foundation annual report 2009–10 - National Gallery of Australia

William Barak
Wurundjeri people
Australia 1824–1903
Corroboree 1895
charcoal and natural earth pigments over pencil on linen
image 60 x 76.4 cm
support 60 x 76.4 cm
acquired with the Founding Donors 2010 Fund, 2009
This is one of the largest and most impressive drawings
produced by William Barak as a way of passing on his
knowledge of traditional culture. In the top half of the
composition, six Aboriginal men with traditional body painting
perform a dance. The lower half of the drawing shows a
group of people in elaborately decorated possum-skin cloaks
sitting and clapping. A lone man standing at the centre of the
composition is the focus of their attention as he dictates the
rhythm for the dance by clapping together two boomerangs.
During his lifetime, Barak experienced enormous cultural
change. He was a child when Europeans began to make
pastoral incursions into the Port Phillip district of Victoria in
the mid 1830s. In 1863, he was one of the first people who
resettled at the Aboriginal Station at Coranderrk, outside
Melbourne. Barak had hereditary status as clan elder of his
people (the Wurundjeri) and was one of the leaders of the
Coranderrk community. He lived at Coranderrk until his death
in 1903, by which time he was one of the few people in Victoria
with a firsthand knowledge of the traditional language, songs
and religious law of the original inhabitants of the Yarra Valley.
FOUNDATION ANNUAL REPORT 2009–10 5