[18] For Australia Day celebrations in Bendigo, and to raise funds for soldiers at the local camp, Freeman joined ‘the Keystone Moving Picture Company’ in a street performance,[19] and also another fundraiser, featuring ‘The Keystone Komedy Kompany’ at Bendigo’s Princess Theatre,[20] in both of which she appeared as the silent movie dancer 'Carmencita.’[21] Freeman’s soldier brother Ross, a signaller, was stationed in Lemnos and newspapers noted that he was the chance recipient of some of his family's war donations.

[22] In February 1916, Freeman commenced her studies at the National Gallery of Victoria art schools[23] under Bernard Hall, and where other Bendigonians Clarice Beckett and her sister, and Elma Roach (from Shepparton) were also,[24] and where they were reported as ‘working very hard’,[25] relieved by periodic returns home to Bendigo on holidays, where on one occasion Coleman hosted a student friend Joan Lindsay.

[26] Freeman appears in a 1920 snapshot, perched at centre top of a group of the students at the base of Emmanuel Fremiet's Joan of Arc statue outside the Art School (now the State Library forecourt).

[30] She was a member, with Norah Gurdon, Dora Wilson, Elma Roach, Isabel May Tweddle, Helen Ogilvie, Louis McCubbin, and Daryl Lindsay of a club for former students formed in 1916 and presided by the oldest, Peter Kirk, which held a number of reunions which received wide publicity in the early 1920s.

[37] Freeman was invited with Joan Lindsay to the Crivelli’s at Ferrars Place, Albert Park to a dance celebrating Rene Crivielli’s Legion of Honour,[38][39] and in January 1923 spent time at his family's Mount Macedon property to break from sketching in the Malmsbury district[40] where she, and probably Elma too,[41] were taught watercolour techniques by Matthew James MacNally who was working there beside Harold Herbert.

[42][43][44][45] The reviewer Alexander Colquhoun, though gently critical of Roach’s technical shortcomings, in Freeman’s work found ‘more technical grip and a better sense of values,’ continuing that she showed ‘a creditable disinclination to rely on a pretty water-color manner and a consistent striving after true definition.’[45] Arthur Streeton in the Argus, while acknowledging that this was their first exhibition so ‘rather immature’, agreed that ‘Miss Freeman reveals herself as the better craftsman [sic], and displays an interesting sense of colour to which is added free handling of pigment’.

Their artefacts, which were reported to have ‘drawn a crowd’, included ‘hair combs, umbrella handles, egg cups, serviette rings, bag handles, hat pins and quaint pendants dangling on necklets of black ribbon’ all in ‘polished, tinted and painted woods.’[49] Another show of their 'Madgelma' branded[50] lacquerware including powder boxes, card trays, fruit bowls and dress ornaments, was held in Jessie Traill’s Collins Street studio for Christmas shoppers,[51] and was noted in Table Talk.

By October Freeman and Roach had arrived in Italy where they were painting in Venice and Choggia, The Age describing them as ‘good draftsmen [sic], good colorists; both understand light, shadows and mass, and both have the strong feeling for sentiment mid against sentimentality, for vitality and against pictorial incident and mere anecdote’ with Roach’s approach being devoted to a ‘poetic element’ and Freeman’s ‘more detached,…making her subject speak more obviously for itself.’[62] The lattter sent her Reflections, Choggia for the first exhibition of the year at the New Gallery, 107 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne.

[64] Late in 1926 Freeman, then aged 31, met and married in Kensington mining engineer Lanfear Thompson from Western Australia a government contractor due to work in Africa[65] After a honeymoon motor tour of rural England they initially settled in Obuasi, West Africa (Ghana),[66] and despite The Bulletin report that she had 'evidently abandoned ideas of an art career,[67] she resumed her painting when they visited Kumasi, Ashanti as guests of Justice and Mrs. McDowell,[68] where she found the landscape reminiscent of Australia.

[88] Streeton was condescending, hinting that she was proficient but a merely aspiring artist who ‘with increased and long study […] will give a more complete and more varied technical expression in her works.’[89] Alexander Colquhoun, in The Age, while appreciating more enthusiastically a number of her works in both mediums, found that Freeman is ‘more at home in the lighter medium,’ and of her later works made in Spain, remarks that ‘there is apparent what seems to be an undecided movement in the direction of modernism which misses alike the objective of the true modernist and that of the realist.’ He concludes that her difficulty lies with ‘representing the various features of the picture in their true space relationship to each other.’[90] Even Harold Herbert, Freeman’s companion in Malmsbury where both painted with MacNally to whose influence on her watercolours he refers, felt compelled in his review in The Australasian, to offer that she should heed Streeton’s thick, sure treatment of highlights and shadows as an exemplar, though concluding that:Miss Freeman has developed a style of her own.

[91]In July 1935, while resident in studios in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, and just prior to her painting expedition to the South of France,[92] Freeman’s work in the Salon des Tuileries was received favourably by the Paris newspapers.

[93] On 15 October 1935, Freeman arrived in Perth on the SS Orsova to stay with her former husband’s family,[94] preceded by Roach who was planning to exhibit with her in Melbourne, for which city Madge departed on 5 November on the Strathnaver, with the intention of later returning to Europe.

In an interview with the West Australian she allied herself to modernism: 'there is a decided swing away from the 'extraordinary,' while there is still no tendency to return to photographic art.’[95] The Perth Daily News, November 1935, also recorded Freeman's comments about working in Europe where over five years she had traveled and painted in England, Spain, Italy, Holland, and Belgium, and in Paris had been studying under Milich over 1934 and 1935.

[98] It was an acquisition The Herald’s art critic Basil Burdett described as ‘Bendigo's sole excursion into anything like modernity and a very creditable one, too.’[99] In August that year Freeman gathered friends Pegg Clarke, Dora Wilson, Lillian White, Nell Patterson, Ola Cohn, Esther Paterson, Elma Roach, Nancy Grant, Nora Gurdon, Edith, wife of George Bell and Harriet, wife of the recently deceased Bernard Hall, Dora Serle, and several Gallery School students, in her new studio and accommodation in a former stable and loft, dubbed ‘Madge’s Mews’, in Gipps Street, East Melbourne,[100] set poetically in The Bulletin as 'an example of what transformations upon a disused stable can be effected by paint and varnish, gay cushions, crochet rag rugs on the floor and the afternoon sun pouring through the windows.

[104] Over the summer of 1937–38 she made paintings of the mines in Bendigo, intrigued by their ‘wonderful color, with golden colored earth contrasting with grey at the poppet head, and marvellous lights in the early morning and late afternoon.’[105] They were works Freeman hung at the 1938 Victorian Artists’ Society Autumn Exhibition, where they were favourably reviewed by George Bell[106] and Basil Burdett[107] who in a survey, 'Modern Art in Melbourne', places Freeman and Elma Roach among artists 'who have brought back with them from Paris [an] aspect of contemporary European painting unfamiliar to Australian eyes.

Madge Freeman joined George Bell, Arnold Shore, William Frater, Norman MacGeorge, Ola Cohn and John Reed in delivering lectures on its artists and their works to the public,[124] presentations which continued even after the removal of the show to Sydney.

[126] Freeman’s work appeared in the inaugural Contemporary Art Society exhibition in Melbourne in 1939 with Dora Serle, Norman Macgeorge, Sybil Craig, Mary Finnin, Isabel Tweddle, Eric Thake, and Alan Sumner.

[127] In the 1940s, Freeman associated with Lina Bryans and her Darebin Bridge House ('Pink Hotel') group of the conservative modernist members of the Contemporary Art Society; Norman Macgeorge, Clive Stephen, Isobel Tweddle and Rupert Bunny and old friends including Sybil Craig, Guelda Pyke, Elma Roach, and Ola Cohn who circulated amongst the Meanjin literary and intellectual set.