Freddie Timms / Patterson Gorge

Freddie took his name, Ngarrmaliny, from his birthplace on Bedford Downs Station. He spent years as a stockman, fencer and handyman on stations across the region, working alongside Rover Thomas, and that intimate knowledge of rivers, stock routes and waterholes became the basis of his art when he started painting in the late 1980s.

His broad planes of ochre, divided by winding lines and dotted borders, look like aerial maps of places he knew from a lifetime of station work. Some works also confront frontier violence and dispossession. The NGV acquired Violet Valley in 1990, he was a six-time National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award finalist, and his work hangs in the National Gallery of Australia and the Australian War Memorial. Freddie passed away in 2017 and was a valued friend of Artlandish for over 17 years.