A painted panel, alleged to have been originally mounted on either the inside or outside of a ‘Leviathan’ coach, the first to travel between Geelong and Ballarat, was handed over yesterday by the Art Gallery of Ballarat. 

The gallery had received the panel over 100 years ago, a gift from a Ballarat coachbuilder who had retained it from the days of the gold rush.

In a sign of the growing co-operation between the two Ballarat institutions, the gallery’s marketing and public programs officer Peter Freund travelled to the museum to sign a notice of transfer on Tuesday, officially presenting the piece to the collection and to the museum’s director Will Flamsteed.

The Cobb and Co Leviathan coaches were the luxury buses of their time (if you counted luxury as half the passengers sitting on the roof in the open weather on bone-jarring tracks).

Carrying up to 62 passengers, they could weigh an amazing six tons (over 6000kg) and were pulled by eight horses – the leading two horses being controlled by riders alongside side them.

Gallery director Gordon Morrison said while the wood and hessian oil-painted piece had potential historical value, it was not germane to the AGB’s collection, and had been deaccessioned.

“The panel has been on long-term loan to the museum,” he says.

“On it there’s a primitive, amateurish English landscape painting; that’s the traditional thing that would prettify the coach. The artistic merit of the painting is pretty negligible; it’s not something you would hang on the walls of the gallery. Its value is it formed part of a coach that had an historic connection to Ballarat.”

Gold Museum manager of collections Elizabeth Marsden says the detective work on the panel’s provenance must now begin.

“Our head coachbuilder (Barry Hore of Sovereign Hill) knows all the history of the coaches in the district, and he’ll know a lot about this. The specialists here will be able to help identify it.”