The Australian Sketchbook is a collection of 24 chromolithographs by artist Samuel Thomas Gill. It was published around 1865 by Melbourne printing and publishing firm Hamel and Ferguson.
The scenes depict mostly rural subjects, including wool wagons, a shepherd, bushranging, lost children, diggers heading for the goldfields, a bush funeral, surveyors, a bush mailman, kangaroo and emu hunting, a corroboree and the native police. The book was extremely popular, running to several editions.
The Australian Sketchbook was Gill’s first foray into the new process of chromolithography, and only the second book published in Australia using the technique, which allowed for the printing of multi-coloured images through the use of oil-based inks applied to a sequence of printing stones.
Samuel Thomas Gill
Samuel Thomas Gill (1818–1880) was a prolific artist and illustrator working in colonial Australia from the mid-19th century.
Gill arrived in South Australia from England in December 1839, and within four months had established a studio in Adelaide offering 'to produce portraits of human beings, horses and dogs, and to sketch houses'. His artwork in South Australia includes drawings made on an exploring party to the Spencer Gulf and portraits of prominent South Australians.
In 1852 he went to the Victorian goldfields where he completed perhaps his best-known representations of everyday life on the diggings. He spent many years travelling in Victoria and New South Wales, sketching what he saw and producing lithographs intended to appeal to colonists and those in Britain with an interest in Australia.
He returned to Melbourne in 1864 and soon published The Australian Sketchbook. Alongside Gill's depictions of the digger life, horses and bushmen were a commonly represented in his work.
Historian WH Newnham observed that Gill's 'fame and fortune was to last just about as long as the gold-rush period'. He died penniless on 27 October 1880.
Slideshow
Museum collection
The Australian Sketchbook was acquired by the Museum in 2013. The Museum's collection also includes a rare wooden printing block of ST Gill’s illustration Bourke Street West in the Forenoon.
In our collection