david coombe history
SUMMARY: In early 1852 S.T. Gill left South Australia in the Victorian gold rush. The previous story of Gill's passage to the goldfields has been a confused one, but I think it can now be clarified. The evidence is indirect, but it's the best we have. It's most likely Gill departed Adelaide on 5 February 1852 aboard the brig Anna Dixon along with other men of a cultural bent: James Allen and son, John Michael Skipper, and Charles Colwell Oke. Also taking passage at that time were Gill's recent lithographers, Penman and Galbraith.
After arriving in Melbourne there is a gap in the timeline before there's dated evidence of Gill at Forest Creek (Mount Alexander) and Bendigo in June and July 1852. What did Gill do in the intervening months? Did he dig for gold?
Article type: NARRATIVE & ANALYSIS
In this article ...
The story of Gill's passage to the goldfields has been a confused one. The story relayed by Bowden (1971, p.25-34) from a family source was that Gill, his brother John Ryland Gill and James Thompson (brother of John's fiancée) left Adelaide on the brig Hero, their small party bound for the goldfields. Appleyard1 doubted this and was right to do so, as there is no Gill listed on the Hero between December 1851 (with Gill in Adelaide) and June 1852 (by which time he's sketching on the goldfields). (The confusion may have stemmed from a later Hero voyage in September 1852.)
There's a vagueness in Bowden's telling, there's no timeline and it is not stated explicitly that Gill was in a single party of diggers with his brother and Thompson, nor when the brothers fell out.
The family papers are held privately and I've not seen them. But modern newspaper digitisation raises the possibility of improving this part of Gill's narrative.
Evidence of individuals is hard to come by in the gold rush. Packed vessels swamped Melbourne's port and its shipping reporters. Melbourne newspapers typically listed only cabin passengers by name and merely gave a count for the bulk of travellers in steerage. Adelaide newspaper lists, however, were generally more complete.
Of course, instead of sailing, Gill may have taken the overland route direct to the goldfields at Mount Alexander, for which, understandably, there are no travel records.
And of the thousands on the diggings, very few rated mention in the press. So evidence for Gill's travel to Victoria is light.
When was he last seen in Adelaide; when first seen in Victoria? And what were his connections doing?
Unclaimed letters help. By December 1851 Gill had already made plans for Victoria, as by the end of that month a letter addressed to "S. Gill" remained uncollected at the Melbourne General Post Office.2 At Adelaide Post Office an identically addressed item lay unclaimed by the end of January 18523 and a further for "Samuel Gill" in February. Judging by these records it's likely that Gill had not yet arrived in Melbourne by December and had left Adelaide around the end of January. (Although we can't be certain the above letters were for S T Gill, this conclusion fits with other evidence.)
We know Gill had reached the diggings by June. The earliest known date is 16 June in the title of a pencil sketch:
Diggers hut - Canvas & Bark - F. Creek - June 16th | State Library of New South Wales PXA 6912 f.02
Preparatory sketch for "Digger's hut, canvas and bark, F. Creek" lithograph (1852 part 1). Significantly Gill dates this original as 16 June (although not in the lithograph). This is the earliest date we can place Gill at the diggings.
(Other scenes are dated (23/25/29) June, 30 June and 1 July 1852.)
Having established bookend dates, we return to the narrative and to where we last left Gill in South Australia.
In Adelaide on 20 December 1851 S.T. Gill had four steeple chase watercolours ready for raffle (← Narrative), likely appealing to those returning for Christmas from the Victorian gold diggings.
The following week James Allen's Adelaide Times reported on news received from the goldfields. Vast amounts of gold had been obtained, but on the down side, the rate of return per digger was not high and the dry summer season was turning against the prospects of thousands of diggers.
... the water was fast failing, and dysentery of a virulent kind had broken out at the "diggings". This is only mentioned in one of the papers, but it is confirmed by numerous parties, who have returned to Adelaide, and who do not intend to visit the "diggings" again until February or March next. By that time, it is expected, the creeks will be running again, and they then hope to obtain a sufficiency of water both for ordinary use, and for the purposes of washing.4
(For the connection between Allen and Gill, see also S.T. Gill and James Allen, 1845.)
Allen furthermore thought gold would soon be discovered in South Australia, and before conditions would improve in Victoria:
... Our full belief, however is, that gold will be found in sufficient quantities in [South Australia] to justify its working, long before it will be either safe or prudent to visit Mount Alexander again, and we would, therefore, seriously urge any of those, who may yet be on the wing, to pause, and see, whether their interests will not be better promoted by staying at home, than by travelling abroad.4
One digger just back in Adelaide was William Galbraith of Gill's lithographers Penman and Galbraith. He'd done well at Mount Alexander, returning with a "pint pot full" of gold nuggets, one weighing nine ounces.5 His homecoming was soured however when, within days of Allen's optimism and Galbraith's and Penman's return, the latter pair (together with Andrew Davie, whose daughter Galbraith would soon marry) were caught up in George Milner Stephen's "discovery" of a goldfield in South Australia.6 It was a trick.
Galbraith, Penman and many other South Australians summered in Adelaide and waited for Victoria's creeks to run again.
In the new year 1852 W A Cawthorne – once Gill's art student – diarised the emptying of South Australia:
Jan'y 3 1852 ... Gold! Gold! Gold! – all for Gold – Butchers – bakers – [miners] – hawkers – fishers – grocers – tailors – workmen – schoolmasters – clerks – officers – all! All! "for the Diggings" – many have come back everyone from £50 to £5000 and this in a few weeks. Some ... 8 weeks all off again with their families. The ministers are even going. The Wesleyan Sunday School has closed for want of teachers. The revenue has fallen to half the amount. Merchants are going – shops are shutting – houses emptying – money scarce – we gain the world and lose our own soul.
Having questioned "what doth it profit a man?", Cawthorne himself joined the surge three weeks later, sailing on 27 January, but he would fail quickly and miserably.7
It was not just labouring types who were heading to the diggings. Adelaide's cultural persons were going too; the artists, theatre people, printers and newspaper proprietors also left, including the lithographing partners Penman and Galbraith – Gill's recent publishers.
Galbraith's earlier success prompted a return to Victoria – likely for more gold rather than for printing, at least in the first instance. He married (the abovementioned Andrew Davie's daughter Janet) and three days later on 31 January 1852 the couple sailed for Melbourne on the barque Competitor. Galbraith was followed after two days by his lithographing partner, John Penman, in the schooner Elizabeth.8 (The pair may well have worked the diggings together.)
In another few days, on Thursday 5 February 1852, the brig Anna Dixon cleared out for Melbourne with seven cabin class and 150 steerage passengers. Among the mass were several men of a cultural bent: James Allen and son (the Adelaide Times proprietor),9 lawyer and amateur artist John Michael Skipper, and Charles Colwell Oke from the Register newspaper.8,10 And a Thomas Gill. They arrived in Melbourne on Monday 16 February 1852. (There the Argus published the wrong arrivals list for Anna Dixon, instead listing names from the brig's previous outwards trip!11)
We can't be certain that Thomas Gill on Anna Dixon was artist S T Gill, but other evidence supports this conclusion, including what others were doing: Allen, Galbraith, Penman, Skipper and Oke. (I'll proceed with this hypothesis.)
Penman arrived in Melbourne on the 12th and Galbraith on the 13th.12 So by mid-February 1852, Gill and his recent lithographers, Penman and Galbraith, were all in Victoria. But Gill's next lithographic publication wouldn't be until August. What happened between times?
If, as we hypothesise, Gill arrived in Melbourne on Anna Dixon on 16 February, what did he do for the four months following?
Perhaps Gill first met with Melbourne lithographers: Thomas Ham, and the partners James Campbell and William Macartney.
Once in Melbourne, Gill couldn't have missed the constant notices in The Argus13 from Thomas Ham advertising a set of "Five Highly Finished Views of the Gold Diggings at Mount Alexander & Ballarat" from "on the spot" drawings by David Tulloch. Ham advertised from late January onwards, saying he was engraving and would publish as soon as sufficient subscribers were found at a guinea each.
The advertisements continued in such fashion even as late as August! Ham's delay would be Gill's opportunity.
On 21 February, Campbell and Macartney announced a single tinted lithograph by William Strutt "View of the Golden Point, Ballarat" and advertised it for a week and a half and then ... silence.14 Campbell and Macartney themselves may have gone to the Mount Alexander diggings. Gill had briefly known Campbell in Adelaide when the latter was in partnership with Penman and Galbraith.
So in February 1852 Gill would've seen there was commercial opportunity for his own work, but as well as needing a reliable lithographer, he still needed the material.
So what did Gill do between arriving in Melbourne and his first dated Victorian sketch at Forest Creek diggings: between 16 February and 16 June?
Gill may have dug for gold. If he did, then his problematic right hand and wrist – which came to public notice in January 1851 – may have hampered his exertions. Perhaps he made company with his brother and Thompson, or Penman and Galbraith, or even Campbell and Macartney. But there is no actual evidence. It must also be said there is little evidence of any prospecting mates of the period. Gill may have taken out a monthly digger's licence in March, April and May 1852.
The past narrative has regarded Sam Gill is a failed prospector who turned to his art.15
But there is every indication of his drive to illustrate the diggings and the diggers and in a way no other artist had done, and in quantity. His gold was to be obtained not from a shovel but from a greasy lithographic pencil.
Letter dated 21 March 1852 from James Allen junior to his father James Allen, newspaper prioprietor. Written from Forest Creek Diggings, Mount Alexander. (Seen by this author.)
Cawthorne. William Anderson Cawthorne - diary, ca. 1849-1859. Digitised at SLNSW: <https://collection.sl.nsw.gov.au/record/9O4oBNAn>.
McCulloch, Alan. Artists of the Australian gold rush Lansdowne Melbourne 1977.
Appleyard1 rightly rejects the Gill family's proposed Hero passage, and posits four possible shipping departures of his own, albeit all for the name Thomas Gill:
Sea Bird can be ruled out with reasonable confidence. This Thomas Gill was a wrestler. He and a mate, John Cassidy, were both absent from their scheduled wrestling contest on 29 December 1851, the same day as both were listed as departing on the Sea Bird. References:
The passenger list for the Cantaro has a big problem. The newspapers accidentally duplicated the Sea Bird passenger list of a fortnight earlier – at least the bulk that were in steerage. Comparison at the destination is of no help, as by this stage the Victorians had given up on recording the names of all the steerage arrivals. Instead the report is "Mr, Mrs, and Miss Waring, and one hundred and forty-six in the steerage." These three cabin passengers are in Adelaide's list of departures, but the steerage passengers have all been duplicated from Sea Bird. References:
This seems to be Gill's most likely intercolonial trip. See above: Cultural Departures from South Australia | January to February 1852. Ages appear to have been rounded, as Skipper was 36 and S.T. Gill 33. References:
Based mainly on the evidence of Sam Gill's unclaimed letters, Margaret Brock seems too late. References:
David Coombe. Original 4 January 2026. Updated 5 January 20026. | text copyright (except where indicated)
CITE THIS: David Coombe, 2026, S.T. Gill to Victoria and the Diggings, 1852, accessed dd mmm yyyy, <http://coombe.id.au/S_T_Gill/S_T_Gill_1852_To_Victoria.htm>