Barbara Weir was an Aboriginal Australian artist and political leader from the Utopia region, celebrated for her Grass Seed Dreaming and My Mother’s Country series. A member of the Stolen Generations, she was removed from her family as a child and later became the first female president of the Urapuntja Council.

She was born around 1945 to Minnie Pwerle, who would later become one of Australia’s most famous Aboriginal artists, and Jack Weir, an Irish stockman. At about nine she was taken by government officials and raised in foster homes in Alice Springs, Victoria and Darwin, while her family was told she had died. As a young married woman in Darwin, she learned her mother was alive, and the two were reunited.

Barbara moved permanently to Utopia in the late 1970s and was active in the land rights movement. In 1985 she was elected the first woman president of the Urapuntja Council.

She began painting in 1989, at around 45, and in 1994 was one of ten Utopia women who travelled to Indonesia to study batik. Her paintings celebrate the plants and Dreamings of her mother’s Country, most famously in her Grass Seed Dreaming and My Mother’s Country series. She later managed the career of her mother, Minnie Pwerle, after Minnie began painting in 2000.