Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

CONTINUING TRADITIONS William Barak Corroborée Andrew Sayers Facing page W illiam Barak m Australia c.1824-1903 Corroborée 1880s Natural pigments over charcoal on paper 50x70cm Purchased 1993 Queensland Art Gallery Below William Barak painting at Coranderrk, c.1898—1903. Photograph by Reverend Johannes Heyer, courtesy Mrs Frances Boyd he great majority of the surviving works ofWilliam Barak are depictions of ceremonial dances (corroborées) and the example in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, dating from the 1880s, is typical of the artist's treatment of this subject. A row of male dancers wearing pubic aprons and carrying boomerangs runs along the top edge of the composition while along the lower edge are ranks of women and children, their hands raised as if they are clapping. The middle of the composition is occupied by two towering bearded elders who beat time with pairs of boomerangs. At the heart of the composition is a fire. The elements that make up this work reappear in almost all of Barak's corroborée drawings although the various versions of the subject do admit a number ofvariations; sometimes no animals are included and there are subtle variations in the number and disposition of the dancers and the degree of symmetry and compositional formality. Nonetheless, the elements in the Queensland Art Gallery drawing are those from which Barak customarily constructed his view of the order of traditional Aboriginal life. In the eyes of many viewers Barak's work looks vaguely 'Assyrian'. This response is evoked by the ordering of the figures in a frieze-like manner, their flat frontality and, not least, the patriarch-like effect of the cloaked and bearded men. The main feature of Barak's style is the striking and powerful design, which is embodied firstly in symmetry, secondly in the angular rhythm of the dancers' legs, and thirdly in the repetition of the patterning of the possum-skin cloaks inwhich his corroborée participants are clothed. If there is an identifiable source for Barak's distinctive style — his use of alternating bands and patches of colour — it is the decorated cloaks made up of squares of possum skins which were the dress of Aboriginal people throughout the southern parts of the Australian mainland before colonisation. These cloaks (of which only a tiny number now survive) were decorated with incised designs and coloured with charcoal and ochre rubbed into the incisions.1One nineteenth-century commentator described the designs on these cloaks as taking a 'scrolly shape', and he sought to point out the non-figurative nature of the cloak patterns by adding that 'striking objects in nature, such as flowers, foliage or animals were never copied'.2 Barak's style not only seems to owe much to the alternating band motif derived from the possum-skin cloak; there is a further way in which his drawings can be linked to that traditional form. Barak frequently used charcoal and ochres in his work and he often mixed these with pencil and watercolour. The majority of Barak's works have an ochre and black colour scheme; however, there are several surviving examples in which the blues, greens and pinks of watercolour are deployed very effectively. Barak was perhaps the only artist in nineteenth-century Australia to mix the media traditionally used by Aboriginal people with media introduced by Europeans — paper, cardboard, pencil and watercolour. In many significant ways this bringing together of Aboriginal and European media to depict Aboriginal subjects seems to symbolise Barak's life. 36 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965