The light-horseman of the AIF is a figure to which a long-established set of written and visual images has been attached. Henry Gullett wrote a chapter in his official history of the AIF in Sinai and Palestine on the men and their horses that has done much to set the precedent. To him the light-horsemen was ‘in body and spirit the true product of the wide Australian countryside’; ‘the very flower of their race’; 97 ‘out of every hundred came from pure British stock’; all were ‘men of resource, initiative and resolution’; and all were ‘horsemen of various degrees of excellence’. From the bush, fighting ‘under conditions closely resembling those to which he had been accustomed to all his life’, they found ‘rigid discipline irksome’, but applied ‘strong common sense’ to their war and fought it ‘with all [their] will as a task which interested [them] or which had to be done’, and when they went on leave engaged in nothing more than a whole-hearted ‘joyous demonstration’. Reflecting some of the same thinking, the Kia Ora Coo-ee had provided a similar sketch in June 1918: