Lot 5: WILLIAM BARAK CIRCA 1824-1903 UNTITLED

bears the inscription King Barak, Yarra Tribe and Coranderrk Station in pencil (upper centre)

32.4 BY 46.5CM

charcoal, natural pigments and pencil on paper laid on card

Executed at Coranderrk Station in the late 19th century
Collected by the owner's grandfather, an English citizen who migrated to France at the end of the 19th century; thence by decent to his daughter in 1950; thence by descent to the current owner in 2004
Private collection, Paris

Cf. While this drawing is unique in Barak's known corpus, there are a number of related works: Group hunting animals, 1890s, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, depicts several animals shown in this drawing. Two other drawings depict the snaring of a wallaby and an emu within a ritual setting; these are Aboriginal ceremony with wallaby and emu, c.1885, in the collection of State Library of Victoria, and Ceremony, c.1895, in the collection of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. The three drawings are illustrated in J. Ryan, C. Cooper and J. Murphy-Wandin, Remembering Barak, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2003, pp. 46, 41 and 43 respectively. The first two works mentioned are also illustrated in A. Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994, colour plates 5 and 3 respectively.

William Barak was one of a handful of Aboriginal artists who recorded colonial life in the late 19th century from the Aboriginal perspective. Barak and artists such as Tommy McRae and Mickey of Ulladulla were commissioned by early settlers to depict images of traditional life ? mostly of ceremony, hunting and battles. Barak favoured depictions of ceremonial scenes that are populated with figures wearing traditional possum skin cloaks; the compositions of such drawings tend be highly formal and hierarchic to reflect the ordered nature of the ritual and the status of the participants.

This is a rare drawing by Barak in that the subject is the hunting of animals with the emphasis on the fauna rather than on the human figure; the composition is loose and animated in contrast to the formality of his drawings of ritual. The focus of this drawing is the stylized emu attempting to escape the two figures trying to catch it: the figure on the left is poised to attack, all his weight on the front foot, with a lasso or snare in one hand and a bunch of branches, rendered in a few expertly daubed brush marks, in the other, to camouflage his approach to the emu. In the top right hand corner four other figures, wrapped in cloaks, observe the scene. Barak's keen sense of observation of the animals is evident in that he depicts them in characteristic poses. These include three emus, one of which is sitting on the ground, a wombat, echidnas, kangaroos, wallabies, dogs, turtles, a lizard, a swan and a flock of birds perched on the branches of a bush. While all these creatures are drawn flat to the picture plane, in profile view, the two lyrebirds are drawn in perspective, facing away from the viewer, to better display their plumage which is used as personal adornment and a sign of ritual status in Wurundjeri ceremonies.

The drawing possesses a feeling of playfulness and celebration of the abundance of natural species and resources available to the Wurundjeri people.