Sketching Tom Gill: Art, history, and a creative exploration beyond the frame of ST Gill's utopian visions of colonial South Australia.

Abstract

The 1840s paintings of the emigrant artist Samuel Thomas (ST) Gill are frequently used to depict Adelaide’s earliest years. ST Gill’s works are enduringly popular, and the compositions show a peaceful version of the colonising of South Australia in an era before the advent of photography could provide alternate views. However, Sketching Tom Gill: Art, history, and a creative exploration beyond the frame of ST Gill’s utopian visions of colonial South Australia posits that these works are studiously composed and highly crafted, and are therefore an unreliable way to view South Australia’s colonial history. Utilising the principles of ‘blind space’ developed by twentieth-century film theorists, this creative nonfiction thesis investigates beyond the frame of Gill’s compositions to expose the realities of the early settlement of South Australia; the framework is underscored by issues of violence and dispossession enacted upon First Nations peoples. The work is a critical and creative narrative of facts and fictions that integrates the epistolary form, artworks, written sketches, journal entries, microfictions and historic found objects, collaging them to suggest new compositions and a unique interpretation of Gill’s South Australian colonial art archive.