Eddy Harris was born at Wilcannia Hospital in 1961, and has become a well-known artist and teacher. Recently, while they were yarning over mugs of tea, Karin Donaldson asked him how his life as an artist developed.
Karin: Did art feature in your early life, Eddy?
Uncle Eddy: When I was a kid, I liked sport and I liked drawing. I drew in the sand on the river bank – I’d draw lines and little stick people when I was down the river with my granny and my aunties and that. At night when the sun dropped and it was a time to relax, the fire would be going and they used to talk about good and bad spirits, and about discipline and respect. As you get older you think about these things, visualise it.
When Mum died, she left a little port with a lot of papers in it and when I was fossicking though it with my sister Colleen, I found some merit awards I got at Central School. In 1973, I got first place in the broad jump and in 1974 I got an award for effort in Social Science and a distinction award in art. So it shows that I liked doing art back in my school days.
Karin: What direction did your art take when you grew up?
Uncle Eddy: In 1988, I started painting lizards and turtles on sandshoes. People who were interested in Aboriginal people and our practices were interested in what I was doing and they started buying them.Then in the 1990s I started making artefacts – clap sticks and boomerangs – then bowls out of river red gum wood. I started doing small paintings on canvas too, and a lot of my Mob used to laugh at my paintings! They reckoned my turtles looked like they were run over! But that motivated me – and they stopped laughing when I started selling them. They thought “Maybe I should start painting turtles too, that look like they were run over!”
I was living in Broken Hill in the 1990s. I volunteered time to the Broken Hill Local Aboriginal Land Council, and in return the Land Council got art materials for me and my brothers Brian and Tevor. We started making artefacts on a 50/50 basis – each month we got 50 per cent of the profits from our sales and 50 per cent back to buying materials. It was a good thing, because Broken Hill is a tourist town. Other Mobs got interested in what we were doing and came to have a look. Later on, TAFE approached me to be an art teacher. I used to teach at Menindee and at weekends I came back to Wilcannia to see my brothers and family – my old brother Tossle started carving then. It was good to have that connection back home. I’m qualified in teaching, I got to Certificate 4 at Narrandera and I’ve taught in different places – prisons, Juvenile Justice Centres and back home with CDEP.
Karin: So art has always been an important part of your life.
Uncle Eddy: Yes, from the 1990s on I kept doing art and I loved what I do. Art is tricky – there’s three levels. There’s the tourist one, then the medium one is artefacts made with traditional materials and the high-end one is painting on canvas. It’s easy to get caught up in making art for which section. You have to think about it. And are you going to do art for a hobby or a business? When you do it for a hobby, you take your time. When you do it for business, it’s a lot different. No one can tell you what to do – it’s how you decide to regulate your prices and the value of your artwork.
Karin: Have the subjects you paint changed over the years?
Uncle Eddy: The subjects were always there, but you’ll feel when it’s time to paint what’s in your creative mind. You’ve got to be patient with art – patient with what you want to do, where you want to go, telling your story.
This article appeared in Wilcannia News, October 2023.
