BLACKFELLA CREEK 2004
This three-panel work shows country around Blackfella Creek on Lissadell Station north of Warmun (Warrmarn – Turkey Creek) and close to the Argyle Diamond. It is a frequent painting subject for the artist. Timms spent a lot of time with his grandmother when very young and listened to her stories of her time with Major, a man who has been described variously as an ‘outlaw’, a ‘bushranger’ and a ‘rebel’.
Major was an Aboriginal man, possibly Wardaman, from country near Katherine, who was brought when he was very young to Texas Downs, east of Warmun, by a man called Jack Kelly. He was badly mistreated in the name of ‘child rearing’ and ‘quietening the savage’. 1 After several brutal incidents, he took to the hills north of Turkey Creek, holding up travellers as a bushranger. He was hunted down by police and killed near a place called Nine Mile, to the east of Warmun. Before his last fatal journey, he killed three men at Blackfella Creek, a small station settlement that is now part of Lissadell. (The historical accounts say he killed two men but the artist who heard the story from his grandmother says three.) The white men he killed are said to have been with the murderers who killed a large number of the artist’s grandmother’s relations at Mistake Creek. After surviving the massacre, the artist’s grandmother and her sister were taken to Blackfella Creek Station by the white men.
Major was watching the place from on top of the hill, his ‘lookout’, shown as the little circle in the lower part of the black hill in the centre of the right side of the painting. He came down to the goat yard, shown by the black rectangle. He killed two of the white men with an axe and shot the manager. The homestead is shown as the black dot right on the creek. The other small black circle is the place where the men are buried.
Major picked up Freddie’s grandmother and her sister after that and took them back to join his party in the hills. Later, Major and his party left the hideout and went on east, through Texas Downs, hiding their footprints by dragging leafy branches along the ground on the way to Nine Mile and Major’s death.
As with much of the artist’s work, his detailed knowledge of the landscape gained while living and working as a stockman in the country enables him to create an abstract aerial view of the main topographic features of a section of the land. This becomes an idealised map that works as a flowing form, colour and space relationship on canvas. The roads and creeks become sensual flowing lines. The boulder covered hills and cliffs are realised as rounded shapes, and the undulating flats become the background.
In this painting, Blackfella Creek runs down from the top of the right-hand panel to a large waterhole near the old homestead and the place where the white men were killed. Bamboo Creek starts in the top right-hand corner of the left panel and crosses the upper part of the painting to join Blackfella Creek. Emu Creek, shown with two large waterholes, crosses the centre of the painting, joining Blackfella Creek near the old station.
A road coming from Camel Creek Yard runs from the bottom of the left side of the right-hand panel. It bends around above the waterhole at Blackfella Creek, going on to Number Four bore and old Lissadell (now under the water of Lake Argyle), then on to Kilfoyle and the Duncan Highway. Another road turns off to Number Three bore, shown as the small black circle in the middle of the painting.
Part of Waterfall hill is shown in black in the lower part of the left panel of the painting. The small pink shape shows a little hill and the larger pink shape is part of a long range called Gawurrngarndiny, the place of the female plains kangaroo. The red shapes at the top of the painting show the part of the hills that are the source of Bamboo Creek. At the bottom of the painting, the black shape shows part of a hill near Cattle Creek bore on Texas Downs, south of Lissadell.
Emu Creek crosses a big plain where Major travelled on his way east. The artist lived on Lissadell for a large part of his early life and travelled through country, both on foot and on horseback, when working as a stockman As well as hearing the stories from his grandmother, he was shown the places by older stockmen when working there.2.
1. B. Shaw, ‘Heroism against white rule: The ‘rebel’ Major’, in E. Fry (ed.), Rebels and Radicals, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1983, p. 12.
2. For a longer account by this artist of the story of Major, see Oliver, T., M. Langton & F. Kofod, Blood on the Spinifex, exhibition catalogue, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, 2002.
courtesy the artist, Jirrawun Arts and Sherman Galleries, Sydney
