The Australian Sketchbook

Samuel Thomas Gill was one of the most active and observant artists of colonial Australia. Born in England, he arrived in South Australia in 1839 and became known for his lively scenes of colonial settlement, travel, mining, urban life, and everyday social interaction. His work is especially valued for the way it records the ordinary visual culture of mid-nineteenth-century Australia: streets, camps, bush tracks, public houses, diggings, domestic scenes, and encounters between settlers, travellers, and Aboriginal people.

The Australian Sketchbook was published in Melbourne in 1865 and presents a series of lithographic views after Gill’s drawings. Rather than offering a formal map or atlas, the book gives a pictorial account of colonial Australia through scenes of daily life, landscape, travel, and settlement. Its images helped shape how colonial Australia was imagined by local and overseas audiences, presenting the colony as a lived environment of movement, labour, leisure, and social change.