Freddie Timms was born at Police Hole c.1946, and followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a stockman on Lissadell Station as a young man. After an eventful life on stations throughout the East Kimberley he settled at Frog Hollow, a small outstation about 20 Km from the newly established community at Warmun, and worked for a time as a gardener at the nascent Argyle Mine.
He began painting in 1986, in the company of elder artists such as Rover Thomas and Hector Jandanay, who were already achieving notoriety at this time. Waringarri Arts, in Kununurra, was newly established and Timms requested art materials from Joel Smoker, the first art coordinator to visit the community on a regular basis. Smoker recognized Freddie’s potential in his first distinctive canvasses and noted his confident grasp of the medium from the outset.
During the last 25 years Timms has become renowned for depicting sites associated with the displacement of his people and the loss of their country. Yet rather than being overt political statements about the ruthlessness and brutality of colonization or the political process of dispossession, his intimate map-like interpretations of country are most commonly rendered with an experiential feel.
His first exhibition was held at Deutscher, Gertrude Street, in 1989 to critical acclaim. It included a superb masterpiece Mandangala, North Turkey Creek, 1989. In what appeared as a new and beautiful sense of irregular geometry, soft yet boldly defined blocks of colour depicted the area of Glen Hill and the Argyle Diamond Mine to the north of Turkey Creek. The fact that it now lay beneath water, having been flooded by the damming of the Ord River made the work all the more poignant. There had been no consultation with the traditional Gidja owners. The places where he and his countrymen used walk and camp, along with all its ancestral burial grounds and sacred places, were simply buried beneath the rising waters.
During the mid 1990’s Freddie traveled often in the company of Kimberley master, Rover Thomas. He painted a large body of works for Kimberley Art Gallery through its association with the Warmun Community, including two works which currently hold the artist’s highest and third highest prices at auction. Both employ a broader, more colourful palate, than the natural earth pigments widely adopted by other East Kimberley artists. By 1999, Freddie Timms was represented by one of Sydney’s most highly regarded dealers, Frank Watters. His exhibition that year explored the history of an Indigenous bushranger named Major who was shot by police in 1908, after killing whites at Blackfeller Creek. Timms eventually left Watters Gallery and returned to the Kimberley to establish the Jirrawun Aboriginal Art Corporation with help from artist and dealer Tony Oliver.