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.

William Barak (c.1824–1903) was an Elder, or Ngurungaeta, who led a community of the Kulin people at Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve, outside Melbourne, in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹ At Coranderrk Barak first became known to settler tourists as an artist, producing works on paper and card and using watercolours, ochre and pencil, with earth pigments.² The late 1880s boom – that transformed Melbourne into a great Victorian city and brought the Australian Impressionists into prominence – was a time when Kulin peoples and their culture were marginalised on their own lands. As the city expanded, Kulin peoples were pushed onto designated rural missions and reserves such as Coranderrk, which became places of incarceration as well as cultural survival.³ In these condensed and marginalised spaces, Aboriginal people and their material culture were only partly visible to the newly arriving and expanding settler population. Geographic segregation, however, only goes some way to explaining European blindness to Aboriginal cultural productions: Aboriginal culture was viewed by settlers on a scale of development in human civilisation that saw them as exemplifying primitivism and as a people without art. For most of the period through to the mid-twentieth century, First Nations’ work was exhibited in museum ethnographic collections.⁴

Such views of Aboriginal cultural forms as essentially ethnographic predominated until the 1920s, when modernist artists, notably Margaret Preston, began appropriating Aboriginal culture into their artworks. Interest increased through an ‘exhibitionary pathway’ which saw some Aboriginal cultural objects exhibited in the late 1950s.⁵ But it was not until the 1980s, following the international success of the Western Desert acrylic painting movement that originated in the early 1970s, that Aboriginal cultural works were re-evaluated, resulting in greater appreciation of the aesthetic aspects of First Nations cultural expression, including retrospectively those by Barak himself.⁶ Today, most Anglo Australians encounter Barak’s works in a gallery setting where, seemingly unproblematically, they are placed within a discourse of art. The National Gallery of Victoria displays them, and they have been included in a recent survey of the Australian Impressionists and have fetched high prices at international auction, as demonstrated in May 2022, when an important painting on paper, Corroboree (Women in possum skin cloaks), and a parrying shield by Barak, both formerly hidden in a private collection in Europe, were sold at Sotheby’s New York.

While this sequence of events and changing fortunes is, on the surface, evidence of growing recognition and respect, this article seeks to problematise the application of the category ‘Aboriginal art’ to the cultural productions of Barak that included paintings on paper and bark and weapons and tools. It argues instead that this categorisation remains linked to the perspectives and priorities of a colonising culture, including within the discipline of art history, in which there is little consideration that the Indigenous meanings of the work might exceed the comprehension of a European audience, then or now.⁷ This incongruity in interpretation was starkly revealed in the lead-up to the Sotheby’s auction, during which a community-run, crowd-funding campaign and a last-minute donation by the Victorian government was able to fund the purchase of the works, enabling them to be returned to Australia.⁸ These efforts highlighted two incommensurate systems of value: on the one hand, the commercial valuation of Barak’s works in the international art market, and on the other hand, the desire to repatriate and reclaim works on the basis of their unique cultural and historical value to Barak’s descendants and the wider Aboriginal community involved in their own campaign.⁹

In the following discussion, the terms ‘painting’ and ‘drawing’ are used to denote Barak’s output, while ‘work’ is used to draw attention to the limitations of terms such as ‘art’ and ‘artwork’. Carolyn Dean has argued, for example, that to classify non-Western cultural productions as ‘art’ risks recentring the West and its value systems.¹⁰ According to the art historians Andrew Sayers and Carol Cooper, the description ‘work’ recognises the labour involved in the preservation of cultural knowledge that, in their view, was a defining aspect of Barak’s artistic career.¹¹ Descendants of Barak use a range of terms to refer to his outputs, including ‘cultural object’, ‘cultural document’, and/or ‘cultural artefact’ rather than simply ‘artefact’.¹² Uncle Colin Hunter used the phrase ‘windows onto our past’ when referring to the ‘artworks’ of Barak being auctioned in 2022.¹³ As we do not have Barak’s words for the works he made, we cannot assume that he ever called them ‘art’.

The aim of this article is to explore the tensions between European and First Nations perspectives on cultural productions that in the years following their making became increasingly understood as art. By tracing some of the earliest accounts of the classification, naming and categorisation of Barak’s work as ‘art’, the following sets out to expose the eurocentrism at the heart of this definition. It will demonstrate how, before the emerging recognition of Aboriginal art-as-art in the second half of the twentieth century, the classification of Barak’s work was particularly unstable, articulated in isolated historical moments and contexts. Several encounters will be analysed, the earliest the labelling of a painting or drawing by Barak as ‘Aboriginal art’ in a newspaper report written in the context of a formal visit between the Ngurungaeta and a Victorian governor’s entourage at Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve in 1897, involving performance, gifting and exchange. In this and a related incident reported in 1887, when Barak’s work became a substitute for the colonial governor attending a corroboree, questions arise about the status of work given to Europeans. Was Barak making ‘just a picture’ of an event or was he engaged in something more related to diplomacy on behalf of himself and his people?

The second set of encounters, also in the late 1890s, considers Barak’s personal relationships with some of the European-Australian artists in Victoria who were contemporary with Australian Impressionism. The artists involved included John Mather, who among others, painted Barak’s portrait – an indication of his significance as a leader and of his presence in the lives of these artists. Mather also acquired some of Barak’s paintings, which he later donated to what became the Melbourne Museum. Another artist who painted Barak’s portrait was Victor de Pury, a member of the Swiss-immigrant family of vignerons who ran a vineyard near Barak’s home at Coranderrk and who forged a close friendship with him. The de Purys also collected Barak’s works, including a work that Barak made specifically for one of their family members as a memento of his time in Australia. As in the Mather example, while Barak’s works seem to have been valued and treated as ‘art’ by his artist and family friends and associates, once they were donated to an institution for preservation, they were reclassified within an ethnographic framework.

The final moment examines the first time that Barak’s work was exhibited as art in a gallery exhibition context rather than as an ethnographic object in Melbourne’s museums, in 1943. Notably, this re-evaluation was instigated by a European immigrant curator to Australia, Leonhard Adam, who applied a modernist European framing of Barak’s work as ‘primitive art’. Barak’s incorporation into a primitivist aesthetics coincided with international appreciation for a range of Indigenous cultures by artists and scholars of the then modernist avant-garde. By asking of each of these critical moments of understanding, exchange and changing recognition, ‘art according to whom?’, the article emphasises the arbitrary and uneven incorporation of Aboriginal cultural work, and specifically Barak’s, into Australian art history. It suggests also that the early failure of the Eurocentric label ‘art’ to ‘stick’ to Barak’s work points to the multiple functions of his work that evade and continue to evade easy categorisation.

The governor’s gift

On a Monday in October 1897, a carriage-load of European visitors arrived at Coranderrk Aboriginal Reserve. Situated east of Melbourne near densely forested mountains, vineyards and the wealthy estates of European settlers, the Kulin residents of Coranderrk knew what to expect and prepared accordingly. The reserve was a place of incarceration and control, but within its bounds those classified as ‘Aboriginal’ utilised a range of strategies to retain their autonomy, including the creation and sale of cultural objects.¹⁴ The four-in-hand carriage deposited the colony’s governor, Lord Thomas Brassey, his wife Sybil and their daughter, and an elite party of sightseers in front of eighty assembled residents. Reporters were also present, along with such notable figures as the explorer Mrs Sheffington Smyth, Mrs Neville, Mr E. Lucas, Mr E. Fitzgerald and Lord Richard Nevill, who was a private secretary to the governors of Victoria and South Australia.¹⁵

According to the reporters from the Melbourne newspapers The Argus and The Age, which published accounts of the day, after Kulin men had performed boomerang and spear throwing, and everyone had sung God Save the Queen, the visitors then greeted the Kulin men, women and children formally.¹⁶ An Elder, probably Barak, demonstrated fire lighting and discussed the origins of his skills with the governor. Several items were gifted to the visitors that day. A Kulin woman, Mrs Rouan (or Rowan), presented Brassey with a finely woven basket and some ‘nicely carved emu eggs’ that she hoped would be presented to Queen Victoria. Brassey replied that he would carry out her request.¹⁷ The basket’s carrying part was woven ‘in a delicate criss-cross pattern by a sort of chain stitch’.¹⁸ Other baskets filled with wild flowers and ferns were given to the women in the sightseeing party.¹⁹ The vice-regal party left ‘substantial monetary gifts’ behind them when they departed.²⁰

During the visit, Barak had presented Brassey with a painting executed on bark in an unknown medium, predominantly black and yellow. As Barak expressed his rank to anthropologist Alfred Howitt as equivalent to that of a governor, we can assume that in Barak’s eyes, this gift from himself, the Ngurungaeta of the Wurundjeri-willam, to Brassey, Governor of Victoria, was between leaders of equal rank.²¹ To at least one among the assembled sightseers, as noted by the Argus reporter, Barak was ‘the Ex-King’ and ‘the Royal artist’.²² As Sayers has observed, Barak was at this time perhaps the most famous Aboriginal man in the Victorian colony.²³ One reporter described the bark painting as consisting of a 3 ft by 2 ft piece with fifty to sixty dancing figures, emus, lyrebirds, and snakes, noting that Lord Brassey ‘possesses no work of art which is half so remarkable as this picture of a corroboree’.²⁴ It was unusual and possibly unique because it was executed on bark rather than on Barak’s customary re-purposed card or paper. This painting has since been lost and is one of several artworks evident only in textual references.²⁵ Brassey acknowledged the significance of the gift by thanking Barak for the ‘valuable example of [A]boriginal art’ and said he would add it to his collection.²⁶ In an obvious effort to find a comparison in European art, one reporter described the work as reminiscent of the ‘pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley’, the contemporary British illustrator and author whose black-and-white ink drawings were influenced by Japanese woodcuts.²⁷ Another reporter noted the influence of ‘advertisement and illustrated newspapers’, and a visitor later the same year described Barak’s drawing on the back of a calendar as ‘impressionist in style’.²⁸ How much weight should we give to Brassey and his attendant newspaper reporters’ rare, perhaps isolated, reference to Barak’s work as a ‘valuable example of [A]boriginal art’?

Only a small number of writers and ethnologists focused on Australia during the nineteenth century were then classifying as ‘art’ some of the products of non-Western cultures. Evolutionist views often characterised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as lacking art; although early anthropologists recorded cultural objects, they did not necessarily apply the word ‘art’ to them.²⁹ ‘Evolutionism’ here refers to the view that science could compare all human societies in terms of how far or how little they had ‘advanced’ from simple and ‘primitive’ social structures (exemplified by Aboriginal Australians) towards a condition of complexity and sophistication exemplified by Western European societies in the late nineteenth century. German scholar Ernest Grosse (1862–1927) wrote about the proximity of ethnology and aesthetics; and although his The Beginnings of Art (1894) was conceived from an evolutionist perspective, he laid the foundations for a globally oriented ‘science of art’ (or Kunstwissenschaft).³⁰ According to art historian Susan Lowish, The Beginnings of Art ‘remains one of the most important documents in the history of the writing on Aboriginal art in the nineteenth century’.³¹ As Grosse did not visit Australia, Robert Brough Smyth’s Aborigines of Victoria (1878) provided the source material for his analysis. As Barak is not mentioned in Smyth’s text, Grosse made no reference to Barak’s work. In 1897, the same year that The Argus referred to Barak’s objects as ‘art’, Adelaide town clerk Thomas Worsnop and Anglican bishop Samuel Thornton both separately published on the question of Aboriginal arts.³² Although Barak is not identified by them, their writings are evidence of a contemporaneous discourse that may have encouraged the newspaper writer to refer to Barak’s work as ‘art’.

By the late nineteenth century, Aboriginal cultural productions, tools, weapons, and ceremonial objects had been traded, stolen, bought, sold, and exchanged with Europeans for over a century.³³ Visiting Aboriginal communities became a novelty experience for Europeans taking day trips from the city, such as the one undertaken by Governor Brassey. In this context, cultural documents served as souvenirs and ethnographic objects as well as potential works of art desired by collectors, and the classification of First Nations cultural outputs was by no means solid or fixed.³⁴ Barak’s painting on bark was both artwork and object circulating in a tourist economy informed by ideas of the exotic primitive in a picturesque setting.³⁵ However, given that observers such as Worsnop and Thornton used broad and evolving terms, including ‘manufactures’, the phrase ‘Aboriginal art’ might just as easily have not been used.

The work stands in for the event

If Barak’s painting was already multivalent in the context of its tourist and diplomatic exchange, it could also stand in for an event. In the weeks prior to his excursion to Coranderrk, Governor Brassey had intended to experience a corroboree organised for him in the Queensland colony. The event was due to be presented by the Butchulla people of K’gari (Fraser Island) but had not taken place. Brassey was therefore even more interested in seeing a pictorial representation of ‘the famous Australian war-dance’ presented to him by a famed Aboriginal artist.³⁶ This was not the only time a painting by Barak had been gifted to a dignitary in place of enacting the ceremony it represented. In early 1887, one of Brassey’s predecessors had expressed interest in witnessing a corroboree as part of his inspection of the Gippsland region and its Aboriginal population. Instead, he received a painting of a corroboree as its substitute.

Henry Brougham Loch preceded Brassey as Victoria’s governor from 1884 to 1889. Given his peripatetic imperial career, his time in Victoria was short, and he was next appointed high commissioner for South Africa and governor of the Cape Colony.³⁷ Loch’s interest in seeing an Aboriginal ceremony, or a demonstration of ‘native games and sports’, as he also described it, triggered what became known in the newspapers as ‘the corroboree dispute’.³⁸

The spark of the dispute came in the form of the enthusiastic and inquisitive public servant, proto-anthropologist, and highly skilled bushman Alfred William Howitt. While stationed in Gippsland as a police magistrate, Howitt pursued research into Aboriginal culture and, unusually for his time, consulted Aboriginal informants. His work shaped the history of anthropology in Australia in significant ways, the archive of his papers now regarded as ‘one of the most important sources of cultural information for Aboriginal people of south-eastern Australia’.³⁹ Barak was one of his key informants for the Kulin people, providing Howitt with information on social structure, ceremonies, conflict resolution practices, marriage and spiritual beliefs.⁴⁰ Howitt probably met Barak through Coranderrk’s superintendent Joseph Shaw, the man who is likely to have received the questionnaires that Howitt posted to all missions and reserves seeking information on pre-contact (or ‘classical’) Aboriginal cultural practices. Howitt also organised for Barak and other senior men from Coranderrk to visit him in Gippsland in 1882 and 1884; during the latter visit Howitt observed a Gunai Kurnai Jeraeil ceremony of male initiation.⁴¹

Keen to organise another ceremony for winter 1885, Howitt found himself in dispute with the Board for the Protection of Aborigines and with the manager of Ramahyuck Mission in Gippsland, Frederich August Hagenauer.⁴² Despite their having issued a public order against such Aboriginal ceremonies, Howitt wrote to Governor Loch of his wish to ‘make myself well acquainted with their condition and status’, a view that the governor endorsed in his own communication with Alfred Deakin, chief secretary and ex officio chairman of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines.⁴³

Several newspapers eagerly covered this controversy, reporting both the concerns of the Board and the desires of the governor, as well as the perspective of one Tatungalung man from Gippsland. On 3 February 1887, the Mount Alexander Mail reported that ‘Sir Henry Loch a few days ago expressed a wish to see a blackfellows’ corroboree’.⁴⁴ There had been ‘quite a controversy’ regarding the suggestion, the paper reported, ‘as it is inadvisable to reawaken in the blacks their savage habits and pastimes’. Before authorities sought to prohibit them, corroborees had served as both a spectacle for tourists and a source of income for Aboriginal people.⁴⁵ In February 1887, Dick Sandmullet, an Indigenous man, offered his opinion of the corroboree dispute in a letter published in Melbourne’s Daily Telegraph, his words having been written down by the Rosedale pound keeper some days earlier on 25 January.⁴⁶ For Sandmullet, while the event was an opportunity for non-Indigenous people in the colony to learn about Aboriginal culture, it required nevertheless the kind of proper preparation, translation, and recording that aligned with Howitt’s intentions to record a genuinely cultural event. Sandmullet encouraged the governor to come and speak with ‘some blackfellows […] of distinction’. Loch maintained his desire to at least meet with Victoria’s Aboriginal people, even if performance of any kind was out of the question.

Barak then stepped into the debate, presenting Loch with his own version of the event in visual form. His friend and ally in an ongoing fight of the Kulin against the oppressions of the Board, Anne Fraser Bon, later wrote:

When Sir Henry Loch was Governor of Victoria, he wished to see a corroboree, but as he failed to do so, Barak painted for him a representation of one, which the Governor accepted and placed on the walls beside the pictures of the old masters.⁴⁷

Like the painting on bark given to Brassey a decade later, this cultural document has been lost, or has yet to surface from a museum or gallery. As an illustration of an event the object itself holds a representative power capable of signifying Barak’s role as a leader and diplomat– his imperial literacy when dealing with the colonial government.⁴⁸

Bon’s words also reveal this document’s placement in Government House alongside European artworks. By adding such works to their collections, both governors implied that they considered them to be a type of art comparable within the European art world as primitive, exotic and yet unique. In the case of Loch, the work hung alongside others in his collection. For Brassey, it is the reporters’ comparisons with Aubrey Beardsley that suggest aesthetic function. Yet the label ‘art’, however respectfully intended by European-Australians, does not adequately encompass the extra qualities of Barak’s paintings, including their ability to stand in for an event, to act in diplomatic encounters as a gift or to preserve Kulin ceremony and tradition for generations to come.

The artist among artists

Another frame through which to view the categorisation of Barak as an ‘artist’ and his paintings as ‘art’ is his relationship with several settler-migrant artist contemporaries in Melbourne, the most famous of whom were the Australian Impressionists, formerly known as the Heidelberg School. The term ‘Heidelberg School’ was coined in 1891 by critic Sidney Dickinson, after one of the outer-suburban, semi-rural Melbourne suburbs where several artists had set up temporary camps to paint en plein air in remnant bushland or semi-rural landscapes – that is, on unceded Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung land. Several of the Impressionists and their contemporaries knew Barak, either introduced to him by acquaintances or commissioned to paint his portrait. It is unlikely, however, that he was a participant of any artist’s camp.⁴⁹

Did these settler-artist contemporaries recognise Barak as a fellow artist? It may have helped that Barak shared many of the conventions they used in creating his images. His works on paper and card were two-dimensional and executed in ochre, watercolour, gouache or pencil. They could be hung on walls, and they included identifiable human and animal figures. Recognisable subjects, such as humans and animals, drew viewers to Barak’s paintings and drawings, as was highlighted by the reporter in Brassey’s party. Shelly Errington labels this kind of appeal to viewers as ‘iconicity’: when observers find something resembling something they recognise – humans and animals – in the object in question and allow it to count, therefore, as ‘art’.⁵⁰

Some suggestion of Barak’s recognition as a fellow artist can be seen in a 1902 photograph of him by Johannes Heyes. Here he appears in the manner of a European artist, shown painting outdoors and using the side of his house as an easel, while his brushes and tools rest on a stool nearby. Barak is not sitting on the ground to paint or wearing distinctively Aboriginal costume. Rather, he is conventionally posed, in the genre of the heroic male artist.⁵¹ In parallel with the practice of the Impressionists, Barak is shown painting en plein air on his Country, as Anne Fraser Bon, described it, ‘with the kingdom of heaven for his studio’.⁵² Barak’s agency in this depiction is unknown, but he and many Kulin residents were familiar with photographers, finding photographs useful to support their political aims. Photographs taken of him and his people by Charles Walter, as Jane Lydon argues, not only document adaptations to colonial customs but also helped to ‘commemorate Kulin stories and signify their claims of ownership of Coranderrk’.⁵³

Beyond these superficial markers of similarity or kinship between Barak and his European Australian artist contemporaries, however, lie significant differences. Barak painted from cultural knowledge and memory, rather than in front of the subject as his fellow plein-airists did. Connection to Country is of central importance. His works emerged in the context of colonisation, but their subject matter ignores this. Carol Cooper offers convincing evidence of the cultural work behind Barak’s discussions with Alfred Howitt.⁵⁴ These include his accounts of warfare and conflict resolution.⁵⁵ Likewise, a specific schema is apparent in his depictions of the ceremonies of the Wurundjeri willam, Barak’s most frequent subject matter. Here the composition is dictated by the roles performed by men, women, children and animals within the dance or ceremony; women drum in the foreground and two Ngurungaeta lead the proceedings.⁵⁶ Drawing upon a much longer tradition of visual expression, such Kulin representations of culture and ceremony diverge considerably from either the realist or modernist elements, principles, and goals of contemporary European visual culture.

The instability of the categorisation of such work continued, fluctuating from art to ethnographic curiosity and back again. This incongruence is evidenced by the relationship of artist John Mather (1848–1916) with Barak. Mather not only painted Barak’s portrait but also acquired and donated some of Barak’s works to the Industrial and Technological Museum, a gesture that reveals the vicissitudes of classifying objects as Aboriginal art in the late nineteenth century. Along with other settler artists who also painted Barak’s portrait, including the lesser-known South African-born Florence Fuller (1867–1946), Artur Jose Loureiro (1853–1932) from Portugal and Swiss Australian Victor de Pury (1873–1961), Mather is not usually included among the Australian Impressionists. Nonetheless, they were respected contemporaries of these now better-known artists such as Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton. A Scottish-born painter and etcher, Mather had arrived in Melbourne in 1878 and become a founding member of the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS). Beginning as a house decorator, he later became a key proponent of British Aestheticism in Melbourne and was responsible for the painting and decoration of the Royal Exhibition Building.⁵⁷ Mather was well known for his plein-air painting practice, featuring many locations across the colony, both seaside and mountainous, with a sublime overtone (Figure 1). Paintings such as Healesville in the State Library of Victoria (SLV) collection demonstrate Mather’s knowledge of the region as well as his use of watercolours to capture the atmospheric effects of a scene.

Figure 1. John Mather, Healesville (1893), pencil and watercolour on paper, Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H2007.49/27.

In December 1894 Barak sat for a portrait by Mather at the request of Anna Leuba, mother-in-law to Charley Robarts, the last superintendent at Coranderrk. Although portraits of Aboriginal sitters do appear in Mather’s etching work towards the end of his life, he was not known earlier in his career for his interest in Aboriginal subjects. During the 1890s, however, he established his studio at a property called Koombahla in Healesville, and, as Coranderrk is close to Healesville, perhaps it was here that the two met and where Barak sat for the portrait.⁵⁸ The label on the back of the painting reads: ‘To my dear son Charley Alfred Robarts in gratefulness for his many kindnesses to me and wishing him many happy returns of the day. April 26th, 1912. From his affectionate mother, Anna Leuba’.⁵⁹

Mather’s portrait of the Elder, now in the Museums Victoria collection, portrays a senior man of serious countenance (Figure 2). Impressionistic brush strokes depict Barak in a grey jacket against a plain darker grey background, his white hair and beard illuminated by an unknown source. Though his eyes are in shadow, there is a sense of their piercing quality.

Figure 2. John Mather, Portrait of Barak (1894), oil painting (colour), X 81437. Source Museums Victoria.

At around the same time, Mather acquired from Barak two large depictions of Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung ceremony, known today as Aboriginal Ceremony and Aboriginal Ceremony with Wallaby and Emu (Figures 3 and 4).⁶⁰ We do not know how or why these were acquired – through gift, purchase, or exchange – although it is reasonable to assume that they were acquired directly from Barak. Using thick untreated cardboard as a background, cut from the same piece and among Barak’s largest works, they represent the complex ceremonial gatherings of humans and animals for which Barak is now well known. He has used ochre and charcoal thickly, so it stands out from the backing. Under the paint, and showing through in places, is a pencil outline of each figure and animal: there are emus and wallabies surrounded by the gathering of dancers and drummers; fires representing the ‘table of decision’ are visible as red circles with thick black outlines.⁶¹ These two significant works have been dated by the State Library of Victoria as falling between 1880 and 1890, the first of Barak’s two most prolific decades.

Figure 3. William Barak, Aboriginal Ceremony (ca. 1880–1890), brown ochre and charcoal on board, Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H29640.

Figure 4. William Barak, Aboriginal Ceremony with Wallaby and Emu (ca. 1880–1980), brown ochre and charcoal on cardboard, Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H29641.

It is not recorded in what way Barak’s paintings were significant to Mather. It is possible Mather acquired the works as a curiosity, as a totally new and original art style, or as evidence of a culture that was disappearing. Alternatively, Mather’s interests in different approaches to art making, including sketches, black and white works and etching, suggest another source of his appreciation of Barak’s style, which on the surface could be described as sketch-based. Sketches, including the famous ‘9 × 5’ Impressionist oils painted on cigar-box lids, were regarded as ‘unfinished’ works, the preparatory drawings for oil paintings.⁶² Thus Barak’s practice may have been viewed by Mather as experimental or unfinished, rather than as completed statements of art.

Whichever was the case, Mather clearly thought they were worth preserving, as he donated them in 1895 to the Industrial and Technological Museum in Melbourne. This museum formed part of the cultural complex of the public library, national art gallery, and national museum, originally housed together on Swanston Street. Founded in 1870, the museum was devoted to adult education, providing popular access to scientific knowledge and technological skills through trade- and industry-focused collections, public lectures, and formal classes.⁶³ In 1945 it became the Museum of Applied Science, and in 1983 it merged with the National Museum to form the Museum of Victoria.⁶⁴ Aboriginal Ceremony and Aboriginal Ceremony with Wallaby and Emu remained unremarked for decades within the interconnected museum collections. It was not until 1930 that a Historical Collections Accessions book was begun, the first time the two works by Barak are mentioned other than in the note of Mather’s donation.⁶⁵ Mather’s donation of the paintings to the Museum complex ensured their survival. Despite their peer-to-peer relationship as artists, we cannot be sure that Mather and his contemporaries understood these works on cardboard as ‘Aboriginal art’. What is certain is that once they entered into the museum complex, they were stripped of their personal meanings and associations with their artist-donor and became little more than an obscure ethnographic curiosity by ‘the last member of the Yarra Yarra tribe’.⁶⁶

Barak and the de Pury family

Barak’s personal relationships with the de Pury family of Swiss settlers from Neuchâtel was another context in which artist-to-artist ties saw Barak have his portrait painted and for the collection of his work to occur. During the 1860s, as Coranderrk was being established, Baron Frédéric Guillaume de Pury (1831–1890) and his brother Samuel (1836–1922) were buying land in the Yarra Valley and beginning what would become a successful winegrowing and grazing estate known as Yeringberg. As this was Barak’s hereditary land, his friendship with the Baron’s sons George and Victor would provide an avenue to access his own Country. The trio hunted together, events recorded in letters by the boys’ mother Ada or in the daily Farm Diary.⁶⁷ The private letters, reproduced in 2015 for the Yarra Ranges Regional Museum exhibition ‘Oil Paint and Ochre’, reveal a sense of friendly intimacy between them:

Barak was here yesterday and was so much amused when Papa told him you had tracked two fellows. He said ‘Him Yarra blackfellow; when him go shooting, him carry gun just like blackfellow: him look here, look there’ (and he suits the action to the word), ‘no look like another man straight on ground’ … he was very pleased to learn you track men like blackfellow.⁶⁸

Victor’s oil portrait of Barak is a striking expression of the de Pury family’s appreciation of Barak’s work and knowledge. Completed in 1899 under the tutelage of Mather’s contemporary Loureiro, it depicts Barak as a patient and wise man of significance. At the same time, Loureiro also painted Barak, who sat for both artists simultaneously over a two-week period in July 1899.⁶⁹ In Loureiro’s portrait the Elder is depicted from a slightly different angle, as a soft light falls on his white hair, revealing the different angles of the easels during the painting sessions. Loureiro is the only artist to have painted Barak twice.⁷⁰ Victor’s portrait held pride of place in the de Pury homestead for many years, while Loureiro displayed his portrait in his studio in Kew for many years, until it was gifted to a physician. The Loureiro painting was recently donated to the National Museum of Australia.⁷¹ As de Pury’s teacher, Loureiro connected the younger artist with the VAS and their annual exhibitions, where de Pury exhibited in 1893 and 1895.⁷² Before returning to Portugal, Loureiro was influential in forming the precursor to the VAS, the Australian Artists’ Association, alongside Mather and Roberts. Both organisations were pivotal to the development of painting in the Victorian colony.

The painting most associated with Barak’s friendship with the de Purys, however, is one of only two known landscapes that Barak produced, over three decades later. In Samuel de Pury’s Vineyard (c.1898) he depicted the one hundred acres of land cultivated by Baron Frédéric’s brother Samuel during his short stay in the colony. Samuel formed a strong friendship with Barak before returning to Switzerland in 1868. Decades after his departure, Barak depicted Samuel’s vineyard in watercolour, painted from memory, and entrusted it to Samuel’s son Hermann, who visited Victoria in 1901.⁷³ On the bottom, Barak described the subject matter:

I send you two pictures

Native Name Gooring Nuring

The English name is Bald Hill

this is all your Vineyard

and trees this all belong to

you there your house above

with the vineyard where

you yous [used] to stop before this is

the picture of it what you see now

I send you this paper

I still remember you all the

time not forgetting yous at all

and your Uncle. I am getting very

old now I can’t walk about

now much

William Barak.

Members of the de Pury family preserved several examples of Barak’s works on paper and card as well as other cultural objects created at Coranderrk such as baskets. Some are now held in the Musée d’ethnographie (MEN), Neuchâtel, including Samuel de Pury’s Vineyard donated by Hermann de Pury, alongside another painting by Barak. The MEN collection is the largest collection of Barak’s work outside Australia. The donation of these works by the de Pury family may reflect their interest in ethnology, fostered when James-Ferdinand de Pury donated his villa to form an ethnographic museum in the early twentieth century, as much as their friendship with Barak.⁷⁴ Their relocation within an ethnographic museum shows how their intelligibility as artworks was dependent on context.

The creation of Barak’s portrait by a family member and Barak’s gifting of the landscape to Samuel’s family suggests, nonetheless, that Barak’s works were understood and valued as artworks and as mementos of friendship, during a time when ethnographic and souveniring frameworks predominated in the wider public’s perspective on Barak. Barak’s portrait by Victor de Pury demonstrates the centrality of art making to their relationship. The way Barak depicted ceremony and Country to affirm his connection to both Kulin land and the de Pury family’s ties to it suggests that in his eyes and in the eyes of the de Purys his work represented something more than aesthetic enjoyment.

Slow recognition in the twentieth century

While Barak’s works were held in high regard by some individuals during his lifetime, they attracted little further attention until their inclusion in the breakthrough ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’, curated by European curator Leonhard Adam (1891–1960), at the National Gallery and National Museum of Victoria in 1943. Born and educated in Berlin, Adam’s artistic expression was informed by international appreciation of African and Native American cultures. Before he came to Australia his reputation had been established through the publication of Primitive Art in 1940. Adam had resided in London, after fleeing the Nazi occupation of his homeland, shortly before being interned as an enemy alien and transported to Australia on the ship Dunera.⁷⁵ After his release, he worked at the University of Melbourne and contributed extensively to Melbourne’s cultural life.⁷⁶

Prior to the ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’, Barak’s work had been largely ignored by the Melbourne art world. He was not included in the first major exhibition of Aboriginal art held in Victoria, the ‘Australian Aboriginal Art’ exhibition in 1929 presented by the National Museum of Victoria. In a foreword to the exhibition catalogue, the naturalist and journalist Charles Barrett (1879–1959) wrote on ‘The Primitive Artist’ in which he described ‘galleries’ of very old and relatively recent rock art in his discussion of ‘Aboriginal art’: ‘in Central Australia and other regions where the aboriginals [sic] still are living in their age-old primitive manner, many paintings on the rocks were made quite recently. Pictures even now are being added to the “galleries”’.⁷⁷ While the exhibition ‘Australian Aboriginal Art’ did not include Barak’s works, it did contribute to a growing discussion of Aboriginal cultural producers as artists, albeit via a highly racialised primitivist discourse rent with colonial nostalgia, laying the ground for exhibitions that followed.

Barak’s drawings were to re-emerge into public view in 1943 as part of the first exhibition to situate Aboriginal art in dialogue with non-Anglophone nations and within international modernist discourses (as seen on the catalogue cover) (Figure 5). The ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’ followed the innovative ‘Art of Australia 1788–1941’ in 1941, in which Aboriginal art was presented within a chronological story of Australian art, although it was shown only to US and Canadian audiences outside Australia. The Aboriginal art appearing in ‘Art of Australia’ was chosen by the US curator Theodore Sizer from the collection of the Melbourne Museum and consisted of ‘x-ray’ bark paintings of figures and animals from the Northern Territory and pen-and-ink drawings by Yakaduna/Tommy McRae. The curator missed the opportunity to choose the works by Barak that Mather had deposited in the Museum.⁷⁸

Figure 5. Primitive art exhibition [introduction by Leonhard Adam], 1943, Arts Collection, State Library Victoria.

Adam’s ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’ embraced the arts of Oceania, North America, western Iran and Africa, and, like the overseas ‘Art of Australia’ exhibition, was interested in non-Indigenous modernist artists’ appropriations of Indigenous motifs.⁷⁹ Robyn Sloggett has observed that Adam was aware that European artists were collecting and studying Indigenous and non-Western cultural objects and that these objects were sometimes exhibited alongside avant-garde artworks in Europe.⁸⁰ Here Barak’s paintings donated by John Mather, Aboriginal Ceremony and Aboriginal Ceremony with Wallaby and Emu, found resonance as artworks alongside the work of Yakaduna/Tommy McRae and Indigenous peoples from around the world. The foreword was written by progressive National Gallery of Victoria director Daryl Lindsay, in which he drew attention to the exhibition’s ‘genuine artistic value’.⁸¹ A few years later, in 1946, Lindsay would preside over the NGV’s purchase of its first Aboriginal works, two realist watercolours by Edwin Pareroultja of the Namatjira school.⁸²

Adam understood ‘Aboriginal art’ as applying to work produced into the present by all First Nations people in Australia, regardless of geographic location and not only by First Nations people living in less contact with Europeans. In an essay published in 1944 he wrote: Aborigines [sic] should be given opportunities to either carry on or develop their traditional style … good examples of European art techniques could be used to teach the natives how to find new ways for the aesthetic expression of their own ideals.⁸³

This statement was clearly inspired by artwork by Barak and Yakaduna/McRae, as well as by bark etchings from Lake Tyrrell (wood engraving, or designs scratched on the blackened surface of bark using a fingernail) exhibited alongside each other in the ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’.⁸⁴ Barak used some non-traditional materials, as would the Western Desert artists at Papunya Tula in the 1970s.

On the afternoon of 11 May 1943, the ‘Primitive Art Exhibition’ opened to mixed reviews. Professor of pathology and dean of the faculty of medicine Peter MacCallum officiated in the absence of anthropologist A.P. Elkin. MacCallum expressed the view that greater anthropological education and understanding would reduce conflict in the world.⁸⁵ This framing was lost on one reporter, however, who wrote, ‘Wisely, he [Adam] confined himself to the facts of ethnology, and made no extravagant claims to the artistic eminence of such interesting examples and evidences [sic] of primitive culture’.⁸⁶ Elkin reviewed the exhibition favourably in Oceania and positive remarks were recorded in Man.⁸⁷

The Australian section was displayed in Spencer Hall of the National Gallery and National Museum of Victoria. Yakaduna/McRae’s pen and ink drawings were exhibited there under the name of Tommy Barnes (Cat. No. 16–18) alongside descriptions of their subject matter. Barak’s paintings (Cat. No. 15) did not receive an extensive description, though the catalogue entry no longer described them dismissively as ‘cardboards’, instead noting: ‘two paintings, scenes of [A]boriginal life, painted on European cardboard by William Barak, aged 70 years, the last member of the Yarra Yarra tribe’.⁸⁸ Here, for the first time in an exhibition context, Barak’s depictions of ceremony were appreciated as artworks as well as records of events, albeit without any strong understanding of their meaning or intention. It was still significant, it seemed, for collectors and audiences to know that Barak was considered the ‘last’ of his people. Nevertheless, within the aesthetic appreciation of global Indigenous creative expression, Adam had created a space and a language through which the Victorian art-viewing public might learn to appreciate Barak’s work as art.

Conclusion

While most would consider Barak’s work Aboriginal art today – and his place in the Australian art historical canon is assured – this article has demonstrated that the path to this recognition was not straightforward. Fleeting moments of understanding, exchange, and recognition of Barak’s works as art by various sympathetic Europeans highlight the diverse ways in which Indigenous cultural objects circulated in the late nineteenth century and acquired different meanings according to their contexts. In some contexts, Barak’s paintings and drawings were recognised and functioned as art, in the sense of an aesthetic object that could be displayed alongside other artworks in a European collection, and in other contexts they functioned in unique ways that was tied to the status of Barak as Ngurungaeta and his and their incommensurate Aboriginality. As we have seen of Barak’s depiction of corroborees in 1897 and 1887, his works could be used to stand for an event itself, reminding us of the limitations of the term ‘art’ when used to encapsulate the qualities and significance of non-Western cultural production. Barak’s objects and images, while understood as ‘art’ in certain circumstances, more often occupied a position of ambiguity within prevailing discourses of primitivism which either saw ethnographic evidence of demise or evaluated authenticity by the degree to which the maker had (limited) contact with Europeans. While Barak was alive, his presence and recognition as a leader was strong, and he enjoyed respectful relationships with several settler supporters that bolstered their high valuation of his works as ‘art’. After his death in 1903, however, such fleeting recognition ceased until 1943. By bringing to the fore those moments when the categorisation Aboriginal art did not ‘stick’, this article has sought to demonstrate that Barak’s work functioned on multiple levels, of which art is only one and not necessarily the most important, including as a diplomatic offering or a token of friendship, and as a record of cultural life in the face of oppression demonstrative of a continuing connection to community and Country.

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.