Early Queensland artworks have interested Dr Kevin Lambkin over many years. He would occasionally see at auctions and antique shops attractive watercolours of unidentified rural homesteads signed ‘F Whitehouse’. Whitehouse was one of those obscure artists about whom very little was recorded, although the State Library of Queensland held his intriguing portrait of a First Nations Australian man from Booubyjan Station in south-east Queensland. The question of who he was and his work as an artist in Queensland, however, came to the fore in February 2025, when Kevin located a large oil painting of the BrisbaneRiver valley town of Esk, signed by Whitehouse and dated 1927. The size and ambition of the painting of the township, and the perceptiveness of the painting of the Booubyjan man, encouraged him to explore and tell Whitehouse’s story.