Significant arrivals

During the gold rush decade, Victoria received unprecedented numbers of educated and professional immigrants, able to afford unassisted passage to Australia and eager to participate in life on the diggings.
Among these new arrivals were trained artists, who, like many others, hoped to defer their careers and make their fortunes on the gold-fields of Victoria.

These artists soon discovered that the lifestyle of the digger was not as easy, or as prosperous, as they had been led to believe.

Lack of success on the gold-fields left many with little option but to return to Melbourne to seek work in their former professions – a task which was made more difficult by the concentration of trained artists who had settled in the city and the limited art market that existed in the mid-1850s.

Significant arrivals presents the work of a small number of artists who travelled to the gold-fields of Victoria in the early 1850s and who, in various ways, were to contribute to the cultural life of the colony.

Through the work of William Strutt, ST Gill, George Rowe, Eugène von Guérard and Nicholas Chevalier, Significant arrivals explores artistic themes beyond the gold-fields and the individual contributions of these artists to the development of art in Victoria.