The son of Scottish migrants, McKenzie knew he would become a painter from the earliest years and had his own purpose-built art studio at home from the age of eleven.
[4] His landscape paintings have been described as "aesthetically reminiscent of 15th century Dutch Masters – with contemporary motifs... reflecting the human journey that transpires time and place.
"[5] "...cinematic in the same way that the works of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich or Eugene von Guerard speak across the centuries to a contemporary visual imagination.
The diorama depicts the 1918 Battle of Semakh that unfolded on the Sea of Galilee's southern shore in the last months of the Sinai and Palestine campaign.
[8] This new background (originally painted by Louis McCubbin in 1926 -1927)[9] is a continuation of a vision first outlined by the memorial's founder Charles Bean back in 1918, where in a letter to memorial director John Treloar, he insisted that the dioramas not be just a purely didactic display – "not a sort of Noah’s ark model… but a real picture, with the atmosphere, the gradations of shade and colour, the feeling of the scene, created by an artist".