On 23 August 1916, a month into the fighting at Pozières, Will Dyson, an Australian artist residing in Britain, wrote to Andrew Fisher, the Australian High Commissioner, suggesting:

At the time he wrote this letter Dyson was 36 years old and working as cartoonist-in-chief with the Daily Herald, a labour newspaper. Dyson was a socialist with humanist and anti-militarist beliefs and his cartoons reflected his convictions but, like many supporters of the labour movements in Britain, France and Germany, Dyson believed that the war was just and necessary. In 1915 he had published Kultur Cartoons, a book of drawings lampooning German militarism, with a foreword written by H.G. Wells. Although Dyson had lived in Britain since 1909, he retained strong nationalistic feelings towards Australia, and he wanted to depict the Australian soldiers fighting in France, as he made clear in correspondence with Fisher: ‘The precise nature of my work in France would be to interpret in a series of drawings for national preservation, the sentiments and special Australian characteristics of our Army…my drawings would be such studies of Australian soldiers and their neighbours as would be suggested to me by personal contact with our men in their European surroundings.’