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An Australian digger will be honoured with art in the village of Bullecourt, France next week — a century after he was killed there in one of the major battles of the Somme campaign of World War I.
Harold Prosser died on May 3, 1917, on the first day of the second battle of Bullecourt in which 7,500 Australians were killed or wounded.
Queensland artist Garry Dolan has produced a collection that will be hung in the Bullecourt town hall as part of the centenary commemoration of the battle.
Earlier this year he invited fellow artists Barry Back and Brett "Mon" Garling to paint the landscape at Frogmore in the central west of New South Wales, where Private Prosser grew up and share farmed before his enlistment in 1916.
The trio painted a stretch of the Boorowa River known as Prosser's Crossing where they believed Private Prosser swam and fished before his death at the age of 24.
"If we want to tell his story we really need to come and see it and experience it for ourselves, it gives us a chance to know exactly what he was dealing with, what he left to go and fight in the war," Dolan said.
According to NSW War Memorial historian Brad Manera, Private Prosser would have known what to expect when he volunteered in 1916.
"They weren't those caught up in the first flush of enthusiasm for enlistment, they had seen the casualty figures," Mr Manera said.
"They knew how bloody this war was going to be, it wasn't going to be over by Christmas and so he's a realist, he believes in what he's doing and so he enlists to go to war and step into the bloodiest killing fields on earth, the Western Front."
Private Prosser enlisted with three mates from his local cricket club; Ted Grimson, Abe Roberts and Walter Malone. Mr Manera said this was typical of the men who made up the 19th Battalion, Fifth Brigade.
"These are all New South Welshmen, they enlist together, many of them had grown up together, so they were groups of mates, they'd known each other in civil life, they trained together and they fought and died together at Bullecourt."
On the first day of the 14-day battle, Fifth Brigade had to cross a near 700-metre stretch of "no man's land" between the Australian and German lines. Private Prosser was carrying steel mesh to lay over German barbed wire.
"I mean he's not only got all his own battle equipment, he's got this extra load and he and 3,000 of his mates are crossing hundreds of metres of open ground under fire from in front and both flanks .... and they're just being torn to pieces," Mr Manera said.
Over 14 days the Australians held off seven German counter attacks, but they captured Bullecourt, breaching the so called Hindenberg Line for the first time and delivering the first major victory of 1917.
Private Prosser's body was never recovered and it took months before his family was officially notified of his death.
Private Prosser was one of 11 children and one of his younger sisters was the grandmother of Dolan's wife Kate.
The Dolans began researching his story on a family trip to France in 2004. A decade later they returned to the Villers Brettoneux Australian War Memorial and to Bullecourt where Dolan produced a series of paintings for an exhibition on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.
This year he drafted his colleagues Back and Garling to add to the collection for the centenary. Some of the work is also being donated to the Bullecourt school.
"I'm not telling the story just for the sake of it, it is an important story to tell, it's good for people to have a bit of a sense of what these guys went through," Dolan said.
Mr Manera said the three painters were following in the footsteps of some of Australia's most famous artists.
Arthur Streeton, Septimus Power, Will Longstaff and George Lambert were just some of the painters who travelled to the Western Front in World War I to record images for Australians at home.
Many, like Private Prosser's family, were anxious to know where their loved ones died.
"The folks at home were only receiving the dreadful telegrams or letters informing them that their next of kin had been killed or injured so it was very important for Australians to understand what was going on," Mr Manera said.
"The newspapers produced maps but Australian artists travelled to the Western Front, some of them at their own expense, to make paintings that could capture those images.
"In an age before everyone carrying their own camera it was very important to record the landscape, the events, using paint, using sketches."
For Garling, contributing to the Prosser collection was a particularly poignant experience. His 19-year-old son Adam is in the Australian Army.
"It gives me shivers up the spine with a son joining the army and now fully trained and if anything happens in the world he's probably going to be there," Garling said.
"I try not to think about it but it does slip into your mind, especially when you hear stories about Harold and the thousands, tens of thousands of other Australians that died in far-flung places far from their home."
Watch ANZAC Painters on Landline, Sunday at noon on ABC TV.
Topics: anzac-day, visual-art, history, community-and-society, world-war-1, boorowa-2586, nsw, australia, france