Tommy McRae sketchbook
Tommy McRae: the Kwatkwat artist who worked in pen and ink at Lake Moodemere and sued a photographer who refused to pay him
He worked lying at full length on the ground, propped on one elbow, and he always started at the feet. Building each figure upward from the ground in pen and ink, never making a correction, he produced drawings of extraordinary precision: each leaf, each clan marking, each feather headdress clearly delineated, the figures clustered and dynamic against landscapes of sparse eucalypts and open earth. Tommy McRae was born around 1835, probably near the junction of the Goulburn and Murray rivers in Victoria, a man of the Kwatkwat people whose Aboriginal names were Yackaduna and Warra-euea. He died on 15 October 1901 and is buried in the Carlyle cemetery at Wahgunyah.
Tommy McRae sketches
When other Aboriginal people in his region were being moved to mission reserves, McRae refused to leave his country. He worked as a stockman for pastoralists along the Upper Murray through the 1840s and 1850s, and began drawing around 1861. His first drawings were collected at Barnawartha by sculptor Theresa Walker under the name Tommy Barnes, possibly after a Wodonga employer. In the 1860s he met Roderick Kilborn, a Canadian telegraph master and justice of the peace at Wahgunyah, who became his chief patron, commissioned drawings from 1865 onward and published articles about McRae in the Corowa Free Press. Kilborn supplied paper and ink. McRae settled with his family at Lake Moodemere, raised poultry, fished Murray cod, made possum-skin rugs and shields, and sold his drawings to travellers and collectors who sought them out.
His subject matter was almost entirely the world of the Kwatkwat and neighbouring peoples: corroborees, hunting, fishing, ceremonies, figures in clan designs and feather headdresses. Where contemporary European artists depicted Aboriginal people as curiosities observed from the outside, McRae placed Indigenous people at the centre of his compositions in full action, with squatters and European settlers on the edges. He also drew Chinese settlers on the goldfields and chronicled the life of William Buckley, the convict who lived for thirty years with the Wathaurung people, focusing on his time within Aboriginal society rather than on his return to the settler world. In 1896 his drawings were used without credit to illustrate K. Langloh Parker's Australian Legendary Tales, published in London; the correct attribution was only established later when his name was found inscribed on the original drawings in Andrew Lang's papers. In 1897 he and another Aboriginal man sued a photographer at the Corowa court for failing to pay £10 he had promised in exchange for permission to photograph Aboriginal people at Lake Moodemere. The case was dismissed but the action itself was a demonstration of his legal confidence and independence. Between 1890 and 1897 all his children were taken from him under government regulations and sent to reserves across Victoria. He never saw them again.
His work is held at the NGA, the National Museum of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the State Library of Victoria, the State Library of New South Wales, Melbourne Museum and the NGV, which holds a notebook from 1875 and a sketchbook from around 1891 with impeccable provenance, passed directly from Kilborn to his descendants.
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