Ethel Spowers studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School throughout the 1910s and met fellow artist Eveline Syme in the 1920s. Together they became influential Melbourne Modernists and the best of friends. Like Syme, Spowers studied at the Grosvenor School, London, with Claude Flight, who was instrumental in developing and popularising modern linocut techniques. The asymmetry and swirling geometric forms in Birds following a plough 1933 exemplify Spowers’s adept application of Flight’s teachings. The vivid green Spowers has employed in the background features frequently in her work and is used as a distinctly modern decorative element. 

In Birds following a plough, Spowers also subverts the tradition of Australian landscape painting, both stylistically and in choosing to employ the linocut technique over the more conventional medium of oil on canvas.