The story
In August 1978 a thief cut Charcoal Burners out of its frame at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. The canvas was painted in 1886 by Tom Roberts, a leading figure of Australian Impressionism, from sketches made at a camp he shared with his fellow painter Frederick McCubbin at Box Hill, then farmland east of Melbourne. It shows labourers splitting and stacking timber for charcoal. A ransom was paid, the painting was recovered in Sydney, and it came back to Ballarat in May 1979. The theft changed how regional galleries thought about security.
The gallery is usually described as the oldest regional art gallery in Australia. Citizens led by the local benefactor James Oddie founded it in 1884, and in 1890 it moved into its present building on Lydiard Street North, said to be the oldest purpose-built art gallery building in the country.
It now holds more than 11,000 works, from colonial landscapes by Eugene von Guerard to gifts from Norman Lindsay, the artist and writer who grew up nearby in Creswick. The gallery is also the custodian of the Eureka Flag, the banner of the 1854 miners' rebellion at Ballarat, which has been on long-term loan to the city's Eureka Centre.
