An Original Album Of S.T. Gill The Victorian Gold Fields 1852-3
Australian History Antiquarian & Collectible Art History Illustrated Reference Non-Fiction Picture Book Gold-Rush History Colonial Australiana
First-edition hardcover of Michael Cannon’s An Original Album of S. T. Gill: The Victorian Gold Fields 1852-3 (John Currey, 1982) – the only book-length gathering of Gill’s gold-rush sketches reproduced directly from the artist’s rare lithographs. 100 crisp pages present 70-plus plates, many in colour for the first time, showing bustling diggings, canvas towns and Chinese miners exactly as Gill recorded them on the spot in 1852-53. Collectors prize this volume because it remains the most faithful source of the colonial images that shaped Australia’s visual memory of the world’s richest gold rush.
What makes the title so scarce is the combination of first-edition status, the fragile dust jacket that most copies lost, and the premium art-stock that lets the ochres and indigos glow. The copy offered here is clean, tight and unmarked: no ex-libris stamps, no inscriptions, no dog-eared corners; just light shelf rub to the jacket and an almost invisible page crease. It is the copy historians, art dealers and interior stylists search for when they need the authentic 1850s palette for reference or display.
Beyond investment value, the book is a portable museum. Open it to find the original captions Gill wrote for his patrons, plus Cannon’s concise context on each camp—perfect for teachers, genealogists or anyone decorating an Australian-themed room. With gold-fields tourism booming and Gill’s works commanding four-figure prices at auction, owning this intact first edition delivers both scholarly authority and the timeless romance of the diggings in one beautifully illustrated package.
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