ST Gill‘s colonial paintings at State Library of Victoria and Ballarat

An artist described as Australia’s most significant of the mid-19th century is the subject of two fascinating exhibitions.

Three of ST Gill’s works in the Gill in the Goldfields exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat.

The paradox of ST Gill is plainly expressed on the State Library of Victoria’s website and in the exhibition itself. He was, we are told, “Australia’s most significant artist of the mid-19th century”, yet has been all but forgotten for the past 100 years or more; or at least, he is reduced to the rank of a secondary figure in the narrative of colonial art and a source of ­illustrations for histories of the goldfields.

Whether STG, as he was regularly known in his time, really was the most significant artist of his period is debatable; it is a big claim when we think of Eugene von Guerard in particular.

But it is certainly thought-provoking and makes us realise that the primacy of landscape in the Australian tradition, as the main vehicle through which our art has defined the national experience, may at the very least have consigned the practitioners of other genres to an unwarranted obscurity.

Landscape was certainly important from the beginnings of settlement, but it is arguable that the success of the Heidelberg School and the simplistic idea that they were the first artists to represent Australia accurately skewed our perception of their predecessors. It led to almost a century of depreciation of colonial landscape painting, and perhaps an even more complete disregard of non-landscape colonial art. But, as Sasha Grishin suggests in this exhibition and in the outstanding catalogue that accompanies it — and as the work itself bears out — there were no doubt other reasons for the neglect into which Gill slipped even towards the end of his own lifetime.

Samuel Thomas Gill (1818-80) was born in England and came out to Adelaide with his family — his father was a Baptist minister — in 1839, barely three years after the new colony’s foundation at the end of 1836 and early in its construction on the plan laid out by Colonel William Light in 1837. Founded by free settlers with money to invest, the city grew remarkably quickly, though not as fast as the Melbourne that would soon spring up, supercharged by the wealth of the gold rush.

Gill’s early works give a vivid picture of the new city, with its broad straight streets laid out on a grid plan that ultimately goes back to the urban design of Piraeus devised by Hippodamus for Pericles, but which Light had more recently admired in the Sicilian city of Catania.

Though still only sparsely built up, Gill’s city seems a tranquil, orderly and civilised place — eminently appealing to anyone considering joining the new settlement.

As a free colony of decent people — unlike the riff-raff of Sydney — Adelaide initially was expected to be free of crime, and Light’s design did not even include a prison. Similarly, there were hopes of maintaining harmonious relations with the indigenous population and, although such optimism proved naive, it helps to explain the emphasis on positive portrayals of the Aborigines that is notable in South Australian colonial art.

Gill’s own early images of Aborigines, from 1842, are extremely interesting, recalling the unbiased curiosity of the Port Jackson Painter in Sydney town a couple of generations earlier. Here too we see images of the daily life of ­indigenous people who have only just come in contact with the settler population and have barely had time to assimilate European ways.

There are, for example, watercolours of ­natives lighting a fire, diving into the water or hunting. Particularly interesting is a larger ­watercolour of a corroboree, with two settler spectators on the right whose presence does not seem to concern the participants in the ceremony at all.

Another drawing shows an armed skirmish between two groups: Gill is a sympathetic observer but does not sentimentally imagine that the Aborigines are pacifists. The most moody and romantic work in the oeuvre of an artist who is usually anything but romantic shows a native sepulchre. The body is raised on a platform made of sticks and covered with what appears to be woven grass mats. The purpose of the platform is explained by the presence of several dingoes beneath, and the whole scene is bathed in silvery moonlight.

The inevitable clash of two incompatible cultural regimes is subtly and poignantly evoked in an image of natives stalking emus. The immediate natural setting seems almost pristine, but there is a post and rail fence on the right and pastures are visible beyond that. Much more complex and ambivalent is the later watercolour Native Dignity (c. 1860) in which an Aboriginal couple parades ostentatiously through the streets in an incongruous mixture of European clothing: the absurdity of their dress is immediately apparent, but perhaps just as significant is the mean-spirited disapproval of the colonials who look askance at them.

Another ambiguous image is one that Gill repeated on a couple of occasions: a squatting, grinning Aborigine with family members behind him and the title “Lord of all he surveys”. The tone of the image depends on the way that we interpret the grin, which is hardly a smile of serene contentment. But there is little doubt about the way the same tag is used in a pair of pictures contrasting the lot of the Aborigines before and after the arrival of white men, personified as a fat and self-satisfied landowner in the second of the pictures.

Gill is best known, however, for the images he made of the goldfields, to which he travelled in 1852. Those that he produced at the Ballarat fields are the subject of a small but valuable satellite exhibition at the Ballarat Art Gallery.

Gill drew in pencil and watercolour, but his work became widely known and popular through the new medium of chromolithography, which made coloured pictures accessible to a wide public.

The gold rush attracted fortune hunters from all over the world like swarms of locusts, devastating the land and living in squalid camps, driven, as though in some medieval allegory, by the desperate search for wealth. A few made fortunes, and many remained poor or ended up even more destitute than they had begun. The subject fascinated Gill, but he approached it on the whole in a low-key, anecdotal mode, with a mixture of comedy and pathos and a vein of moral criticism.

Often the images are conceived in pairs or in series. Thus Lucky Digger That Returned shows the now wealthy prospector at home in comfortable middle-class surroundings, with his wife and family. Unlucky Digger That Never Returned, meanwhile, displays the grim picture of a skeleton picked over by carrion birds. Such is the lottery of the goldfields. Similarly, Provident Diggers in Melbourne has a pair of successful diggers outside a land office evidently planning the acquisition of further leases to reinvest the money they have made so far. In Improvident Diggers in Melbourne a couple of loudly dressed diggers are busy wasting their earnings on theatres and jewellery with no thought of what is to come next.

These pictures focus on a pair of men, and this seems to be the most typical format in Gill’s work. A whole series evoking the different phases and outcomes of life on the goldfields is based on pairs of figures: in The Newly Arrived Enquiring, the new prospector talks to an old hand; in Fair Prospects, two miners examine a sample of dirt; in Bad Returns, one man consoles another. Diggers On Route to Deposit Gold, armed with rifles, journey together, and even the shady characters who seem bent on exacting a cut of the profits are a pair.

The invalid digger sitting disconsolately outside his tent is without a human companion, but he is at least accompanied by his dog, and dogs and horses, as we see in another part of the exhibition, were subjects close to Gill’s heart. It is interesting that in a set of three plates devoted to native animals — the kangaroo, emu and native dog — it is only in the last that we sense a vivid apprehension of the life and character of the animals: the female guarding her pups while the male is seen further off, beneath a crescent moon.

The focus on the one-to-one relations between men in the goldfields subjects shows the artist takes a primarily personal and moral rather than political view of the events he is recording: the most important dimension of human experience in this world is the ­relation between man and man. This supports Grishin’s suggestion that the ethos of Australian mateship was forged on the goldfields and Gill was the artist who more than any other ­articulated this form of camaraderie, which would assume its definitive form on the ­battlefields of the Great War.

If this is true, however, how can we explain Gill’s fall from popularity towards the end of his career and especially after his premature death in 1880? The answer, it seems, is that audiences in Melbourne didn’t want to be reminded of the rough, ugly, greedy and self-interested world of the gold rush that underpinned their own wealth and the grandeur of their city, any more than the people of Sydney wanted to be reminded of the thieves, whores and brutal guards who had been the first population of their own city.

The gold rush and the prosperity that ­followed brought an immense growth in the population of Australia, some seekers after wealth on the fields and others who followed in their wake, taking up the opportunities available in the growing cities. In this new world, those who had made their money in the rough and tumble of the gold rush wanted to forget and reinvent themselves as gentlemen, especially as the more recent and respectable arrivals were jealous of their own standards of propriety.

The work that best illustrates the new ­Melbourne a generation after the gold rush is one that Gill made in the last year of his life: Doing the Block (1880) refers to the afternoon passeggiata that had become a custom in ­Melbourne in those years, and in which the well-to-do would parade with their wives in their most extravagant finery.

Gill’s composition is humorous enough in its procession of the nouveaux riches asserting their status with all their might and main, but the key to the story we are witnessing is the pair of figures on the left: short, thick and ugly, they are evidently the even more newly prosperous. The others have had a generation to become slim, elegant and acquire at least the affectation of good breeding. The newcomers, so obviously out of place and ignored by the beautiful people, look on resentfully — the confrontation of the two groups echoed, in a homage to Hogarth, by the two dogs in the centre of the composition.

Australian Sketchbook: Colonial Life and The Art of ST Gill

State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, until October 25.

Gill in the Goldfields

Art Gallery of Ballarat, until September 13.