Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century

Until very recently the only Aboriginal artist whose name was well known to most Australians was Albert Namatjira. It comes as something of a surprise to discover that there were famous Aboriginal artists before Namatjira, nineteenth-century artists whose names are today just beginning to receive recognition again.

In 1935 the journalist Charles Barrett described Tommy McRae (c. 1835-1901) as 'if not famous, at least widely known' and 'remembered still as Victoria's most gifted Aboriginal artist'. Equally well known in his lifetime and in the early twentieth century was William Barak (c. 1824-1903), although his reputation was not simply as an artist, but also as a survivor. He had been present at the signing of the 'treaty' between John Batman and Aboriginal leaders in 1835 which was the first act in the story of European dispossession of Aboriginal people in Victoria.

Tommy McRae and William Barak were the two most prolific Aboriginal artists in Australia during the nineteenth century, at least among the artists whose names we now know. There were many other artists of course, but very little work survives that can be attributed to specific individuals. One exception is Mickey of Ulladulla (c. 1825-1891) who, like McRae and Barak, produced drawings over a number of years.

McRae, Barak and Mickey of Ulladulla had many characteristics in common. They were contemporaries, having been born in the early decades of the century and living until its end. Much of the work in this exhibition comes from the later lives of the artists. It is art in which memory mixes with the reportage of contemporary life — traditional subjects with depictions of ships, Chinese, pastoralists and their homesteads. In the work of each artist portrayals of ceremonies — corroborees — are of central importance.

The life of Tommy McRae (Yackaduna) was characterised by activities which demonstrated his impressive strength of character. McRae ranged over a wide area of the Murray Valley, but his country is not precisely known — he first appeared as a stockman working in the Barnawartha area in the 1860s. He worked for much of his adult life as a stockman. By 1880 he had settled with his family on the shores of Lake Moodemere near Corowa. He lived at Lake Moodemere until his death in 1901 and it was during these last two decades of his life that he made most of the drawings that survive today.

McRae lived by fishing, raising poultry and making drawings in sketchbooks which he sold to local people and to curious visitors to the Corowa area. His drawing style is instantly recognisable by its extreme economy, vitality and the suggestion of space achieved with the simplest means — silhouetted figures on a blank page.

Barak's life was perhaps not typical, in that as a clan elder he maintained a position as leader of his people (he was known to Europeans as 'King of the Yarra tribe'). At the end of his childhood Europeans took over his land, the land of the Wurundjeri who lived in the Yarra Valley. Barak was the son of the Wurundjeri elder Bebejern and until the end of his life he held the position of elder to Aboriginal people at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station. Barak was one of the Wurundjeri people who settled at Coranderrk, near Healesville, in 1863 and he lived there until his death in 1903.

Like McRae, Barak appears to have made most of his drawings in the 1880s and 1890s. Drawing was just one of the activities through which Barak kept alive his traditional culture. He sang songs, told stories and made artefacts. Through deputations to Melbourne to meet with politicians, Barak led the fight to keep Coranderrk when it appeared that the government was going to sell the reserve to local pastoral interests. In these disputes Barak always insisted on his right, and the right of the Wurundjeri, to live at Coranderrk; 'Yarra, my father's country', he insisted.

Barak's drawings seem to embody the struggle which characterised his life, the struggle to maintain his Aboriginality within a structure of European institutions. His drawings are made with a mixture of traditional and European materials.

Mostly they are charcoal and ochres on cardboard, but with the exception of a couple of examples their subject matter is a consistent reiteration of the one subject — ceremony. Across the body of his works depicting ceremonies the compositional scheme varies little. Rows of dancers fill the upper parts of the composition while animals, fires and spectators fill the lower part. The participants in his pictures wear the traditional apparel of the Aborigines of Victoria, the possum-skin cloak. In both the compositional pattern of his works, and in his unique use of traditional materials, Barak affirmed the value and the underlying structure of traditional Aboriginal society.

Much less is known about the life of Mickey of Ulladulla (or Mickey the Cripple, as he was sometimes known). In the 1880s he made drawings which combined the native flora and fauna of the south coast of New South Wales with depictions of small boats, ships and sawmills. Mickey's is a contemporary world — the microcosm of Aboriginal life on the south coast in the last decades of the century. Towards the end of his life he lived on the eight-and-a-half hectare reserve at Ulladulla where the local people made a living from fishing and providing labour to the port. When Mickey died in 1891 the local paper noted his passing and mentioned his 'very fine pencil sketches'.

Like Mickey, Oscar, a stockman who worked on Rocklands Station near Camooweal, in Queensland, recorded his impressions of frontier life in the last years of the century. However, Oscar's exercise book of drawings (available for viewing in Canberra only) records a more violent frontier, one in which the Native Police were responsible for the 'dispersal' — a euphemism for indiscriminate shooting — of Aboriginal people throughout Queensland. Oscar balanced these depictions of violence with drawings in which he celebrated the life he led as a boy in the Palmer River area.

Charlie Flannigan made his drawings in the 1890s, and while for the most part these depict remote station buildings in the Northern Territory, his life reflected the violence of the bush as depicted by Oscar. In 1893 Flannigan was gaoled for the murder of a white station manager, and spent his time in prison making drawings. He was later hanged — the first person to be officially hanged in Darwin. His case was taken up by some South Australian politicians as an example of discriminatory sentencing. Early in the year in which Flannigan was hanged a convicted murderer named George Page had his capital sentence commuted but the governor refused to commute Flannigan's sentence. As the press commented: To the injunction “Thou shalt not kill" we have added "unless thou art a white man"'.

Flannigan was not the only Aboriginal artist to make drawings whilst in prison. The extraordinary group of drawings collected by J.G. Knight in 1888 from Aboriginal prisoners in Darwin's Fannie Bay Gaol were the first drawings by Aboriginal people to be exhibited publicly in Australia. The drawings were made by men from a number of areas in the Northern Territory, but it appears that Knight was more interested in the similarities between them than in their differences. Knight arranged the drawings in a sequence, entitled them ‘The Dawn of Art’ and exhibited them (as art objects, not ethnographic artefacts) at the Centennial International Exhibition in Melbourne in 1888. In Melbourne the drawings attracted considerable interest — particularly, Knight noted, from visiting artists.

The fate of the works in this exhibition throughout the twentieth century makes a fascinating study in itself, because it highlights changing attitudes to the idea of 'authentic' Aboriginal art. Although there was still considerable interest in Barak and McRae in the 1930s, as the century wore on the idea arose that their works were not examples of real Aboriginal art. Today we would not subscribe to this narrow and ethnocentric notion of 'authenticity'. Art is a dynamic, not a static, thing and it takes many forms. The art made by Aborigines in the nineteenth century is very important because it projects the world views of its makers into the present. For Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians this art speaks with a voice that must be heard.

Andrew Sayers
Curator, Australian Drawings, National Gallery of Australia