Lewis gun mounted near Glisy

A Lewis Light Machine Gun (LMG) is mounted on a makeshift pedestal in a weapon pit surrounded by sandbags at the Battle of Hamel. The gun was used as an anti-aircraft weapon. In the background are tents and soldiers marching. There is what appears to be two strands of signal cable in the foreground.

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 being 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 10 paintings and 86 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.