Dingbat Alley, Peronne

Depicts the 1st Australian Imperial Force, 2nd Australian Division Ammunition Column headquarters and the houses in the street, with some ruined. In Australian military slang 'dingbat' is a derogatory term that comes from 'ding' - a vicious dingo and 'bat' from batman which is an officers servant. Peronne, an ancient French town at the junction of the Somme and Cologne Rivers, was the objective of an intensive series of operations mounted by the Australian Corps between 29 August and 2 September 1918. Since 1916 the town had suffered badly from intense the intense shelling that was characteristic of the war.
Arthur Streeton is best known as one of the painters of the Heidelberg School in Melbourne in the late nineteenth century. His name is linked with Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, and Frederick McCubbin as responsible for developing in Australia an impressionist technique of painting, and depicting scenes that embraced the nationalistic concerns of the last two decades of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime he was acknowledged as the finest painter of the Australian landscape; he was the first Australian painter to be honoured by a retrospective exhibition in his own lifetime; and only the second to be knighted.

In 1918 while based in London, he was appointed by the Australian War Memorial as an official war artist and travelled to France to record the involvement of Australians in the battles taking place along the Somme River. During the period of his employment he produced ten paintings and eighty-six drawings that are held by the Memorial. These were all executed in the years 1918 and 1919. The Memorial later purchased his HMS Renown, Sydney Harbour painted in 1922, and commissioned several large paintings of significant wartime subjects.