Victorian gold
The gold rush and its impact on cultural life

born England 1818, active Australia 1839–80, died Australia 1880

ST Gill’s artistic output during Victoria’s gold rush period was so prolific that he is considered ‘the artist of the gold-fields’.
His family immigrated to Adelaide in 1839, where he immediately established a studio and sought commissions. In 1846 he joined the exploration party of John Horrocks as field-artist, travelling to country north of the Flinders Ranges.

Declared bankrupt in 1851, Gill left South Australia in 1852 for the Victorian gold-fields to dig for riches. Within only months he abandoned the life of the digger, choosing instead to visually record aspects of life on the gold-fields.

He travelled widely throughout Victoria during the height of the gold rush period, completing numerous sketches, many of which were then lithographed at his Melbourne studio. Gill’s images were widely reproduced and his works are characterised by their spontaneity, realism and humour.

In 1856 he travelled to Sydney where he lived for eight years. When Gill returned to Melbourne in 1864, it was a very different city to the one he had left at the height of the gold rush. He failed to recapture the success that he had achieved in the mid-1850s.

In 1869, the Trustees of the Melbourne Public Library commissioned a set of forty watercolours after his earliest goldfields sketches.