Born in Wylong, NSW in 1917, Raymond Boultwood Ewers spent a year as a jackeroo before winning a scholarship to train as a commercial artist at the Working Men's College (now Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) Melbourne, from 1936 to 1940. Ewers was selected by the eminent Australian sculptor Leslie Bowles for a five-year apprenticeship and worked as his assistant on two memorial sculptures: King George V and General Sir John Monash in Melbourne.

Ewers enlisted in the AIF as a sapper in 1941. On the recommendation from Bowles he was transferred to the Military History Section in 1943 and appointed as an official war artist with the rank of lieutenant.

During the early stage of his commission Ewers worked in the Memorial's Melbourne office and in his own studio in Frankston. His primary task was to research and create the sculptural elements of the Second World War dioramas. In 1944 he was sent to New Guinea, and briefly to Borneo in October of 1945, with the job of collecting material for the construction of dioramas. Between 1943 and 1958 Ewers produced 32 dioramas depicting events from the Second World War.

From the late 1940s until the 1960s, Ewers executed commemorative sculptures for the Memorial, 22 of which are held in the art collection, including the impressive Australian Serviceman. Originally commissioned in 1954 for the Hall of Memory, where it was displayed from 1959 to 1993, it is now a feature of the Memorial's sculpture garden.