Publications

Here' you'll find a selection research and art criticism I've published over the past decade.

ngaratya (together, us group, all in it together)
Memo Reviews, Broken Hill, NSW 3 May – 28 Jul 2024

Price and Provenance: William Barak as an Artist in the Market
This chapter, in part, details my role in the 2022 auction of two of William Barak's artworks. It is also an exploration of value making and attribution in the artworld.
Crosscurrents in Australian First Nations and Non-Indigenous, Routledge, 2023, pp 45-60.

Seeing Aboriginal Art: Settler Classifications of the Work of William Barak
This article sets out to demonstrate the uneven history of settler-Australians’ labelling of Indigenous cultural objects and documents as ‘art’. Using the case of William Barak (c. 1824–1903) as its example, it asks, how was Barak’s work understood prior to the major re-evaluations of Aboriginal art as ‘art’ in the 1980s? A series of fleeting moments of understanding, exchange and recognition provide a hitherto-overlooked genealogy of the shifting reception of Barak’s paintings and drawings within his own lifetime and up to the 1940s. These moments encompass his agency in diplomatic exchange, his peer-to-peer relationships in Melbourne’s colonial artworld, and the early placement of Barak’s work in cultural institutions leading eventually to the first inclusion of his work in an art exhibition in 1943. Selected examples from this trajectory demonstrate an uneven path to recognition while illustrating their ability to exceed the category of art from a western viewpoint.
Australian Historical Studies, 2023, Volume:54, Issue4, pp 718-739

Aboriginal artworks and cultural objects as primary sources
Object-based learning can provide students with opportunities to ask questions that provide a deeper connection to the contested nature of First Nations history.
Agora (History Teachers' Association of Victoria), 2022 Volume 57, Issue 3, pp 53-56. (Journal Subscription Required)

William Barak and the de Pury family
This catalogue note describes the significance and provenance for two artworks by William Barak sold by Sotheby's New York on 25 May 2022 and purchased by the descendants of William Barak through crowd-funding.
Sotheby's Aboriginal Art, 25 May 2022.

Co-authored with Barry Judd: Unfashionable Goodes: The Wrong Kind of Black and the Scandalization of Indigenous Masculinities in Settler Australia
Edited by Vicki Karaminas, Adam Geczy and Pamela Church Gibson Fashionable Masculinities: Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumber SexualsPublisher (Rutgers University Press) 2022, pp 123-36.

Co-authored with Alan Lester: The Restructuring of the British Empire and the Colonization of Australia, 1832–8
Analysing a comprehensive shift in the governance of the British Empire in the mid 1830s, this article introduces the context for the following three articles in the Feature, ‘Legacies of Slave Ownership’. This shift included the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, upon which these articles concentrate, but also the restructuring of the East India Company. A reformed British parliament introduced transitions in the western and eastern halves of the Empire in a concentrated burst of legislation between 1833 and 1838. While vested interests were protected, not least by facilitating a surge in the colonization of Australia, the transition produced the template of a liberal Empire.
History Workshop Journal, 2020, Volume 90, pp 1-24. (Journal Subscription Required)

William Barak's Paintings at State Library Victoria
Recent discoveries on the provenance of key paintings in the State Library Victoria collection.
La Trobe Journal, 2019, Volume 103, Issue 1, pp 6-23.

The happiest time of my life…’ Emotive visitor books and early mission tourism to Victoria’s Aboriginal reserves
Aboriginal History, 2017, Volume 41, pp 95-120.