GILL, Samuel Thomas
Waiting for the Ferry c1860s

watercolour
Initialled lower left ‘STG’ and inscribed lower right ‘Waiting for the Ferry’.
27.5 x 35.5  cm

Title on old (1950s?) mount ‘River Yarra/ Two Gintilmen (sic) waiting to cross the Ferry’. Inscribed on the old mount ‘c1856’

Provenance: Unknown; Leonard Joel Pty Ltd Auctioneers at The Art Salon, 362 Collins St, Melbourne,19 February 1953 (lot number no 2108 or 2708 on label on backing); George Page-Cooper; Leonard Joel Pty Ltd Auctioneers, 21 and 22 November 1967, ‘The Historical George Page-Cooper Collection’, Lot 232 titled ‘Waiting for the Ferry’, (one of 14 Gills auctioned); Private Collection, Melbourne.

Illustrated: Samuel Thomas Gill – Artist by Keith Macrae Bowden, 1971, p100 (‘reproduced with permission of the late G. Page Cooper’).

Comments: A similar version inscribed with the title 'The Gintilmin as Pays the Rint' (referring presumably to the pig) was sold at Joel's auction, Melbourne, for $20,000 in the 1980s and re-appeared at Trevor Bussell Fine Art Gallery in October 1987 (no. 7 in the gallery’s catalogue of ‘Fine Australian Paintings’) for significantly more. Recent sales of Gill’s watercolours have included Diggings in the Mount Alexander District of Victoria 1852 for $45,400 (Deutscher~Menzies, 16/06/2004) and the two smaller watercolours Zealous Golddiggers for $93,000 and Puddling for $76,800 (both sold at Sotheby’s, April, 2006). Samuel Thomas Gill is renowned for his watercolours and prints of goldfields subjects which have provided the most extraordinary documentation of this period of Australia’s history. In ‘Waiting for the Ferry’ Gill has added high comedy to the history, giving us a classic of Australian humour. We wait, for ever, in gleeful anticipation for the digger’s impending attempt to board his large pig onto the approaching rowing boat. And ponder whether this digger’s overconfidence has been helped along by a few drinks (indicated by the colour of his nose). While the watercolour has been dated at circa 1856 (on an old mount) it may have been painted a little later, since Gill created a series of other comical images that were published as lithographs by De Gruchy and Leigh in Melbourne in 1866. The titles of these lithographs have lettering similar to that on ‘Waiting for the Ferry’. Gill continued to depict gold-mining scenes many years after the initial rushes, many being produced as lithographs. However, unlike many of Gill’s watercolours, ‘Waiting for the Ferry’ has not been reproduced in printed form. Gill set out for the diggings and, by 1852, was on Pennyweight Flat, Little Bedigo, Forest Creek. He was, at the time insolvent. But, while his brother John laboured for gold, the artist stopped digging and spent his time recording the rapidly increasing activity as the hoards of prospectors grew. In his book on S. T. Gill, Keith Macrae Bowden comments that some of the new arrivals ‘had only pick and shovel, others carried nothing at all, intending to buy what they wanted at the new site if the rush turned out well’. There were store tents, usually guarded by fierce dogs. Storekeepers sold mining tools and the usual equipment: ‘washing pans, buckets, cradles, puddling tubs, picks, shovels, crowbars, sacks of flower, tin teapots, clothing, ropes, saws, boots, bacon and pork…’ Thus, to attempt to take a pig, as well as a spade, to the diggings shows a degree of entrepreneurial initiative, even if it was alcohol-fuelled. Ultimately, ‘Waiting for the Ferry’ embodies not only classically Australian humour but combines those colourful and quintessentially Australian characteristics of eternal optimism (‘she’ll be right, mate’) and

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