Then came the 1947 Travelling Scholarship, a competition whose winner would be sponsored over two years in Europe taking their craft to the next level. The Argus newspaper judged her entry “one of the best painted by a Gallery student for many years”.

But a “dank shadow” was cast onto Judith’s life, says art historian Dr Juliette Peers in the exhibition catalogue.

She came second. The winner was Douglas Green, a 28 year-old ex-soldier, with a bold depiction of train passengers in a modern style that “may shock conservatively minded art enthusiasts”, the Hobart Mercury wrote.

Peers says it was perceived as a skirmish in the wars over the arrival of “modern art” – Perrey was a painter in the more traditional style. However Peers says it may have simply been gender that determined the outcome.

The three men on the judging panel decided Green showed the “greatest promise of becoming ... a painter likely to enrich his country’s art”. The one woman on the panel, Alice Bale, strongly disagreed, forcing the result to a ballot.

“Art schools [at the time] were increasingly dominated by mature ex-service students,” Peers says. “Male artists captured attention. Many of Judith’s female contemporaries, when interviewed later, believed that being a woman weighed against her.”

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The following year, Perrey wrote in her diary that she had been told the judges thought her work better, but a male student was more likely to be a future success. She entered the Archibald, was a finalist, but didn’t win.

Two years later, the woman who had repeatedly told her diaries she would never marry, got married, and a year after that quit her job as a commercial artist at Murdoch’s Herald and chose a suburban, domestic life. She continued to paint, mounting the occasional show with arts groups, doing portraits or Christmas cards. She painted her children, and these works show “her gifts never faded”, says Peers.

One colleague, who had made a fortune with teddy bear art and collectables in the 1980s, slammed Perrey for “irresponsibly throwing away her remarkable gifts”, Peers says. Judith found this “hilarious rather than wounding”.

But, says Peers, her career raises central questions, still debated and unresolved, about gender, class, celebrity and reputation in Australian art.

The man who won the scholaship, Green is, like Perrey, almost lost to posterity. His winning work sits with Perrey’s runner-up in Warrnambool Art Gallery. McAllister says this was a deliberate, mischievous move by Perrey, who donated her work to the gallery. A wordless gesture from the past; a note in a diary now closed.