Major, the East Kimberley bushranger

Major, the East Kimberley Bushranger presents artworks by Freddie Timms and Timmy Timms drawn from the Art Gallery’s collection and loans which detail vital stories from the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Referencing the frontier period that saw violence against Aboriginal communities across Australia from 1788 to the 1930s, these works consider the resistance and survival of Aboriginal families in this region. 

Freddie Timms, born at Ngarrmaliny/Police Hole near Bedford Downs Station, worked primarily as a stockman at various East Kimberley cattle stations before turning to art – painting in the East Kimberley style of expanses of natural-coloured pigments lined with white dots. Timms was a prominent artist and advocate for artists’ moral rights and intellectual property issues in the East Kimberley. He was among a group of artists working at Jirrawun Arts that possessed the courage to bring awareness to the violence their families endured. Timms’s paintings recall the story of Major, a Wagiman rebel and bushranger originally from the Daly River region in the Northern Territory.

Born in the late 1880s, Major reportedly shot and killed white men at Blackfella Creek in retribution for a massacre of Gija people at a place known as Mistake Creek. Freddie Timms’s grandmother survived the massacre with Major’s help and later shared these accounts with the artist. Major was ultimately led to his death at the hands of Western Australian police in 1908.

Timms’s 1999 painting, Major, features expansive planes of natural pigments, creating a pared-back depiction of Country. Major stands in a heroic pose at the centre of the painting, outlined in a double row of dots. He looks directly at the viewer, wearing a square helmet recalling Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings. This painting is derived from a body of work developed by Timms following an encounter with Nolan’s Ned Kelly series. Some of these first works are included in the display.

Timmy Timms spent his childhood on Bow River and Lissadell stations, later working as a stockman and fencer across the East Kimberley. Timms was instrumental among East Kimberley artists in painting the history of massacres. His works on display recount frontier killings at Mistake Creek and Bedford Downs, stories shared among his family through oral narratives and joonba (song and dance performances). Timms’s paintings challenge the silence surrounding these massacres and the widespread frontier violence of Australia’s colonial past.

Mistake Creek Massacre 2000 recounts a massacre where a group of Aboriginal people, including some of Timms’s family, were shot and killed by three men in a gorge near Mistake Creek. Dark forms symbolise significant details of the landscape connected to this history. Close to the centre of the work is a large boab tree – a form that Timms and his sister Peggy Patrick both painted – reflecting where many of their mother’s family were murdered. Timms explains, ‘The boab tree grows close to the grave site. That’s the story. White people call it Mistake Creek. We call it “Gurtbelayin” – the place where many were killed at one time.’

Present in this display are artworks that have not been exhibited for decades. Blackfella Creek 2002, a monumental six-panel painting by Freddie Timms, has made its first public appearance since 2003 when it was last displayed in Blood on the Spinifex at Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne and is graciously on loan from the collection of Arnold Bloch Leibler. Notably, The Kelly Gang 2004 is on show to the public for the first time in 22 years in a landmark appearance, on loan from a private collection.

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Kieara Quintal, assistant curator, First Nations art (local and global).

Major, the East Kimberley Bushranger, Naala Nura building, ground floor, until 4 April, free

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