Eddie Blitner Taiita b. 1961

Edward (Eddie) Blitner was born in 1961 and is from the Ngukurr Community (now called Yugul Mangi) in Naijarlindji country on the Roper River, approx. 270km south-east of Katherine in the Northern Territory. Eddie attended school at Concordia College in Adelaide until he was sixteen years old, and as a young man he worked as a stockman and farmhand. Eddie began learning to paint when he was about 7 years old, and was taught by his grandfather, who would paint on bark with natural ochre pigments.

The artistic inheritance Eddie received was broader than painting alone. His grandfathers Fred, Gerry and Donald were artists and carvers who worked in natural ochres on bark and wood, and Eddie learned both crafts — today he is also an accomplished didgeridoo maker, and his large carved birds, some standing two metres tall, are remarkable objects in their own right. His working life gave him an unusually wide knowledge of the north: after his stockman years on the vast Victoria River Downs station he lived and worked across the Katherine, Victoria River and East Kimberley regions, moving among the many language groups whose countries stretch from the Roper River to Kununurra.

When he was young, Eddie was at the Gurindji Strike or Wave Hill walkout, famously led by Vincent Lingiari in 1966 - this eventually led to the return of a portion of homelands to the Gurindji people, and the passing of the first legislation that allowed First Nations peoples to claim land title.

Through traditional pathways, Eddie has earned the permissions to paint the spirit ancestors of his people. He paints using the technique of cross-hatching (rarrk) to depict the spirits and animals of his homeland. His Dreamings include Mimi Spirits and the Rainbow Serpent. The Mimi are the tiny, match-thin beings believed to have lived in the rock escarpments since the beginning of time — in the Dreamtime it was the Mimi who taught people to hunt, fish, weave and paint on rock. Deeply shy, they hide inside the boulders through the day and emerge at night by blowing holes in the rock, bringing with them their weapons and their pets: goannas, echidnas, rock wallabies, barramundi, brolgas and small rock pythons among them — and the surest way to anger a Mimi is to harm one of its pets. Eddie renders these figures with an accompanying story in every work, often alongside totems, bush tucker, X-ray style animals and corroboree scenes, in a meticulous, fastidious hand.

Eddie's exhibition record reaches back decades: he was a selected entrant in the 15th National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 1998, has held solo exhibitions at Japingka Gallery in Fremantle — Stories from my Grandfather (2012) and Freshwater Billabongs (2018) — and his work appeared in Making a Splash: Mermaids and Modernity at Macquarie University Art Gallery in 2017 and Artists of the North Country at Mitchell Fine Art, Brisbane, in 2023. He has also taken first prize at the Barunga Aboriginal Cultural Festival. He is a sought-after artist, represented in collections around the world.