Barak the Wirrirrap
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The following was directly transcribed from an interview with Wurundjeri Elder, Ian Hunter recorded in 2004. "AB" denotes the interviewer.
Ian Hunter: Barak was said that to "sing" a person you need something belonging to them, especially hair. Or if a person in their family had died and if you could get to where the person's grave was and dig the person up and get the fat from around the kidneys ...sold! Whoever you wanted to sing to, you could sing to them with the fat from the kidney.
AB: Sing to them?
Ian Hunter: Sing to them AND sing them to death [...] But you had to be wirrirrap, you had to be medicine man to be able to do that.
AB: How did one become a wirrirrap?
Ian Hunter: "Oh just being old. Being old and knowing. I suppose, in the sense of European education, a professor of everything. Knowing botanical skills. Knowing bodily parts, how to do keloids [ceremonial scarification of the body] without causing too much drama of infection, how to heal - everything. Knowing what herbs to use for what, what you can eat, what you can't eat and being able to pass that onto other people.
So you were a healer and you knew. So you were a doctor of medicine. You were a doctor of botany. You were a doctor of philosophy, because you would know all the rules and the stories relating to our people.
And Barak was accepted as wirrirrap, meaning sorcerer or medicine man. And he actually said that he could fly. But he couldn't fly in, I suppose, a European sense, his murrup [spirit or soul] could fly. "
The following is the voice of Ian Hunter:
Barak was actually a diplomat working with the white people [...] he grew up a boy seeing our country as wild and bush. He then [saw] all these changes during his lifetime. So he was here and he was alive during Federation. Before European settlement he wouldn't have seen a chook or a goat or a horse or a cow [...]
Another amazing thing that I've come to realise is that my grandmother, she was actually born in 1897. Now, that was six years prior to Barak passing away. [...] And I remember a long while ago, when my grandmother was alive (she died in 1976) asking my Nan,
"Nan, do you remember him?"
Now, he must've been pretty important and had a big impact on my Nan, because she was only six when he died, but she came across and she said,
"Yep, I remember us as kids going and sitting on his front porch and William Barak telling us stories."
And she said she remembered one of how William Barak talked about the white fellas, when they come. And he remembers seeing Captain Cook, but he wasn't talking about Captain Cook. He remembered the people coming off the Rebecca, meaning the Batman People. And coming on this great big tree with all the clouds on it. And he was talking about the Rebecca to my Gran.
So that's how recent it is, like my grandmother, who died in 1976, remembers sitting down and talking to an old man who saw the first white people come to Melbourne.
Well, I suppose some people talk about how many generations their family have lived in Australia and I think they're looking at sort of seven or eight. But from me back, when my great grandmother's grandmother was a babe, was when the first white people come.
So it's only five generations, or four back from me. And my mother passed away only last year [2004], so from my mother it was only three generations back from her when the first white people came to Melbourne. [...] So when I talk in schools and that, and I talk to kids and I show them my photos, it's real to them.
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© Aliey Ball (freshwater.net.au) 2006
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