Transculturation and counter-narratives: The life and art of the Wurundjeri artist William Barak

Abstract

A few decades ago the culture of Aboriginal Australians was believed to have been removed or assigned to the margins. It was considered static and primitive, produced by uncivilized and barbaric peoples. Since the 1980s the view has been successfully challenged and recent art histories produced in settler colonial countries emphasize that Indigenous cultures were neither stuck in the past nor resistant to change. Its development was due to contact between the Indigenous and settler societies and the cross-cultural interactions the contact engendered in political, social and artistic life. This was often against the backdrop of conquest and displacement, which was the result of colonization. Adopting as the main frame of the discussion the theory of transculturation and the concept of counter-narrative from cultural studies, this article will show these different types of encounters and their influence on the life and art of William Barak, a nineteenth-century Aboriginal Australian statesman, leader of a Woi Wurrung nation and an artist. It will also show ‐ again through transculturation ‐ what trajectory the Australian mainstream society followed from initial separation and exclusion, through assimilation to an integration of Indigenous Australians in the artistic and social life. The counter-narrative concocted on the basis of those encounters produces a nuanced picture of loss, survival and strength as experienced by William Barak and his peoples.