Seeing Aboriginal Art: Settler Classifications of the Work of William Barak

Abstract

This article sets out to demonstrate the uneven history of settler-Australians’ labelling of Indigenous cultural objects and documents as ‘art’. Using the case of William Barak (c. 1824–1903) as its example, it asks, how was Barak’s work understood prior to the major re-evaluations of Aboriginal art as ‘art’ in the 1980s? A series of fleeting moments of understanding, exchange and recognition provide a hitherto-overlooked genealogy of the shifting reception of Barak’s paintings and drawings within his own lifetime and up to the 1940s. These moments encompass his agency in diplomatic exchange, his peer-to-peer relationships in Melbourne’s colonial artworld, and the early placement of Barak’s work in cultural institutions leading eventually to the first inclusion of his work in an art exhibition in 1943. Selected examples from this trajectory demonstrate an uneven path to recognition while illustrating their ability to exceed the category of art from a western viewpoint.

Notes

1 I use the term Kulin Nation to denote several language groups who gathered at Coranderrk at different times. It denotes many commonalities in language and cultural practices, but is not intended to homogenise the groups within: Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Wathaurong, Boon Wurrung and Taungurung. This article contains outdated spelling and terms, some of which are considered unacceptable or offensive, in quotes drawn from historical sources.

2 For further details see Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, paperback ed. (Melbourne: Oxford University Press in Association with National Gallery of Australia, 1996), 20.

3 Notably, the locations of some reserves were chosen by Kulin people themselves. See also Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds, Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

4 Philip Jones, ‘Perceptions of Aboriginal Art’, in Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia, ed. Peter Sutton (New York: G. Braziller in association with Asia Society Galleries, 1988), 143–79, 144.

5 See Catherine Speck in this issue.

6 Darren Jorgensen and Ian McLean, Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal Art (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2017); Howard Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon, 1998); Wally Caruana, Aboriginal Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003); Andrew Sayers, Australian Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Philip Jones, ‘Perceptions of Aboriginal Art’; Ian McLean, Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art (London: Reaktion, 2016); Sasha Grishin, Australian Art: A History (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, 2013).

7 Carolyn Dean, ‘The Trouble with (the Term) Art’, Art Journal 65, no. 2 (2006): 30, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2006.10791203 (accessed 1 May 2023).

8 Jack Latimore and Nell Geraets, ‘Barak where it Belongs: Indigenous Art Returns Home After Auction Win’, Age, 26 May 2022, https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/barak-where-it-belongs-indigenous-art-returns-home-after-auction-win-20220526-p5aonl.html (accessed 18 July 2022).

9 A North American example is Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, ‘Introduction’, in Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast, eds. Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse and Aldona Jonaitis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020); Nikita Vanderbyl, ‘Price and Provenance: William Barak as an Artist in the Market’, in Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous Art, eds. Sarah Scott, Helen McDonald and Caroline Jordan (London: Routledge, 2023).

10 Dean, 27.

11 Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century; Carol Cooper, ‘Remembering Barak’, in Remembering Barak, eds. Judith Ryan, Carol Cooper, Joy Murphy-Wandin and National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003).

12 Barak’s descendants trace their lineage via his sister Annie aka Borate (c. 1838–1871). On ‘cultural documents’, see Latimore and Geraets.

13 Latimore and Geraets.

14 Sylvia Kleinert, ‘“Keeping up the Culture”: Gunai Engagements with Tourism’, Oceania 82, no. 1 (2012), https://doi.org/10.2307/23209619 (accessed 1 May 2023).

15 ‘Explorers in Petticoats: Women Wanderers who have Helped to make the World's Maps’, Wellington Times (NSW), 6 January 1919, 4, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article143238165 (accessed 2 February 2022).

16 ‘The Governor on Tour. Visit to Coranderrk. An Aboriginal’s Present to the Queen’, Argus, 26 October 1897, 5, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article9776628 (accessed 2 February 2022); ‘Lord Brassey at Coranderrk. An Aboriginal Welcome’, The Age, 26 October 1897, 5. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article188154748 (accessed 3 February 2022); ‘Lord Brassey at Coranderrk’, Mount Alexander Mail (Victoria), 27 October 1897, 3, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article200222960 (accessed 2 February 2022); ‘Vice-Regal Visit’ Healesville Guardian, 29 October 1897, 2, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article60281582 (accessed 3 February 2022).

17 One reporter noted that the Queen was no longer receiving gifts ‘from those of her subjects who were personally unknown to her’ in, ‘The Governor on Tour. Visit to Coranderrk. An Aboriginal’s present to the Queen’; ‘Lord Brassey at Coranderrk’, 3.

18 ‘The Governor on Tour. Visit to Coranderrk. An Aboriginal’s present to the Queen’.

19 ‘Lord Brassey at Coranderrk’, 3.

20 Ibid.

21 Alfred William Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (London: MacMillan and Co., 1904), 108; Diane E. Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk, eds. Laura E. Barwick and Richard E. Barwick (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 1998).

22 , ‘The Governor on Tour. Visit to Coranderrk. An Aboriginal’s present to the Queen’.

23 Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, 13.

24 ‘The Governor on Tour. Visit to Coranderrk. An Aboriginal’s present to the Queen’.

25 Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, 20.

26 ‘The Governor on Tour. Visit to Coranderrk. An Aboriginal’s present to the Queen’, 5.

27 Ibid.

28 ‘Table Talk’, Table Talk, 29 October 1897, 1, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article145860367 (accessed 3 February 2023); Francis Fraser, ‘A King at Coranderrk’, Australasian, 25 December 1897, 25. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article138632422 (accessed 13 July 2022).

29 Jones, ‘Perceptions of Aboriginal Art’, 144.

30 Ernst Grosse and Claudia Hopkins, ‘Ethnology and Aesthetics’, Art in Translation 6, no. 1 (2014), https://doi.org/10.2752/175613114X13972161909562 (accessed 30 April 2023).

31 Susan Lowish, Rethinking Australia's Art History: The Challenge of Aboriginal art (New York: Routledge, 2018), 105.

32 Thomas Worsnop, The Prehistoric Arts, Manufactures, Works, Weapons, etc., of the Aborigines of Australia (Adelaide: Govt. Printer, 1897); Samuel Thornton, ‘Problems of Aboriginal Art in Australia’, Proceedings of the Victoria Institute (5 April 1897).

33 Jones, ‘Perceptions of Aboriginal Art’, 150.

34 For an explanation of this process for the boomerang, see Philip Jones, ‘The Boomerang's Erratic Flight: The Mutability of Ethnographic Objects’, Journal of Australian Studies 16, no. 35 (1992): 64.

35 Ian D. Clark et al., ‘The Tourism Spectacle of Fire Making at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, Victoria, Australia – A Case Study’, Journal of Heritage Tourism 15, no. 3 (2020): 256, https://doi.org/10.1080/1743873X.2019.1572160 (accessed 12 July 2023).

36 ‘The Governor on Tour. Visit to Coranderrk. An Aboriginal’s present to the Queen’, 5.

37 A. G. L. Shaw, ‘Loch, Henry Brougham (1827–1900)’, in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Canberra: Australian National University, 1974).

38 ‘The Corrobboree Dispute’, Gippsland Farmers' Journal and Traralgon, Heyfield and Rosedale News (Vic.), 3 February 1887, 22, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article227343256 (accessed 26 April 2023); Cooper, ‘Remembering Barak’.

39 Jason Gibson and Russell Mullet, ‘The Last Jeraeil of Gippsland: Rediscovering an Aboriginal Ceremonial Site’, Ethnohistory 67, no. 4 (2020): 555, https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-8579216 (accessed 31 May 2023); Helen Gardner and Patrick McConvell, Southern Anthropology – a History of Fison and Howitt's Kamilaroi and Kurnai, ed. Matt Matsuda (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

40 Gibson and Mullet, 560; Nikita Vanderbyl, ‘Artist and Statesman: William Barak and the Trans-Imperial Circulation of Aboriginal Cultural Objects’ (PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 2019), 112.

41 D. J. Mulvaney, ‘The Anthropologist as Tribal Elder’, Mankind 7 (1970): 213; Gibson and Mullet.

42 Mulvaney, 214.

43 National Archives of Scotland: GD268-647, 137–8, Loch to Deakin, 26 December 1886.

44 ‘The Governor and the Gippsland Corroboree’, Mount Alexander Mail, 3 February 1887, 28, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article198277636 (accessed 26 April 2023); ‘The Corrobboree Dispute’.

45 David Cahir and Ian Clark, ‘“An Edifying Spectacle”: A History of “Tourist Corroborees” in Victoria, Australia, 1835–1870’, Tourism Management 31 (2010): 413, http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/65449 (accessed 23 August 2020).

46 Dick Sandmullet, ‘Corroborees – A Blackfellow’s Letter’, Tasmanian, 19 February 1887, 29.

47 Anne Fraser Bon, ‘Barak an Aboriginal Statesman’, Argus, 28 November 1931, 6, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4438423 (accessed 2 May 2023).

48 For a definition of imperial literacy, see Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Imperial Literacy and Indigenous Rights: Tracing Transoceanic Circuits of a Modern Discourse’, Aboriginal History 37 (2013): 1–28.

49 See Chapter 4 in Vanderbyl, ‘Artist and Statesman’.

50 Shelly Errington, ‘What Became Authentic Primitive Art?’, Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 2 (1994): 208, https://doi.org/10.2307/656240 (accessed 1 May 2023).

51 William Barak at work on the drawing ‘Ceremony’ 1902 photography by Johannes Heyer, National Portrait Gallery. https://www.portrait.gov.au/portraits/2000.33/william-barak-at-work-on-a-drawing-at-coranderrk (accessed 1 May 2023).

52 Bon.

53 Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 72.

54 Cooper, ‘Remembering Barak’, 24.

55 For example Howitt, 255–56.

56 Cooper, ‘Remembering Barak’, 25.

57 Joan M. Cornell, ‘A Victorian House Painter & Plein-airist: John Mather's Early Melbourne Years (1878–1891)’ (Master of Arts in Australian Art, Monash University, 1994).

58 Correspondence of John Mather, Victorian Artists’ Society inward correspondence, MS 7593 box 585/1(b), State Library of Victoria; ‘Mr. John Mather’, Table Talk (Melbourne), 27 February 1891, 7, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/147284260 (accessed 25 January 2022).

59 ‘Item X 81437 Painting. Melbourne, Port Phillip, Victoria, Australia. /12/1894’, Museums Victoria Collections, https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/items/226924 (accessed 4 June 2023).

60 I expand upon the provenance of Barak’s paintings here: Nikita Vanderbyl, ‘William Barak’s Paintings at State Library Victoria’, The La Trobe Journal 103 (2019): 6–24.

61 Ryan et al., Remembering Barak, 6.

62 Cornell, 6.

63 Kathleen Fennessy, A People Learning: Colonial Victorians and their Public Museums, 1860–1880 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly, 2007), 113–62.

64 Carolyn Rasmussen, A Museum for the People: A History of Museum Victoria and its Predecessors, 1854–2000, ed. Victoria Museum (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2001), 402–03.

65 Public Library, Museums, and National Gallery, Report of the Trustees of the Public Library, Museums, & National Gallery of Victoria, for 1895: with a statement of income and expenditure for the financial year 1894–5 (Melbourne: Robt. S. Brain, Government Printer, 1896).

66 ‘Report of the Trustees of the Public Library, Museums, & National Gallery of Victoria, for 1895’.

67 Yarra Ranges Regional Museum: 9657, entries 2 June 1891 and 2 December 1891, Yeringberg Rough Diary.

68 Ada to George de Pury, 23 June 1889, de Pury archives cited in Max Allen, ‘“Not Forgetting yous at All”’, in Oil Paint and Ochre: The Incredible Story of William Barak and the de Purys, eds., Karlie Hawking and Yarra Ranges Regional Museum (Melbourne: Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, 2015), 31.

69 YRRM: 9767.14, Yeringberg Times; 9656, 19 July 1898; 9657, 10 and 11 July 1899; 17 July 1899; 9658, 13 July 1900.

70 Vanderbyl, ‘Artist and Statesman’, 162–63.

71 ‘Oil painting titled ‘King Barak last of the Yarra tribe’, by Arthur Loureiro, 1900’, National Museum of Australia, http://collectionsearch.nma.gov.au/object/8403 (accessed 1 April 2018).

72 SLV: Victorian Artists’ Society: Australian Gallery File no. 2 (1893 to 1895), Victorian Artists’ Society, Exhibition of Australian Art, Past and Present (Melbourne: Victorian Artists’ Society, 1893); Victorian Artists’ Society, Annual Exhibition of the Victorian Artists’ Society: Exhibition Catalogue (September) (Melbourne: Victorian Artists’ Society, 1895).

73 Vanderbyl, ‘Artist and Statesman’, 155.

74 ‘The Collections of the MEN’, Ethnographic Museum of Neuchatel, 2019, https://www.men.ch/en/collections (accessed 3 September 2023).

75 Ken Inglis, Seumas Spark and Jay Winter, Dunera Lives: A Visual History (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2018).

76 Robyn Sloggett, ‘“Has Aboriginal Art a Future?” Leonhard Adam’s 1944 Essay and the Development of the Australian Aboriginal Art Market’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2015): 167–83, https://doi.org/doi:10.1177/1367877913515871 (accessed 13 July 2022).

77 Charles Barrett, A. S. Kenyon and Jas. A. Kershaw, ‘Australian Aboriginal Art: Issued in Connexion with the Exhibition of Australian Aboriginal Art, National Museum, Melbourne’ ed. Museums and National Gallery of Victoria The Public Library (Melbourne: H. J. Green, Government Printer, 1929), 8; ‘Aboriginal Art Show Opened’, Herald (Melbourne), 9 July 1929, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article244104395 (accessed 23 August 2020).

78 Caroline Jordan, ‘Cultural Exchange in the Midst of Chaos: Theodore Sizer's Exhibition “Art of Australia 1788–1941”’, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 13, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2013.11432641 (accessed 1 April 2023).

79 Sloggett, 173.

80 Ibid.

81 Leonhard Adam, Primitive Art Exhibition [Catalogue] (Melbourne: National Gallery & National Museum of Victoria, 1943), iii.

82 Sloggett, 170–71.

83 Leonard Adam, ‘Has Australian Aboriginal Art A Future’, Angry Penguins Autumn (1944): 49.

84 Ibid., 44.

85 ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’, Age (Melbourne), 12 May 1943, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article206848593 (accessed 26 March 2023); ‘Lessons from Primitive Art’, Argus, 12 May 1943, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article11345333 (accessed 26 March 2023).

86 ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’, Age.

87 J. L. M., ‘Melbourne National Gallery and National Museum of Victoria: Primitive Art Exhibition 1943’, Man 43 (1943), http://www.jstor.org.ez.library.latrobe.edu.au/stable/2792381 (accessed 1 April 2023); A. P. Elkin, ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’, Oceania 13, no. 4 (1943).

88 Adam, Primitive Art Exhibition [Catalogue], 11.