ON THE BRINK RADIO #343 THE ROCKIST: PAINTING THE BODY OF MOTHER EARTH/FULL MOON/TOP END ADVENTURE PHASE 2 ./'STAR OF BETHLEHEM' SOLSTICE EVENT :)

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LAST TWO WEEK'S SHOWS:

OTB # 342 ON BEING A FREE-LANCE INTELLIGENCE AGENT/WE ARE ALL INDIGENOUS
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=5836301fa77e7b3fd56cacff8&id=565b3cc4d5

OTB #342 INDIGENOUS: WHAT IT MEANS IN THE WORLD OF TODAY
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=5836301fa77e7b3fd56cacff8&id=f06b6fb9a2

LEWOTOLO VOLCANO, INDONESIA

HAPPY BEAUTIFUL FULL MOON AND THE LARGEST SOLAR FLARE IN THREE YEARS YESTERDAY!

Apparently most of the CME shot off in a direction away from Earth but shortwave radio was knocked out across significant regions! We as the dominant and most intelligent species on the planet...how do I know? Just ask anyone!...pay little attention to our cosmic context and as our extra-terrestrial sensitivities have atrophied in the era of military-industrial civilization, our awareness and appreciation of, our respect for, the forces of nature that have made us possible...which have also brought all of life to its very knees countless times...has diminished to nil. All it would take is a single much larger CME to conflagrate the surface of the Earth into a smouldering cinder which would then freeze over for a few thousand years. Not to mention comet or asteroid impacts, as I have done so often. Note also a major volcanic eruption occurred in Indonesia at the same time as this full moon/CME event.

LEGENDARY ARECIBO RADIO-TELESCOPE IN PUERTO RICO COLLAPSES

Around the same time as the full moon, CME and Indo eruption, the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world at Arecibo experienced terminal structural damage when the central instrument assembly collapsed. In recent years and months the iconic dish had been damaged by hurricanes and lately by two support cables that snapped. She served as our ears to the radio universe for 57 years, including a lot of SETI searches and programs, was used by Frank Drake to send his encoded message to M13 in 1974, and was as significant for how she looked and what she represented as much as for what she did: collect infinitesimally tiny amounts of radio-frequency EMR coming from sources as close as the sun and as distant as the furthest limits of the observable universe, mapping out an entire cosmos invisible at optical wavelengths.

THE RADIO-FREQUENCY UNIVERSE

In some ways it's almost as if radio astronomers have had an ear-drum punctured, but in reality, signals are being 'harvested' (a trendy term like robust, or 'capture' for photos these daze!) at unprecedented levels. With VLBL interferometry techniques (Very Long Base-Line) networks or arrays of smaller antennas or dishes can be linked together to function as one instrument, no matter how far apart they might be, even on different continents. A program called the Square Kilometer Array is under construction in Australia, Africa and other parts of the world. In honour of the radio universe and the demise of Arecibo I am getting in touch with Australian radio astronomer Ray Norris to see if he will do a show with me.

OTB #321 THE ELECTROMAGNETIC UNIVERSE: CURRENT ISSUES & SHOCKING ANOMALIES
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=5836301fa77e7b3fd56cacff8&id=d8d112755f

And I hear the Chinese have built an even larger single-dish instrument. Rumours are that it was being 3-D printed and going up in two weeks but this has yet to be verified, as well as the hear-say that it will be linked in with Elon Musk's Starlink sat-net to beam 7G internet to every life-form on Earth as well as to track everyone via their new vaxy-jab RFID-GMO injection.

JUPITER & SATURN IN CAPRICORN 21 DECEMBER 2020: A VERY GOOD OMEN!

A once-in-500 years convergence is coming soon, a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Capricorn, occurring right on the boreal winter/austral summer solstice, 21 December. The two planets will be less than 0.1 degrees apart, close enough to give a 'star of Bethlehem' effect. I'm not sure what all this conjures up in astrological minds, but I am just hoping that Bill Gates isn't having any megalomaniacal premonitions! A trans-human GMO Jesus-claus bringing salvation to humanity with the gift of a eugenic vaxy-jab? LNGDTR-fttb* OK?

* Let's Not Go Down That Road for the time being au que?

RETURN OF THE STAR DRAGON, SISTER OF THE RAINBOW SERPENT

JEFF PHILLIPS ART :)
http://dolphinmatrix.com/Jeff

MY PAINTED ROCK BLOG:
http://chak-roks.blogspot.com

This broadcast #343 of OTB IS in fact about rocks, but ones on a scale much smaller than planets, comets or asteroids. In this show I honour hine ahu one, what the ancient Waitaha people of New Zealand called rock or stone. It means, literally, 'first ancestor', for stone is the body of Mother Earth, which is what everything we know is made of. Even water and the atmosphere are parts of her body.

FIRST COLOUR IMAGE OF EARTH FROM SPACE (ATS-3, 1967)

"EACH OF THESE IS A BEAUTIFUL WHITE ROCK PERFECT FOR PAINTING ON!"

WHAT IS A ROCK?

We as 'man, the wise' really have no idea of the ultimate reality of anything. Even things that we are intimately involved with on a daily basis, like water and electricity, have not yielded their true identities to the probosces of human inquiry. Scientific consensus tells us that we are 'star-dust', that all matter, from atoms to galaxies, is made from the remains of cosmic events in the astronomically distant past. Well, not all matter...in fact, not even most matter...in fact, only a tenth of one per cent of all matter. Why? Because, scientific consensus once again tells us that 99.9% of all matter in the known universe is in the form of plasma, super-hot ionized gaseous elements comprising stars and maybe other entities we know little about like pulsars, quasars, inter-galactic filaments, and mysterious sources of UV and radio-frequency emissions.

So, all or most of the cool, or aplasmic, matter in the known universe is in the form of solid-state combinations of elements and compounds that we call rocks and minerals.

In the same way that science assumes, probably incorrectly, that the speed of light is not only a constant, but that this constancy applies everywhere, it also assumes that the periodic table of the elements describes all matter everywhere. It will be a while before any of this can be empirically investigated. What we have learned about the composition of planets our own star-system, and about things coming to Earth like comets, asteroids and meteors...who become meteorITES upon impact...does seem to verify this hypothesis so far. Interestingly, fragments of comets or asteroids that are found do not become cometITES or asteroidITES, but they do find these rock fragment things called tektITES? Future archaeologists of Earth may discover technITES, the glassified remains of computer components polished by nuclear explosions and buffed by microwaves!

TRILOBITE FOSSIL:
GAIAN LITHOGRAPHY OF NATURE'S FIST USE OF THE EYE

What I am talking about really belongs in a show dedicated to the science of geology, which is extremely interesting. The word comes from Greek Gaia, Mother Earth, and, like hine ahu one of the Waitaha, is feminine. I don't read Hebrew but have been told that in the original version of the Old Testament, the Earth is referred to as being feminine. My response was that if the whole story from the opening verse began in a way so fundamentally different from the Bible of today, that what people see now is utterly useless unless regarded as fiction.

CHRONOSTRATIGRAPHIC TIME-SCALE

Geology and astronomy are two fundamental investigative paradigms that have given us maps or coordinate reference frames for time, space, and matter, for understanding the lovely planet who has given us existence and for her neighbourhood and family in the local universe (as opposed to the non-local universe, which is everywhere at once!)

THE OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE

OTB #322 ON BEING AN ASTRONOMER: HONOURING STAR NATIONS AND OUR COSMIC CONTEXT
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=5836301fa77e7b3fd56cacff8&id=d647a0078d

I've covered astronomical topics in my show countless times, usually focusing on the impact hypothesis of periodic catastrophic modification of life processes on Mother Earth at a global level. I have shared the research and ideas of 'big picture' thinkers Victor Clube and Bill Napier, and their mentor Immanuel Velikovsky, in great detail, and would like to mention something that just occurred to me after re-reading Clube and Napier's highly influential 1979 paper 'A Theory of Terrestrial Catastrophism.'

We are all familiar with the geo-stratigraphy charts with the various blocks of colours and hard to pronounce scientific names of assorted aeons, ages and epochs. Well, did you ever wonder why the tendency to demarcate these geo-temporal segments so abruptly and discretely, as opposed to having them blend together, flowing continuously together from colour to colour? These discrete geological discontinuities may be the result of "perturbed boundary conditions" of the Earth's body due to comet and asteroid impacts; the onset of each new era or age being the consequence of such events.

The observable body of Mother Earth contains not only the blueprint of life but an archive, written in stone, of the history of forces shaping biological and geological evolution and transformation.

Enough on geology. Back to rocks.

A FEW DOZEN OF MY 58,000+ PAINTED ROCKS

MY PAINTED ROCKS

To me a rock and a stone are pretty much the same thing. All rocks are made of stone, and all stones are made of rock. 'Rock' can be one you can hold in your hand, or bigger ones that might need to be hoisted using machinery, but a stone would never be very big. 'Rock' can also be a huge out-cropping or even an escarpment, cliff, face, or side of a mountain, like in Yosemite National Park. Those are big rocks. Boulders are huge but discrete pieces of rock that are separate from the main body. Grains of sand are actually very tiny little rocks. Or stones.

HALF-DOME,YOSEMITE N.P., CALIFORNIA: A BIG ROCK, MADE OF STONE

Pebbles are rather small rocks or stones; gravel is the irregular chunky bits that you pave your drive with. The rocks I like to paint on have often been referred to as 'skipping stones', because they are round, flat and smooth and have hydro-foil properties when launched at appropriate angles over the surface of a body of water.

GUARDIANS, HORSESHOE CANYON, UTAH

WANDJINA, GWION GWION, KIMBERLEY AUSTRALIA

Rock-painting for me was a gift from the native American ancestors. I tend to think of the Cheyenne but Shoshone, Ute and Lakota also lived nomadically in western Wyoming. In 1993 I was hitch-hiking I think from Santa Fe up into Utah. The driver (who I remember because he'd just made a lot of money from developing software that made email possible) stopped by the Colorado river in southern Utah (it's the Colorado river that formed the Grand Canyon, which is in Arizona) and we went for a walk. I looked over and saw a big pile of rocks that had been dredged out of the river bed. Some of them caught my eye. I picked up three nice smooth flat ones and brought them with me to Park City, where I was visiting an old friend.

ONE OF MANY HUNDREDS OF MY HAND-PAINTED SHIRTS

I had my art table set up in my friend's kitchen and was about to do some hand-painted t-shirts, and on late summer afternoon decided to go for a walk out in the beautiful countryside, which is hilly grassland in the area where Utah merges into Wyoming, where the Cheyenne and Shoshone native Americans call home. As I walked for a few hours I began to feel an extraordinarily powerful presence of native American spirit with me, almost tangible. I'd felt this kind of thing before during my decades of hitch-hiking all over North America, sometimes standing for hours by the side of the highway with no traffic right in tornado alley for example. The ancestral spirits had come to know me well and apparently liked me, too, because when I returned to my friend's apartment, I sat down to paint shirts and looked at those three rocks sitting there, and I went "Oh my goddess, I can PAINT ON THEM!" This had never crossed my mind until this point, but it was like a lightning bolt of inspiration, and clearly a gift from the ancestors. It's not like I wondered if I should, I was being appointed to do so with blessings! I painted my first three right then in honour of native Americans. I thought of them with choice of colours and designs. I just kept them and looked at them and honoured them as symbols of really cool people whose land I was visiting.

A SET FROM AROUND 1996 (that may be the very first dolphin I did!)

For a while those were the only rocks I painted. Ones nice enough to paint on weren't just lying around, but on my next visit to Santa Fe I began to notice that a lot of people as well as the city used flat river rocks in places where in other towns they would plant grass, like in medians between roads and as lawns in front of houses. These were relatively round, flat and smooth and later I learned that they just dig them up from out in the desert, proving that the plateau used to be submarine, so they were not in short supply. I developed a habit of filling up my pockets with nice rocks from here and there, never taking enough to be noticed but enough to give me a supply of paintable rocks. I also began to become very aware of any rocks I'd see while out hiking around, and began a collection of various and sundry shapes and sizes which were my earliest 'geological canvasses.' Some of these can be seen in the photo above with me and the platter of stones.

SANSKRIT NAMES OF CHAK-RAS IN CORRESPONDING COLOURS

For the first year or so I just gave them away, but then people with shops started asking if they could buy some for resale, so I was happy to oblige. After a year or two as well I began to develop a technique of painting a background colour then a band around the edge, onto which I painted a border of dots and dashes, until one day I realized that I was accidentally painting Morse code, and if so, why not put actual words in Morse code? And I decided to call them Chak-roks as I'd been learning how to paint the Sanskrit names of the chak-ras on them.

CROCHET CRYSTAL BAGS: HARD TO COME BY NOW!

In the early years I was able to get these really cool little crochet crystal bags imported from Guatemala. They were so inexpensive that I just gave a bag with every rock...to keep it warm. Over the years, however, it became difficult tor anyone to get a shipment out of Guatemala. In 2006 I was able to source some from Thailand, but that, too, has fallen by the way-side, so I don't give away the little bags any more. If anyone has any leads on how I can get some, let me know ok?

ROCKS FOR SPA THARPE, MARTHA'S VINEYARD, MASSACHUSETTS, 1996

I painted all kinds of designs, many of the early ones quite abstract and experimental. I have always been quite sensitive and careful about copying design motifs or symbols from other cultures, and if I felt it was ok for me to paint something, I have always made sure to get it as accurate as possible. In 1996 in Athens, GA I met a lovely friend from Malaysia who spoke Mandarin Chinese. He taught me how to paint some on rocks and even gave me his wee dictionary, which I still have. The characters are so tiny and complex that you almost need a magnifying glass to decipher.

'BEAUTIFUL FRIEND' in MANDARIN CHINESE

Friends began to find rocks for me in their travels and would ship me some here and there, and I began to have my special places where I'd go to gather some. I began to have stashes and stock-piles here and there. I began to make a habit of always having some painted rocks with me to give to anyone kind enough to stop and give me a ride hitch-hiking.

As I talked about in my last OTB show, my last hitching treks in the states were from western NC to Ohio then to Denver to see the last of Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair concerts. All of this was extraordinarily and magically powerful for me, to have met all these top-level musos and to give them all painted rocks. I probably gave away 50-60 all in all the those musicians and their bands and support folks.

WITH SARAH MCLACHLAN, 1999...
that's the cord to her rock bag around her neck!

I have kept track of so-called 'famous people' who have my rocks, the first one probably being Arthur C. Clarke, the renowned science-fiction author. I didn't meet him in person but sent him a parcel with a t-shirt, painted rock and letter in 1996. His response enabled me to talk with him on the phone a couple times. In 1998 I met Steven Tyler of Aerosmith on the plane to England and also met Gordon Lightfoot that year. They got rocks, as well as all of their band members.

In 1998 I was visiting a friend in Colorado. On his wall was a photo of a friend of his in a river-bed made of millions of the nicest rocks I'd ever seen. When I asked him where that was, he said "New Zealand. Jeff, if you go there you will never come back." Little did I know exactly how prophetic his words were.

GRANDMOTHER MAROTINI, GUARDIAN OF CASTLE HILL

GRANDMOTHER MAROTINI, A TRUE 'ROCK STAR', CASTLE HILL, NZ, 2011
(Boreal circumpolar star-trail, Nikkor 24mm@f/4.5, 45 mins, ISO 400 film)

GETTING STONED DOWN UNDER

In February of 2000 I arrived to Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud having absolutely no idea exactly why I was there except that I knew without a doubt that I was meant to be there. The only person I 'knew' in New Zealand was marine biologist/underwater photographer Wade Doak, who I went to visit after staying with friends of friends in Titirangi for a couple days. Wade and I had been corresponding via snail mail for years about the whales and dolphins. I am sure I gave him and Jan a painted rock or two. On my way hitching from Auckland to Whangerei I got a ride from a lovely bloke named Robin Shepherd. I gave him a rock and he said "Jeff, I've given rides to hundreds of hitch-hikers but you're the first one who ever gave me anything." We became friends and a year or two later they had me up to their ranch near Kaitaia where his lovely late wife Gina set me up to do my very first rock painting with her third graders.

When I first painted rocks in Utah in 1993 I had never seen any other ones. When I came to New Zealand I was told about a woman in Tauranga who painted cats on rocks. I saw one once and they were pretty cool, quasi-realistic looking kitties curled up on rocks a good bit larger than I used, ones you'd use for a door-stop.

NOTE: from 2000 over the next few years I disseminated thousands of my rocks all over NZ and Australia, never encountering any others until I might return to a place a year later and see that other folks had made an effort to paint rocks. Of the ones I saw, some were quite cool and artistic and all were brilliant efforts to honour the body of Mother Earth.

NOTE ALSO: once a random bloke couldn't believe that I hand-painted every one, and assumed that I had a posse of workers in Singapore who sat there spray-painting the designs with wee templates. Needless to say, I set this person straight via side-ways :)

A few weeks later I was on the south island staying in Christchurch. I met the owners of a new age crystal shop and they loved my rocks and ordered some. I had brought some rocks with me on the plane from the states, including some I'd collected at Findhorn in Scotland. I didn't have very many so they told me about this amazing place called Birdlings Flat, about an hour south of Christchurch. They actually took me there. I was astonished to see a beach running for at least 10 kms made of nothing except one type of rock called greywacke (a metamorphic variety of great importance in the history of geology). While Craig and Andrew collected tiny semi-precious stones from the pounding surf, I collected quite a few kgs of some of the nicest rocks I'd yet to find. The Birdling greywackes are almost all paintable and with just a bit of looking I could find hundreds of absolutely perfect ones, very round and flat and smooth, some of them almost perfect circles. This was just my introduction to the rocks of the south island, to this day home of beaches that are my ultimate rock-gathering places.

LIESBET AT BIRDLINGS FLAT, 2010

"LET HIM IN...HE'S INCREASING THE MASS OF AUSTRALIA!"

In July of 2000 I first set foot in Australia, the beginning of an amazing legendary love-affair on-going to this very day. My plane ticket from NZ to Aus had plenty of excess bags included, and as I'd collected heaps of extraordinarily nice painting rocks, I decided to bring a 20 kg box of rocks with me.

I had cleared immigrations and was exiting through customs and a young woman official asked me about the box of rocks. Instinctively, I went into my bum-bag (upon arrival into NZ it was my fanny pack but it soon got renamed!) and pulled out one of my painted rocks, which happened to be the one nicest white Findhorn rock I had. I explained that I paint them and had brought these with me from NZ and that they were dry and clean.

She then got all suspicious as those folks can do sometimes and said "So, your are going to set up and sell them at markets?" in a derisive way, as I was on a tourist visa and not authorized to work. I explained, in total honesty, that I don't like markets and rarely even go to them, and that I tend to mainly give away my rocks to nice people.

She was hassling me when the chief bloke came over and said "What seems to be the problem here?" He was a friendly kind of chap. He looked at me and my box of rocks and smiled as I explained to him what I had just told her. I shit you not, his exact words were, said with a near-laugh "Let him in, he's increasing the mass of Australia!"

This was my extraordinary welcome to Australia. I have reflected on his comment many times, realizing that in the back of his mind he was already aware of what I would soon learn, about how much Australia exports of itself in the form of ores of various kinds that have been mined out. He saw me as remedying the mass-loss in a symbolic way.

And this process continues to this very day, as I have brought and shipped literally hundreds of kgs of beautiful rocks from New Zealand since then, and a box is actually on the way right now!

LIESBET PAINTING ANDY THE ANDROMEDAN MACKERAL, 2010

ULTIMATE CREATIVE PARTNERSHIP: THE OTHER ROCKIST

Liesbet and I met here in Darwin in 2007, spent a night together, then stayed together for the next five years, hitch-hiking comprehensively all over Australia and New Zealand, visiting Europe, doing thousands of rocks and paintings together, playing music, communing with nature and photographing her, making films and being what some friends called 'the ultimate creative partnership.' I am working on a film about our legendary and amazing journey together, which was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

From day one I could see her talent as a painter. We would often work on paintings and even the same rocks together. She truly qualified as a rockist. When I last saw her in 2014, she was going strong with all her art, and I hope she has kept it up!

LIESBET'S ROCKS FROM 2014

NEAR SMITHTON, TASMANIA, 2008

THE FIRST ROCK I PAINTED FOR LIESBET :)

I guess I truly do create rock art, but not in the traditional sense of paintings, carvings or etchings on large immovable slabs, boulders or cliff-faces done by shamans, medicine men or even graffitists of paleo-history. I only paint on small ones that you can carry, with only two or three exceptions I can think of.

The 'meaning' of my rock is art is more accessible than that of ancient indigenous design. Counter-intuitively, I learned from my former friend, epistemologist, self-proclaimed polymath and internationally recognized rock art specialist Robert Bednarik that 'translating' or even interpreting the meaning of ancient rock art is the very last thing any respectable rupistry researcher would do. You'd think that would be top priority but to them, what they might mean or have meant is secondary if not superfluous. What they try to do is to ascertain authenticity and then perform accurate dating procedures, only later possibly to infer hypotheses on the origins of human knowledge....its existence, not what it was.

SOME OF MY AUSTRALIAN ROCK ART PHOTOS

EWANINGA SITE, SOUTH OF ALICE SPRINGS NT (2004)

CHAMBERS GORGE, FLINDERS RANGES SA (2003)

CATREPILLAR DREAMING, N'DHALA GORGE ALICE SPGS NT

RED GORGE, FLINDERS RANGES SA

SITE NEAR QUORN, FLINDERS RANGES SA

According to Bednarik in 2010, Australia has over 3 million known rock art sites, with far more than that as yet undiscovered. I used to think that locating and researching ancient rock art was a good idea, but now I'm not so sure. Unless it was graffiti or 'art' for its own sake, in my mind it was bound to have spiritual and cosmological significance to its makers. What it was for, how it was 'used' or experienced, and where it is located would all be parts of a sacred equation about which the people of today can know next to nothing. Sure we can apply advanced forensic research techniques to determine approximately when it was made, but beyond that, it's pure speculation. To me, just the process of finding it and going in and messing with it in what spirit would probably regard as an invasive and non-sacred manner is akin to grave-robbing, which is in reality a big part of what mainstream archaeology is all about.

PLASMA DISCHARGES IN ANCIENT SACRED ART

A lot of rock art from around the world depicts similar motifs and imagery which Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Anthony Peratt believes was inspired by intense auroral displays and celestial plasma discharges possibly involving comets, asteroids and planets, witnessed not so much in the contemporary helio-cosm but within the timespan of Pleistocene humanity. These displays and possibly concomitant planetary catastrophic events, whether from solar flares, supernova or galactic super-waves, or cometary encounters, made huge impressions on our ancestors and left indelible if not traumatic memories in our collective psyche which may influence the behaviour of the people of today. This is in essence the primary hypothesis of Russian psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky.

CHAMBERS GORGE GLYPHS PAINTED ON A CHAMBERS GORGE ROCK (2002)

With my painted rocks I have tried to honour all the kingdoms of life, all the beings and forces of nature, all of the cosmic energies and processes, all of the ancient cosmologies and spiritual traditions.

I have never dug out any rocks nor forcibly extracted any of them; if I find some nice ones, I try to obtain indigenous approval and barring that, ask spirit if it's ok to paint some. If I am unsure at all, I never bring any. And if I pick one up but decide not to bring it, I apologize to it.

I don't hurt or injure my rocks but care for them, honour them, nurture them as the sacred body of Mother Earth they each truly are. I could not possibly guess how many hours I have spent in direct contact with rocks in the act of painting them, but it would be thousands of hours. Professional geologists and stone masons might have more hours of direct physical contact, but their relationship would not be nearly so gentle and loving as is mine!

LIESBET WITH ROCK FAMILY, NORTHEAST COAST SOUTH ISLAND NZ 2010

The rocks I have painted on have come from a wide variety of geological types, but the one thing almost all of them have in common is that they have been shaped by water. The vast majority of all my rocks have come from beaches, often where rivers enter the sea.

I ask if they want to come, and if so, I bathe, caress, touch, massage and tickle them with my brushes as I adorn them with beautiful patterns and colours, honouring hine ahu one and the infinite creativity of life herself. When someone holds my rocks they are touching the Earth in a kind and loving way. I also only paint one side of the rock so it can breathe!

SOME STATISTICS ON MY ROCK PAINTING

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO PAINT A ROCK?

First I will answer my most often asked question, "Jeff, so how long does it take to paint a rock?" I have answered this thousands of times and have tried to be as accurate as possible. I explain that most of the time it takes to paint a rock is for the layers of paint to dry, which can be minutes to hours depending on conditions. I usually work on many at once, and may have as many as a hundred or more on my table at any given time. If I am working on at least a dozen or two, I can pretty much keep going as I move from rock to rock. So for the average rock, the actual painting time is probably no more than about 30 minutes or so, but the drying time would be hours. In general, if I have reasonably dry and warm conditions, if I start from blank rocks, I can get backgrounds done then the border then the design layers for say a dozen rocks in 4-6 hours plus or minus. That gives the 30 min/rock figure again, but I can't paint a rock in 30 minutes. Statistics can be misleading eh?

AOTEA ROCK LAB, 2018

HOW MANY ROCKS HAVE I PAINTED?

I haven't counted every single rock I've ever painted but after the first few years I began to make a tally at year's end. I knew about how many sets I'd sold and how many I'd given away. In 2004 I knew I was at around the 20,000 rock mark since beginning in 1993. I took an average size per rock, based on the average diameter being around 7 cm, computed the surface area per rock and multiplied that by 20,000 and came out with a rectangle approximately 25 metres square, about the size of a 3 bedroom house!

I seem to be rocking out at about 2,000 per year, which gives an average of about 40 per week which is about right. Now I'm crossing the 58,000 rock lodestone. This is 2.5 times as many as in 2004, so I must now have covered an area the size of a trendy 4 bedroom house! I've always imagined what it might look like to have all my painted rocks laid out side by side...that would be like a cross between the Taj Mahal and the Burrup Peninsula in the Pilbara region of western Australia...one of the most elaborate examples of design/engineering and the site of the greatest concentration of ancient rock art in Australia and probably the world.

ROCK PLATTER, AOTEA 2019

'VIRTUAL ROCK MANDALA', DARWIN, 2004

They look cool together, kind of like members of a family or parts of a cell. Maybe one day I'll paint my 'ultimate rock mandala' which will have a picture of a rock for every life form who exists on Mother Earth.

HOW MUCH DO ALL MY ROCKS WEIGH?

Given the figure of the mass of the Earth being on the order of 5.972 times 10 to the 24th kgs, if I've painted 58,000 rocks with an average weight of 50 grams, I would have painted roughly 1/10 to the 20th % of the Earth's mass, or about 2,900 kgs, or roughly 2.9 metric tons.

A trifle of the whole, but not insignificant when you consider that each and every rock, almost without exception, has been individually selected, collected, gathered, moved, transport, shipped and relocated numerous times on its journey from old home to new, some rocks traversing many thousands of kms in this process. They go in the post and with me everywhere I travel, by surface, water or air. If I had more time I could launch into some more math computing the amount of work in a physics sense I've done in moving all these rocks. This would yield a figure in Newtons or Joules and would no doubt have plenty of zeroes. Will save this for a later date...

AUNTIE DAWN BLAZELY, TASMANIAN HEALER (2020)

TASMANIAN PHOTOGRAPHER RICKY MAYNARD
(rock in his right hand from central desert mid-90's = the only painted rock
I'd ever seen in Australia that was done before my arrival)

INDIGENOUS ELDERS WHO OWN MY ROCKS

In addition to all the 'famous people' I've already named who have my rocks, I could add the names of well-known and highly influential minds and researchers I've sent or given them to, including the late Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Dr. Claudia von Werlhof, Dr. Nick Begich, Dr. Fritjof Capra and Dr. David Stannard; whale researchers Wally Franklin, Roger Payne, Iain Kerr and his best mate Patrick 'Jean Luc Piccard' Stewart. I could list names of well-known musicians like Ralph Towner and his band Oregon, Bela Fleck, Gordon Lightfoot, and Sting and his merry band of managers/accountants.

Many non-human friends have my rocks, including trees, mountain tops, and larger fellow rocks. I tend to bury or hide these gift rocks so that they remain undisturbed by sapiens probosces.

The human people who I am proudest of to have my rocks are the indigenous elders, primarily of Australia, who I love so dearly. At least three dozen elders of as many nations have my rocks and other art and have been blessing my journey and endeavours for the last 20 years if not longer.

Maori elders in New Zealand have my rocks, like Rodney Ngwaka of Aotea and Rose Pere of Lake Waikaromoana. Here in Australia, the first elder to get one of my rocks was Uncle Bob Randall, custodian of Uluru and spokesperson for indigenous people world-wide. In 2000 I met someone in Byron Bay who knew bob and thought he and I would like each other. At that time the central desert seemed light-years away, so I gave them a rock to give to Bob.

UNCLE BOB'S FIRST ROCK FROM 2000

In 2016 I saw Bob on a John Pilger doco and loved what he had to say, so I made a very special rock for him and endeavoured to give it to him in person. It was taking me a while to get there and he passed away in 2017 before I could meet him. I met his widow Barbara and she showed me that rock that Bob had had since 2000, which was extremely cool. I held on to Bob's rock but made duplicates for Barbara, his niece and grand-daughter, and left one for him at his sacred water hole at Uluru.

UNCLE BOB'S NEW ROCK...SHE TRAVELS WITH ME ALWAYS :)

A FEW OF MY FAVOURITE ROCKS

In recent years dominant themes in my art, whether on rocks, canvasses or murals, has been sea-life and astronomical themes.

BANDIE, IN HONOUR OF MY CLOSEST-EVER BIRD FRIEND, AOTEA

MY FIRST HONEY-BEE, WITH BANKSIA, AOTEA

MY FIRST KOALAS

MY FIRST COCKATOOS

PAIKEA-ANIWANIWA STAR NAVIGATION

TE AHUMATA CRYSTALLINE ENERGY, AOTEA

DRAGON-FLY, AOTEA

TIBETAN MANTRA, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO, MID-90'S

'RIVER OF HEAVEN' (DARWIN, 2004)/CONTROL ROCK (2017)

CETACEAN DREAM-TIME ASTRONOMY ROCKS (2019)

SOME OF MY MUSIC DEDICATED TO ROCKS

WITH DJED PILLAR, MOTHER EARTH TEMPLE,
FLINDERS ISLAND, TASMANIA, 2011

'THEME FROM THE ROCKIST'
https://soundcloud.com/jeff-wefferson/17-gat-fx-theme-from

This track has me playing 3 multi-tracked guitars, my own modified Crafter steel 6-string, a Peter Stephen Spanish guitar, and a Takemine 12-string, recorded by Ian McAllister in 2007

'THE KEY OF ROCKS' White Electric Dog Transmissions cd (1998)
https://soundcloud.com/jeff-weffiops/07-wedt-the-key-of-rocks?in=jeff-weffiops/sets/the-white-electric-dog

"FIRST ANCESTOR" cd (2002)
https://soundcloud.com/jeff-weffersonic/sets/first-ancestor-the-brink-jeff

LIESBET WITH ROCK-FLOWERS, CASTLE HILL

WITH BARRY BRAILSFORD & CUSHLA DENTON, CASTLE HILL 2013

'SONG OF WAITAHA'
https://soundcloud.com/jeff-weffersonic/05-fa-song-of-waitaha-1?in=jeff-weffersonic/sets/first-ancestor-the-brink-jeff

WITH MY FLUTE, BARRY'S PLACE, CASTLE HILL

'GEO-SIDERAL (ROCK STAR THEME)'
https://soundcloud.com/jeff-weffersonic/05-fa-song-of-waitaha-1?in=jeff-weffersonic/sets/first-ancestor-the-brink-jeff

SOME OF MY FAVOURITE MONOLITHS

LIESBET WITH MAROTINI, CASTLE HILL, SOUTH ISLAND NZ, 2012

TE AHUMATA (WHITECLIFFS), AOTEA
[the largest outcropping of quartzite in southern hemisphere]

TE TOKO O KAHU KURA, AOTEA

MOUNT TITIROA, FIORDLAND NZ
[isolated dome of pink granite with quartzite outcroppings]

STRZEZLECKI GODDESS DREAMING, FLINDERS ISLAND TASMANIA

STRZEZLECKI RANGE FLINDERS ISLAND TASMANIA

NOSE ROCK, BOTTLE NECK BAY, FLINDERS ISLAND TASMANIA

YIN-YANG ROCKS, BOTTLE NECK BAY, FLINDERS ISLAND TASMANIA

OLD MAN'S HEAD SNOOZING, FLINDERS ISLAND TASMANIA

SANDSTONE ANCESTOR, BOODHI N.P., CENTRAL COAST NSW

WUDJUB-GUYUM (HOLLOW MOUNTAIN, GARIWERD N.P. VICTORIA

ULURU, CENTRAL DESERT, NT

BURRINGURRAH (MT. AUGUSTUS), WESTERN AUSTRALIA

WILPENA POUND/IKARA, FLINDERS RANGES SA

TOP END/AUS ADVENTURE UPDATE

Whew! This has been another time-consuming blog post that's taken me all week to get done, partly due to having to relocate to another part of Darwin, much closer to the ocean and to the Botanical Garden, but even more due to an as yet unresolved computer issue that is forcing me to have to do my mailchimp on a borrowed pc laptop, which means that everything takes twice as long.

This has also been my very first OTB broadcast and post dedicated exclusively to my beloved painted rocks, who truly are my children! They ae so stoned that they don't need to go to college.

ORDER SOME NOW FOR CHRISTMAS and then you can be LEGALLY STONED just like four police officers in New Zealand, including the two top administrators for the Auckland region who I met on the plane last year.

PETER WEIR/SARAH MCLACHLAN

WITH MY OWN PERSONAL COLLECTION, AOTEA 2019 :)

**WITH MY OWN PERSONAL COLLECTION, AOTEA 2019 :)**