Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

colonisation) but also as 'the last chief of the Yarra Yarra tribe'. For his own community Barak represented no less an important role as a link to the past; it is this fact that provides the context for his drawings of corroborées. Barak's drawings recall the time of his childhood, before the coming of Europeans. Barak also retold stories he had learned as a child. He knew and sang traditional songs, described by Anne Fraser Bon, a friend of the artist, as 'weird and pathetic'7 and recorded in transcriptions published by the musicologist G. W. Torrance.8Barak also made spears and boomerangs and demonstrated the use of such artefacts on many occasions. During the 1880s and 1890s Barak had become a genuinely famous figure — he was probably Victorias best known Aboriginal person — and visitors to Coranderrk sought to meet him and buy examples of his work. In addition to its role as an agricultural settlement, Coranderrk had a significant tourist market element; visitors could buy artefacts, rugs and baskets as well as examples of Barak's drawing. As Coranderrk was the closest Aboriginal settlement to Melbourne, European visitors often made their way there to see Aboriginal people, and visiting dignitaries were customarily taken there. Often they were presented with Barak works. One celebrated instance of this was in 1887 when the Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Loch, requesting to witness a corroborée and being told that this was not permitted by the authorities at Coranderrk, was presented instead with a Barak corroborée drawing.9Loch was not the only colonial official to be presented with examples of Baraks work. In 1886 the outgoing Chief Secretary, Graham Berry, received a deputation led by Barak in which he was presented with a group of artefacts, some made by Barak himself.10 There are several nineteenth-century accounts of Coranderrk. These accounts, as well as photographs and official reports, provide a detailed picture of life at the settlement. One of the most complete descriptions was made by the German ethnographer Arthur Baessler who went to Coranderrk in 1892.1 Barak made several wooden lighters for Baessler 'in which bark was set alight by rubbing a soft and a hard piece of wood together', and boomerangs 'formed with an axe and knife and smoothed with bits of glass'.12The German visitor also appears to have bought a painting from Barak — he complained that he charged 'fairly high prices for his carvings and paintings' — but the payment was in tobacco (although Baessler commented that the artist would have preferred cash). Baessler described Barak's approach to drawing. He wrote, slightly inaccurately, that his art works always portrayed corroborées, the old dances of the blacks'. He described how the artist worked quickly, adding that 'if he had to paint a dressed-up man he first drew the whole body and then dressed the person by painting a suit over it'.13 The other eye-witness account that we have of Barak's working method was Anne Fraser Bons recollection recorded many years after the artist's death. She described how '[W]hen Barak could get a sheet of drawing paper he made the outside of his chimney his easel, having the canopy of heaven for his studio .. ,'.14It is almost certain that Mrs Bons memory of Baraks painting method would have been prompted by a photograph which she had reproduced, taken after 1898 by the Reverend Johannes Heyer, another visitor to Coranderrk, and which shows Barak at work on a drawing outside his house. Interestingly, the photograph includes Barak's materials resting on a small stool, showing the mixture of charcoal, earth colours and watercolours alluded to earlier. Barak was one of a handful of identifiable Aboriginal artists working in the nineteenth century making drawings and depicting memories of Aboriginal life in earlier times. The artist whose life and experience most closely resembles Barak's was Tommy McRae who lived in northern Victoria, near the town ofWahgunyah and who, like Barak, made drawings that were collected as examples of Aboriginal art by visitors and tourists. McRae's life span was similar to Barak's — he had lived in Left Tommy McRae C.1824—1901 Victorian Blacks, Melbourne Tribe, holding corroborée after seeing ships for the first time C.1890S Pen and ink on sketchbook page National Gallery of Australia, Canberra a relatively undisturbed traditional setting until his teens and made his drawings towards the end of his life. McRae died in 1901, two years before Barak's death in 1903.15 In the late nineteenth century both Barak's work and Tommy McRae's drawings were collected as authentic examples of Aboriginal art. Since the beginning of the 1980s, there has been a resurgence of interest in these works: the drawings of McRae and Barak are once again collected, studied and displayed as a record of the memories and culture of artists who had not only survived in the face of overwhelming odds, but who also kept traditions alive through art. Barak's work is not only valued with pride by the Wurundjeri of today but has also struck a chord with many contemporary Aboriginal artists who have faced the questions of appropriate and expressive subject matter that his work raises. The late Lin Onus, living and working near the place where Barak lived, described his drawings as 'particularly moving'; for him they evoked 'a poignant joyfulness in which one can picture large numbers of people coming together for a special occasion'.16 This must have been the most powerful and abiding memory of Barak's early life; it is not surprising that he reiterated the theme of the ceremony, the most important element of the fabric of Aboriginal life, time and time again in his art. Andrew Sayers is Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, and the author of Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century. CONTINUING TRADITIONS 39