Frank Campbell

I was an academic for twenty-six years, teaching Australian history, sociology, economics and architectural history among other things. For the past twenty years I've been a freelance art historian/art authenticator. For fifteen years I reviewed non-fiction books monthly in The Australian (1994–2008), national daily.

Apart from Australia, I worked in Chile, Mexico, UK, USA, Singapore and elsewhere.

Since 1994 I've specialised in colonial Australian and 19th century British art, but have ranged across British colonial art generally, as well as US and Latin American painting.

Apart from my new book "Face Value", on mid-19th century Australian colonial and British art and photography, now available on Amazon, I've debunked the claim that the famous Australian colonial artist S.T. Gill (1818-1880) was a child convict rather than the free settler he actually was. It was a case of mistaken identity: the child convict was a Samuel Gell, not Samuel Thomas Gill. The "child convict" story received much uncritical media attention.

Read the demolition of this myth on my webspot:

https://medium.com/@fjcamp_28902/