An academic expects to set the cat among the pigeons by alleging that one of our most celebrated colonial artists, S.T. Gill, was a convict.
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Babette Smith says art historians have been openly hostile to her theory that Gill was a 13-year-old forger transported to Sydney in 1833, rather than a free settler to Adelaide.
Gill, who dropped dead outside Melbourne GPO in 1880, is best known for his humorous sketches of life on the Victorian goldfields.
But Ms Smith, a University of New England lecturer who has written books on convicts, and families' shame, believes he kept a dark secret.
On Tuesday in Ballarat, she will tell the Australian Historical Association's conference, From Boom to Bust, that the artist was the Samuel Thomas Gill who in 1832, age 13, was convicted in Birmingham of forging cheques at a solicitor's office.
On arrival in Sydney the boy was assigned to work on a southern NSW farm until he escaped in 1839 – the year his parents and two siblings arrived in South Australia.
Recaptured, he was flogged, sent to the Blue Mountains and escaped again. He spent three years on Norfolk Island and went to Hobart in 1844. He never arrived at his next posting, in Southport, and was assumed drowned, but Ms Smith says he could have escaped and joined his family in SA.
Ms Smith claims records of Gill's supposed 'free immigrant' 1839 voyage from England to Adelaide are questionable.
And, she says Gill's early 1840s watercolour series, Months and Seasons, depict labourers in 1830s convict clothing, which is puzzling because South Australia wasn't a convict colony, and the 'immigrant' Gill did not leave SA until 1851.
She also claims Gill's large painting of the explorer Sturt departing Adelaide, dated 1844-5, depicts in the foreground a convict in distinctive blue stripes talking to an artist - does it slyly depict Gill's dual identities?
She says Gill's official coroner's inquest paperwork, which could detail flogging scars, is missing. One historian has a copy but she says he "is not prepared to share it".
Other historians have shunned the convict theory and a distant relative of Gill's was dismissive.
Australian National University art historian Sasha Grishin, a Gill biographer and curator of an exhibition last year of Gill works at the State Library of Victoria, which is now on at the National Library of Australia, described Ms Smith as an "amateur genealogist". He has blocked her emails because "there's no foundation to what she's saying".
He said every year in Gill's life is accounted for, and it was unlikely that "all those dates, all those works were forged and it's a conspiracy".
For example, Gill's sketchbook brought from England, has "every second page dated" as 1837 - a time Ms Smith claims he was a convict in Australia.
Professor Grishin said: "I myself aren't fussed about Gill's moral character, but I'm simply saying there is absolutely no evidence for this thesis."
