Ceremony

Tommy McRae was a Kwatkwat man from the Murray River region near the border of Victoria and New South Wales. McRae’s early life was characterised by upheaval and devastation, the result of white pastoralists invading his Country. Working as a stockman under European occupation, McRae became one of the few known nineteenth-century Aboriginal artists to produce drawings on paper.

Known for his silhouetting style and for drawing his figures from their feet upwards, McRae included contemporary figures of Chinese diggers and white convicts in his compositions of Aboriginal cultural and daily life. This drawing of a ceremony shows Aboriginal men in ceremonial dress and body paint. Standing in a line with overlapping limbs, the men are holding short clubs and boomerangs. McRae often sold sketchbooks of his drawings to white colonists; this drawing originally formed part of a sketchbook given to a customs officer at Albury. McRae compiled the sketchbook while he was living at Lake Moodermere on the Victorian side of the Murray River near Wahgunyah, where he and his family earned a living as traders, selling Murray River cod and possum-skin cloaks and raising poultry.

Alice Clanachan, Assistant Curator, Prints Drawings & Photographs