Myth and Memory: Prints from the Collection

In the decades following the Eureka Stockade, artists sought to interpret and memorialise a fleeting and chaotic battle of enormous social and political consequence. They transformed the tenuous and competing accounts of chaos, violence, and heroism at Eureka into enduring images. These prints seek to establish the Eureka Stockade and the gold rush as foundational stories in an emerging colonial society.

This exhibition features a range of prints representing subjects related to Eureka and the Ballarat gold rush. In most cases, these images were produced as plates for publications, notably the 1887 second edition of ‘History of Ballarat’ by William Bramwell Withers. Published by Ballarat printer F. W. Niven, the book included illustrated prints, among them an indicative map of the Eureka Stockade site. The illustrations include drawings signed by Niven, alongside prints made from sketches by the redoubtable goldfields’ artist S. T. Gill.

Another important source for these prints is the ‘Picturesque Atlas of Australasia’. An American publishing team arrived in Sydney in 1885 to establish the Picturesque Atlas Company, adapting an increasingly popular format of illustrated travel books for the Australian market. Published in forty‑two supplements between 1886 and 1889, the ‘Picturesque Atlas of Australasia’ attracted more than 55,000 subscribers. These supplements were commonly collated into impressively bound volumes, bringing images of the colonies into parlours and libraries across Australia and beyond.

Most of the prints in this exhibition were first issued as black‑and‑white illustrations in publications. Their later extraction, framing, and display speak to the growing democratisation of art in middle‑class homes across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Although coloured lithography was increasingly available, the practice of hand‑colouring black‑and‑white prints persisted in the Australian colonies, as evidenced by the works shown here.

Eureka continues to stir the imagination of Australians from all walks of life and remains a fertile subject for artists, writers, and makers of film and theatre. In the years following the Eureka Stockade, the impulse to make tangible a profound and unsettling historical moment expanded beyond reportage into romanticism. In doing so, these images occupy a highly charged space between remembrance and interpretation, establishing an enduring tension between the preservation of memory and the making of myth.

The exhibition introduces recent additions to the collection through a gift from former Sydney Eureka Committee presented in memory of R. D. Walsh.

Image: George Rossi Ashton (artist), Illustrated Australian News (publisher), ‘Storming the Eureka Stockade, 3^rd December,1854’, c1887, Print: hand coloured engraving, 11.4 x 11.7 cm, Donated by the Sydney Eureka Committee in memory of R.D. Walsh, 2025, Eureka Centre Collection.