Australian Dictionary of Biography

William Barak, by Florence Fuller, 1885

State Library of Victoria, 50642492

William Barak (1824–1903), Woiwurrung spokesperson, variously called ‘King William Barak’, ‘the last chief of the Yarra Yarra tribe’ or ‘Beruk (white grub in gum tree) belonging to the Wurundjeri Willum horde whose country lay along the Yarra and Plenty Rivers’, was the son of Bebejern and great-nephew of prominent Victorian Aboriginal leaders Billibellery, Captain Turnbull, and Jakki Jakki. With more romance than reason, he was regarded by contemporaries as an ‘innocent’ witness to the first European invaders, William Buckley and John Batman. He spent his childhood in customary Aboriginal fashion but was not properly initiated due to the colonisation of Melbourne. His relations invested him with the possum shawl, necklet, waist string, and nose peg of manhood in a brief ceremony, but much of his people’s lore was left to be picked up informally. He received a brief taste of European education at Rev. G. Langhorne’s mission school in 1837–39 and was a member of Captain Henry Dana’s Native Police Force.

With his Gippsland-born first wife Lizzie, he was among the first group of Aboriginal people from the Goulburn River Protectorate Station to settle at Acheron Aboriginal Station when it opened in 1859, and he hoped to have the area reserved for his people’s use. After much indecision by government authorities, Coranderrk Aboriginal Station, near Healesville, was gazetted and he settled there permanently in 1863, in a ‘neat little cottage and garden, most tidy and comfortable’. Barak worked for a small wage on the station farm and acquired a few horses. Further schooling and religious instruction was undertaken; he could read but not write. Baptised and confirmed, he married his second wife, Annie ‘of the Lower Murray’ (Lizzie had died before 1863), in a publicised Presbyterian ceremony in 1865. The fate of his family was typical of the time: two infants died of gastro-enteritis, and his son David and wife Annie died of consumption. When he married Sarah, a Gunaikurnai woman, on 7 June 1890, he was the oldest man at Coranderrk and only known full-descent survivor of his people.

In the late 1870s, when management of Aboriginal affairs came under vigorous public criticism, Barak emerged as a respected spokesman. He was the acknowledged leader at Coranderrk and a liaison between officialdom and the Aboriginal population. His contact with such people as Graham Berry, Alfred Howitt, Ann Bon, and Alfred Deakin, and his petitions and public appearances, were important spurs to action, especially the government inquiry of 1881. He outlined a plan for autonomous communities under Coranderrk’s first manager, John Green: ‘give us this ground and let us manage here ourselves … and no one over us … we will show the country we can work it and make it pay and I know it will’. His non-Aboriginal champions did not share this faith and the scheme was never fostered, although Coranderrk was retained.

While adapting his life to the changing conditions brought by colonisation, Barak also maintained his connection with his own culture. He was an accomplished painter in ochre and charcoal, ‘a baritone of average compass,’ and a source of knowledge on Aboriginal ways for both tourists and serious anthropologists. Lorimer Fison drew extensively on his knowledge. He was Howitt’s chief informant for central and south-west Victoria and elsewhere. Large parts of Howitt’s Native Tribes of South East Australia (London, 1904) rest heavily on his knowledge and opinion. Howitt invited him to Bairnsdale in 1882 and his notes of these interviews cover a wide range of customs, beliefs, and kinship patterns, discussed with respect and deep feeling by Barak, who evaluated them against his Christian faith.

Barak died on 15 August 1903. In 1934 the local Australian Natives’ Association erected a marble monument, donated by Mrs Anne Bon, in Healesville’s main street. This was later defaced by vandals, stored in the municipal offices, and finally placed above the heap of stones that mark his grave at Coranderrk.

Those who knew Barak described him unanimously as wise and dignified, with penetrating eyes and firm principles. The Board for the Protection of Aborigines noted him ‘the most intelligent … remarkable black’. However, in wider society he became a romantic curiosity—a figure on picture postcards, erect and bearded, wearing sandshoes and a long coat, a Bible in one gloved hand and a boomerang in the other.

♦♦  This article was revised on 11 July 2025