The World War I works of Will Dyson, Australia's first official war artist, are as powerful today as they were 100 years ago

But he had no interest in portraying great battle scenes; he wanted to represent the experiences of the ordinary soldier - hardships, loneliness, exhaustion and miserable conditions.

He was wounded twice during the war and his brother-in-law was killed in the Second Battle of the Somme, yet he returned again and again to produce some of the most emotive drawings of his career.

More than 100 years later, his drawings of Australian soldiers on the Western Front are as powerful today as when they were created a century ago.

Australian War Memorial senior art curator Anthea Gunn has long been interested in Dyson's story.

"He was already a well-known cartoonist in the press in Australia and London, and goes off to war determined to document what he's seeing," Gunn says.

"He was really focused on the everyday soldier and he didn't try to heroicise what he saw. For him, I think, the heroism was in the endurance, and in enduring these terrible conditions: the terrible food, the terrible weather, and the sheer sense of you didn't know how this could possibly end, or when it could possibly end.

"It was the everyday soldier that he wanted to see recognised and understood so he was trying to capture this sense of what these men were going through to demonstrate what war is really like.

"He talks about how he was only going to draw something to show war as the 'filthy business that it is'."

The ninth of 11 children, William Dyson was born in Ballarat, Victoria, in 1880. His talents for drawing and writing were encouraged and influenced by his elder brothers Ted and Ambrose, who were regular contributors to the Sydney Bulletin. His first cartoon was published in the Bulletin in 1897 and by the turn of the century he was a regular contributor to newspapers in Melbourne and Adelaide.

In September 1909, Dyson married Ruby Lindsay, sister of his close friend, renowned Australian artist and editorial cartoonist Norman Lindsay. Ruby was a talented and recognised artist in her own right, and the pair moved to London together to further their artistic careers.

Dyson's big chance came in 1912 when he was appointed cartoonist-in-chief at £5 a week to the new labour newspaper, the Daily Herald, whose editor gave him a full page and the freedom to express his ideas.

He was extremely critical of the Kaiser and German militarism, and when the First World War broke out in 1914 he was determined to document it.

"Despite having moved to Britain, Dyson remained fiercely patriotic," Gunn says. "He saw that Australians were just being devastated through the war and he became committed to making sure their story was known.

"At around the same time he actually became eligible for British conscription, but he wanted to serve with the Australians so he put it to the Australian High Commissioner in London that he could forgo pay as long as he had access and was an honorary enlistment in the AIF."

In 1916, Dyson wrote to AIF commander General Birdwood, stating his aim was to "interpret in a series of drawings, for national preservation, the sentiments and special Australian characteristics of our Army".

He was granted a position as honorary lieutenant and in December 1916 travelled to the Western Front.

"By 1916 the true horror of the Western Front, and Australia's role in it, was becoming apparent," Gunn says.

"It is that real low point in the war, and conditions are just utterly terrible. It was all rain, snow and mud and he started drawing the everyday experience ... soldiers giving each other haircuts, trudging through the mud ... and he basically did that for the rest of the war."

It was in France that Dyson met Australia's official war correspondent Charles Bean.

"Dyson arrived in the little village of Montauban in the December of 1916, and he and Bean met almost immediately," Gunn said.

"Bean had been advocating that art should be commissioned, but he was very much of a view that they should recruit artists from among the enlisted troops.

"He believed you had to be a soldier to really be able to depict the experience, but Dyson was able to show Bean that artists who weren't soldiers could depict something of the truth of this experience as well which was essential.

"Bean can really appreciate that Dyson gets it, and within the week, Bean is writing in his diary that "Dyson is an able man at this and he's game.".

"He felt Dyson really captured the essence of the soldiers' experience."

In May 1917, Dyson was formally appointed as the first official war artist attached to the AIF as part of the Official War Art Scheme.

Unlike his earlier, satirical cartoons that exaggerated and mocked the physical characteristics of his subjects, Dyson's war art used pose and gesture as powerful expressions of a soldier's experience.

"During the war, his work was probably the best known of Australia's official war artists," Gunn says.

"There were artists who had been commissioned from among the enlisted troops to serve with the official war records section, but the other official war artists, like George Lambert and Arthur Streeton, were Australians artists who were resident in London.

"They would be commissioned to go for three months at a time, and then they would come back and their sketches would go to the government for a flat fee per day, but Dyson had quite a different arrangement, and he was basically full time for two years.

"He was the only one to have that kind of access, and I would argue the only one who probably wanted that kind of access ...

"There is this sense of compulsion in Dyson's work ... and he did the same thing again and again; just drawing these soldiers and trying to capture the breadth of their experience.

"By the end of the war he'd only been paid about 180 pounds, so he was virtually left penniless, and his wife bore the brunt of that.

"She was at home in London with their young daughter, Betty, and was pretty much at her wits end. She was terrified that she would be widowed or that Dyson would be incapacitated.

"She knew that he had been wounded and that death could come easily, so although they had some savings at the start of the war, she pretty much didn't touch that money, and she lived on nothing, to the point of not eating at times.

"They had both sacrificed a lot, but he created this incredible body of work, and there are now hundreds of his drawings and lithographs in the Memorial collection."

His work and ideas would have a profound influence on Bean and the foundation of the Memorial itself.

"Dyson was part of this circle around Bean," Gunn says.

"Bean was renowned for the fact that he didn't just sit in the hotel waiting for news to be brought back from the front line; he actually went as far forwards as he could, so he and Bean would be watching these battles unfold

"They were right in amongst it, and it's a miracle that neither of them was killed, but he was seeing those crucial events unfold, and he would often be with Bean again when they went and interviewed people in the immediate aftermath.

"They were coming up with the idea for the Australian War Memorial at the time and in his letters, Bean talks about how Dyson was a really integral part in that, particularly in relation to things like the dioramas in the First World War galleries.

"They were coming up with these ideas to try and convey the scale of this war to people back at home in Australia, and these dioramas wouldn't just be models, they would be actual artworks that would show the whole history of the war.

"They have remained absolutely essential to the First World War galleries right from the opening of the Memorial to the present day, and I often talk to people who have these incredibly vivid memories of when they first saw the dioramas as children so it's not only Dyson's work, but his whole contribution to the Memorial that is his lasting significance."

Dyson returned to his work at the Herald after the war, but was left grief-stricken when his wife Ruby died on 20 March 1919, a victim of the Spanish flu.

The influenza pandemic that swept the globe after the war and Ruby died in his arms just a few days before her 34th birthday.

"They were deeply in love and they were quite excited about the future," Gunn says.

"They were going to get out of London, go into the country, and allow Ruby time to focus on her career, but Ruby goes off to visit the Lindsay family in Ireland with one of her brothers.

"She comes back to London with these symptoms of a cold and within a week she's dead.

"Dyson writes to his brother about getting nurses and doctors in and desperately trying to help her, but he loses her just a few days later.

"He is just utterly devastated and I don't think he ever really truly recovered.

"He was just facing the worst kinds of grief and when he writes to his brother he talks about how he doesn't quite know where time has gone.

"He's in this absolutely black mood, and although he does remarry later on, there is something missing in his spark, and he never quite gets back to where he was pre-war.

"After all that he had witnessed during the war, it was like Ruby's death was the final straw, and he was never quite the same after that.

"It was just brutal, and there must have been so many families with similar stories. People who had survived the war were just looking forward to getting back to whatever normality was, and adjusting to it, and then for this virus to come along and take so many more lives, and seemingly even more indiscriminately than the war, must have exacted untold trauma ...

"He was depicting history as it happened, but of course he never knew what the ending was going to be ...

"He captured the sense of the weariness of the soldiers, the trudging back from the front lines, one foot in front of the other, and the sheer utter exhaustion on these men's faces, and it is incredibly affecting."

"Bean had always intended that there would be a dedicated room of Dyson drawings at the Memorial and that it would be a permanent feature, but of course the Memorial building, which was originally built for the First World War, has come to accommodate the entire military history of Australia, so that dream has long since departed."

Dyson died in London on 21 January 1938. His death made newspaper headlines around the world and his last cartoon was published on the day he died. He had drawn two vultures perched on a crag watching Franco's planes bombing Barcelona. His caption read: "Once we were the most loathsome things that flew!"