deliberately, using it to paint and publicly share his own Country, and his work, exhibited internationally from the 1930s onward, remains the most widely known and celebrated body of Aboriginal Australian painting produced in this form, continued after him by his sons, his son-in-law and other Hermannsburg School artists. This atlas describes this watercolour landscape practice specifically because it is a form the artist and his community made deliberately and permanently public; it does not describe or reproduce any restricted design, ceremony or image, consistent with the atlas's own standing account of what is and is not appropriate to publish about Aboriginal religious life.