Eddie Blitner / Mimi Spirits and Brolga Dreaming (EB773)

Edward (Eddie) Blitner was born in Katherine, Northern Territory, in 1961. His bush name is Taiita. He is a Marra and Alawa man with connections to Naiyalrindji Country and Ngukurr on the Roper River in south-east Arnhem Land. Ngukurr is home to people from several clans and language groups who are collectively known as Yugul Mangi.

Eddie spent part of his early life at Ngukurr before attending Concordia College in Adelaide, where he remained until the age of sixteen. After returning to the Northern Territory, he worked as a stockman and general hand on Victoria River Downs. Over the years, he has also lived and worked throughout the Katherine, Victoria River and East Kimberley regions.

Eddie began learning to paint and carve when he was around seven years old. His grandfathers Fred, Gerry and Donald were artists and carvers who worked with natural ochres on bark and wood. Eddie recalls:

“My grandfathers, Fred, Gerry and Donald, would be painting or carving, and we kids would sit around them and watch them grind the ochres and mix the colours. After a while they would tell us the story for that particular painting and also teach us the songs and dances for that story. When they were in a very good mood, they let us paint the sides of the bark painting. That was my start.”

Through his grandfathers and other senior family members, Eddie learnt about painting, carving, ceremony and the cultural stories connected with his Country. Members of his Barbil clan also taught him traditional skills, including making flint spearheads and hunting boomerangs, fishing, hunting, finding bush foods and preparing bush medicines.

Eddie has continued to share his painting, carving and cultural knowledge with children and younger people, carrying forward the tradition of learning from family and Elders that shaped his own early years.

Alongside his painting practice, Eddie is an accomplished woodcarver and yidaki (didgeridoo) maker. He has created detailed carvings of birds and other animals, including large bird sculptures decorated with finely painted cross-hatched designs.

Eddie’s paintings draw upon the visual traditions and subject matter of southern Arnhem Land. He is particularly recognised for his precise use of rarrk, the fine cross-hatching that gives his figures pattern, movement and depth. Working primarily with ochre-inspired reds, yellows, browns, black and white, he combines traditional techniques with his own distinctive arrangements of overlapping and interconnected forms.

His best-known subjects include Mimi spirit figures, Rainbow Serpents and the abundant wildlife of the Roper River and its freshwater billabongs. Brolgas, magpie geese, barramundi, turtles, crocodiles, goannas, kangaroos and water plants frequently appear throughout his work. Animals are sometimes represented in an X-ray style, revealing their internal structures and reflecting Eddie’s intimate knowledge of the creatures and environments of his Country.

Eddie also paints men’s hunting and fishing scenes, corroboree and ceremonial subjects, bush tucker and ancestral stories. His compositions are often complex and highly animated, with figures moving through and around one another rather than appearing as separate, static images.

Through his distinctive use of rarrk and carefully layered imagery, Eddie continues the stories and artistic knowledge passed down by his family and Elders while creating a contemporary body of work that is immediately recognisable as his own.

AWARDS
• 1999 First Prize, Barunga Aboriginal Cultural Festival
• 1998 Finalist, 15th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Darwin NT

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
• 2023 Artists of the North Country: Arnhem Land and Beyond, Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane QLD
• 2018 Edward Blitner: Freshwater Billabongs, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle WA
• 2017 Making a Splash: Mermaids and Modernity, Macquarie University Art Gallery, Sydney NSW
• 2012 Edward Blitner: Stories from my Grandfather, Japingka Gallery, Fremantle WA
• 2009 Rock Spirits, Central Art, Alice Springs NT
• 2000 Love Magic, Sydney NSW
• 1999 Spirits of the Dreaming, Darling Harbour, Sydney NSW
• 1998 15th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Darwin NT

In the Dreamtime Ancestral Beings walked throughout Arnhemland teaching law and ceremony to Aborigines, creating sacred sites, and instilling into young men the need for strict discipline both in their private and ceremonial life. A boy was to stay with his mother until the age of 5, when his uncle would take him out into the bush for six months of concentrated instructions, and this pattern would be followed until he had passed through the initial age grading ceremonies. At the age of 18 he would be considered a fit and proper person to marry, if he had a promised wife. Until then his father or his uncle would be teaching him the technique of painting, but it was not until the age of about 25 that he would begin to learn the sacred meanings of the myths which he would now be allowed to paint.

One of these myths, which is told in song and dance cycles in ceremonies, concerns the Ancestral Being who was out walking through the bush one day when he had a premonition that he was being followed. He quickly turned his head and saw two hunters with spears upraised. He ran towards a billabong and changed into Ngalyod the Rainbow Serpent. When the two men peered into the water Ngalyod reared up and bit each one in turn, killing them immediately.

Emerging from the waterhole he changed back into his human shape, then to avoid further danger transformed himself into a brolga and flew up into the air. Winging his way through the sky, he saw below him a group of brolgas dancing on the plains. He flew down and joined them, and decided to stay with them until it was time to die.

When that time came he would metamorphose into a rock or some other natural phenomena, in which his spirit would live on forever. Ancestral Beings of the Dreamtime had the power to transform their shape at will, either to avoid danger or when they felt their time had come to die.

In sacred ceremonies men paint their chests with the design of their chief Ancestral Being. Thus many men have the brolga design on their bodies and are known as “brolga men”, descended from “Old Man Brolga”. Others might have fish or another creature painted on their chests, and all pay homage to their First Ancestor.