It is the first known European oil painting to depict a night corroboree by Aboriginal Australian people.

Joseph Lycett was the first convict artist to broadly depict the transformation of the Australian colony into a free settlement.

[2] In this imagined scene, Aboriginal people perform campfire ceremonies on the banks of the Hunter River, surrounded by casuarinas and mangroves, with distant Nobby's Island and the European signal station lit up by the full moon.

In one a tooth evulsion is taking place while under a tree a group of men are gathered around a fire sharing a clay pipe.

[5] The painting was presented to the State Library of New South Wales by Sir William Dixson in 1938.