The stories of our World War I Heroes.

Written by Garrie Hutchinson.Edited by Gordon Kerry.

Commissioned by Melbourne Recital Centre as part of Local Heroes 2015.

ContentsCaptain Robert Bage……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1Lieutenant Fred Birks VC MM…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 2Lieutenant Albert Borella VC MM……………………………………………………………………………………………… 3Lance Corporal Walter Boxer DCM MM & Bar………………………………………………………………………. 4Lance Corporal David Boyle……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 5Dr. Elsie Dalyell, Dr. Mary de Garis and Dr. Vera Scantlebury Brown……………………………… 6Sergeant Maurice Buckley VC DCM………………………………………………………………………………………….. 7Brigadier Walter Cass…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 8Sergeant George Challis……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 9Frank Tate & Charlotte Crivelli………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 10Lieutenant Robin Cuttle………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 11

Vera Deakin…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 12C.J. Dennis……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…. 13Corporal William Dunstan VC……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 14Will Dyson……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 15Brigadier Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott……………………………………………………………………………………………… 16Lieutenant Colonel Walter Percy Farr……………………………………………………………………………………… 17Trooper Sid Ferrier……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 18Skipper Francis………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 19Simon Fraser…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 20Private Abdul Ganivahoff…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 21The Gillespie Brothers of Carlton……………………………………………………………………………………………….

22Lieutenant Robert Grieve VC………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 23Geoffrey Haggard…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 24Lieutenant Edward Ellis Henty…………………………………………………………………………………………………… 25Captain Mervyn Higgins……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 26The Horwood Brothers of Preston…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 27Captain Cedric ‘Spike’ Howell……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 28George Mawby Ingram VC……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 29Captain Albert Jacka VC MC & Bar……………………………………………………………………………………………… 30John William Alexander Jackson VC………………………………………………………………………………………….. 31Carl and Ernek Janssen………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 32Major Doctor Frederick Miller Johnson……………………………………………………………………………………..

33Brigadier General George Johnston……………………………………………………………………………………………. 34Lieutenant William Donovan Joynt VC……………………………………………………………………………………... 35Private Walter Henry Chibnall…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 36Nurse Alice Ross-King…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 37Captain Joseph Peter Lalor……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 38Major James Francis Lean……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 39Frank Lesnie……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 40Captain Aubrey Liddelow…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 41Private Percy Mansfield………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 42Colonel Leslie Cecil Maygar…………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 43Sergeant Albert Lowerson VC…………………………………………………………………………………………………

….. 44Lieutenant Lawrence Dominic McCarthy VC…………………………………………………………………………. 45Major General James McCay……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 46Private William Michael McDonald…………………………………………………………………………………………… 47Ronald McDonald…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 48Ted McMahon………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 49Frank McNamara VC………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 50Dame Nellie Melba……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…… 51Mauritz Michaelis…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 52Private William ‘Billy’ Miles…………………………………………………………………………………………………………... 53General Sir John Monash…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..….. 54Rupert Moon VC…………………………………………………………………………………………………

……………………………. 55The Muxworthys of Daylesford…………………………………………………………………………………………………... 56Captain James Newland VC………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 57Private Thomas O’Dwyer………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 58Joe Pearce………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 59Private Walter Peeler VC………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…….. 60Army Nurse Rachel Pratt…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….… 61Private Adolf Thompson Knable………………………………………………………………………………………………… 62Nurse Louise Riggall………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….……. 63Sergeant Nicholas Rodakis MM………………………………………………………………………………..…………………. 64Fred and Arthur Rogasch……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 65Nurse Elizabeth

Rothery……………………………………………………………………………………………………..………… 66Major William Ruthven VC…………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 67Private Edward John Francis Ryan VC………………………………………………………………………………………. 68Sir Stanley Savige…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 69Phillip Schuler………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 70Major William Scurry……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 71Sir Nevill Maskelyn Smyth VC Sudan…………………………………………………………………………………………. 72General Cyril Brudenell Bingham White…………………………………………………………………………………… 73Private Ansselmi Talava…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 74The Stuart Mill Nine……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..…. 75Lance Corporal John Firebrace, Private Harry Thorpe, Private Reg Rawlings……………….. 76Major General Edwin Tivey…………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 77Private Albert Parkinson & Private Andrei

Tolstoi……………………………………..………………………….. 78Nurse Jessie Traill & painter Violet Teague………………………………………………………………………………. 79Private Martin Troy………………………………………………………………..………………………………………………………. 80Fred Tubb VC……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 81Annie Whitelaw……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 82Four brothers of Dunkeld……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 83Private Harry Willis…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 84Able Seaman William Williams………………………………………………………………………..………………………….. 85

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Captain Robert BageA very gallant gentleman: Robert Bage was born in St Kilda in 1888, went to Melbourne Grammar, and studied engineering at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1908 and joining the Army in 1911.

In 1911, Bage obtained 18 months’ leave without pay to join Douglas Mawson’s Antarctic expedition and was appointed astronomer, assistant magnetician and recorder of tides, reaching Antarctica on 9 January 1912. After building Mawson’s Hut, the various sledging expeditions set out. Bage and two others, including photographer Frank Hurley, left on 10 November 1912 and man-hauled sledges south from Commonwealth Bay, into the unexplored Antarctic interior.

They hauled heavy and unstable sledges for 1000 kilometres making observations all the way, through atrocious conditions – gale force winds, blizzards creating white-out conditions – and suffered snow blindness, hunger and frost bite.

Mawson had set 15 January as the deadline, when the ship Aurora would return to pick each of the sledging parties, including Mawson’s. Bage made it back with his team after a herculean effort on 11 January, but Mawson hadn’t returned and missed the boat. Mawson’s party had to stay another winter.

Bage (and Mawson) eventually returned to Australia on 26 February 1914. He returned to his unit and joined the AIF as second in command of the engineering 3rd Field Company after war broke out.

On 7 May Australian commander General Bridges spotted Bage and said ‘here’s the man!’ for a daylight suicide mission marking a position for an advance that night. Bage, after suggesting it would be better achieved at night, accepted that an order was an order. He told his batman that he would probably not come back, and made the appropriate arrangements.

He was wounded as he was hammering in a peg to mark the spot, again as he tried to get back, and a third time, fatally, as a comrade tried to get him to safety.

Bridges, notoriously reckless in exposing himself to danger, and not sensible to the danger he had exposed Bage to in an unwise and impetuous decision, was himself killed ten days later. Bage was buried at Beach Cemetery; Bridges was the only casualty whose body was returned for burial in Australia.

Historian Ross McMullin noted:

“A sapper in Bage’s company, aware of his exploits with Mawson connected the manner of his death to the most celebrated example of bravery in Antarctica. ‘Captain Bage went out knowing he was going to his end’, wrote Jim Campbell. ‘He went out like Captain Oates of the Scott Expedition – ‘a very gallant gentleman’”.

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Lieutenant Fred Birks VC MM

Anzac from Wales: Frederick Birks was born at Buckley, North Wales (near Chester), on 31 August 1894. Educated at the local St Matthews Anglican School, he was a conscientious pupil with an interest in sports, particularly boxing and football. Birks migrated to Australia with friends in August 1913. Working in South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria, he was a waiter in Melbourne when enlisted in the AIF as a private, service number 47, on 18 August 1914 at Broadmeadows.

Posted to the 2nd Australian Field Ambulance, Birks embarked with his unit and the 4th Light Horse Regiment on HMAT Wiltshire from Melbourne on 19 October, arriving in Egypt on 10 December. Landing at Gallipoli around dawn of the 25th April, Birks demonstrated the courage that would mark his military career. Under heavy fire he carried the wounded from areas that could not be accessed using stretchers. He repeated the actions again at the awful battle at Krithia on 8 May.

Now Corporal Birks, he embarked for France in March 1916, and was awarded a Military Medal for his actions during fierce fighting near Pozieres on 26 July 1916. Disregarding his own safety, Birks once again braved heavy fire to rescue his comrades.

In February 1917, Birks attended officer training and was commissioned 2nd Lieutenant to the 6th Battalion on 26 April. On 20 September, while his battalion was advancing on Glencorse Wood near Polygon Wood, east of Ypres, Birks and a corporal rushed a pillbox that was holding up the advance. The corporal was wounded but Birks went on by himself, killed those manning the pillbox and captured a machine-gun. Shortly afterwards he raised a small party and attacked another strong point, capturing sixteen men and killing or wounding nine others. Next day, during an artillery bombardment, he was killed while trying to rescue some of his men who had been buried by a shell. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.

Birks is buried in Perth Cemetery (China Wall) near Ypres, Belgium. The Victoria Cross was presented to his older brother, Captain Samuel Birks of the Royal Field Artillery, by King George V at Buckingham Palace on 19 December 1917. We do not know whether his mother Mary, or sisters Polly, Beatrice, Emily or Martha, or brother John were there.

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Lieutenant Albert Borella VC MM

Determined to serve: Albert Chalmers Borella was born at Borung, Victoria, in 1881 and educated at Borung and Wychitella state schools. He later farmed in the Borung and Echuca districts; he also served for eighteen months with the Victorian Rangers.

In 1910 he was a fireman in Melbourne, resigning in January 1913 to take up a pastoral lease, drawn by ballot, on the Daly River. By 1915 he was a cook for a survey party in Tennant Creek. At the outbreak of the war he set out for Queensland to volunteer for active service, as volunteers from the Northern Territory were not being accepted.

With Charlie, an Aboriginal man, he walked 88 miles (140 km) and swam across flooded rivers. After borrowing a horse at Powell Creek, just north of Renner Springs, Northern Territory, he rode to Katherine where he caught the mail coach to the railhead at Pine Creek. He sailed from Darwin to Townsville on 8 March 1915 with four other men who were among the first 15 volunteers for active service from the Northern Territory.

He enlisted in the 26th Battalion in March 1915 and served at Gallipoli before proceeding to the Western Front, was promoted, received the Military Medal for conspicuous bravery in the attack on Malt Trench, north of the Butte de Warlencourt, on the night of 1 March, 1917.

He was awarded the Victoria Cross, ‘for most conspicuous bravery in attack’, on 17 and 18 July at Villers-Bretonneux. The citation read, in part:

‘Whilst leading his platoon with the first wave, Lieutenant Borella ran out ahead of his men into the barrage, shot two German machine gunners with his revolver, and captured the gun. He then led his party, now reduced to ten men and two Lewis guns, against a very strongly held trench, using his revolver, and later a rifle, with great effect, causing many enemy casualties. His leading and splendid example resulted in the garrison being quickly shot or captured. The enemy twice counter attacked but his cool determination inspired his men to resist heroically, and the enemy were repulsed, with very heavy losses.’

At the end of the war Lieutenant Borella was invalided back to Australia. From 1920, he farmed a soldier settlement block near Hamilton in Victoria. In 1924 he stood for the seat of Dundas in the Victorian Legislative Assembly as the National Party candidate, but was narrowly defeated.

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Borella also served In the Second World War, including working with the Prisoner of War Group at Rushworth. He died in 1968 in Albury.

Lance Corporal Walter Boxer DCM MM & Bar

By Diggers defended, by Victorians mended: Walter Henry Boxer was born at Violet Creek near Hamilton and went to Wannon State School and the Ballarat School of Mines. He worked as a rabbiter before enlisting on 14 February 1916, and was a stretcher-bearer, joining the 58th Battalion after the Battle of Fromelles. Boxer was severely wounded in the left arm near Warlencourt on 25 February 1917 and was evacuated to England. He resumed duty in June and in September served in the battle of Polygon Wood. He was wounded again at Passchendaele on 16 October when the Germans bombarded the valleys behind the lines with shells and mustard gas; he remained on duty.

In the spring of 1918 the 58th Battalion returned to the Somme, where the Germans had launched their final offensive. The 15th Brigade, under ‘Pompey’ Elliott, played a vital part of forcing the Germans out of the village of Villers-Bretonneux, near Amiens, where the Australian National Memorial now stands and an Anzac Day dawn service is held every year.

On Anzac Day 1918, at Villers-Bretonneux, Lance Corporal Boxer was watching a party of the 59th Battalion stretcher-bearers carry a wounded man back from the front line during a heavy hostile bombardment. A shell dropped close to the party, killing two of the stretcher-bearers and the wounded man, and severely wounding the other two bearers. Boxer, without hesitation, jumped out of the trench and attended to the wounded men. His men, fired by his example, dashed out with stretchers and brought in the wounded. ‘Pompey’ Elliott recommended him for a Military Medal. Boxer was also awarded a Bar (a second Military Medal) for actions at Dernancourt, south-west of Albert, on 19 and 20 June.

In the next major engagement, the battle of Peronne on 2 September 1918, he won the Distinguished Conduct Medal for conspicuous gallantry. Under a heavy barrage of high explosive and gas he brought two men to the dressing-station, then went back through the barrage four times and carried more men from the outpost line before being severely wounded by shrapnel. This was his sixth wound, and most serious. He was evacuated to England and on 13 December was invalided to Australia, where he spent a further eight months in hospital.

After discharge, Boxer worked in Melbourne as a clerk and began an accountancy course. He died of tuberculosis on 16 June 1927 and was buried in Kew Boroondara Cemetery.

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Lance Corporal David Boyle

Deeds of love: Lance Corporal David Boyle was wounded and captured during the attack on Hill 971 at Gallipoli – during the final, desperate, but unsuccessful offensive for control of the commanding ridgeline at Gallipoli. David Boyle had enlisted in the 14th Battalion on 10 August 1914, as private No. 296. He was nearly 23, and worked with his father as a carpenter in Warrnambool. The 14th landed at Gallipoli on the afternoon of 25 April.

It appears that Boyle, wounded, was one of those left behind, and taken prisoner by the Turks on 8 or 9 August. He was a prisoner at Arion Kara Hissar in 1917, acknowledging receipt of a Red Cross parcel and some money.

In April 1918 David’s mother Christina wrote an extraordinary letter to the Red Cross Australian Wounded & Missing Bureau, which was run by Vera Deakin, daughter of Alfred Deakin, former Prime Minister of Australia. The Bureau’s task was to find out details of wounded and missing from their comrades, and provide information to their families. The provided this service to at least 31,885 families.

The letter from Christina Boyle read:

Dear Miss Deakin,

I have just received a letter from my son who is in AIF in France he tells me he as had the pleasure of meeting you & that you went to a great of trouble to give him all the information you possibly could about his brother I need not go into details about my poor boy for I am sure he as told you all about him Mr Boyle myself & family cannot express in words our gratitude for your kindness we people in Australia cannot ever forget what the ladies in London are doing for the dear Prisoners may God bless them for their good work we mothers in Aust are far from our dear ones now you will quite understand how dear to us are those who are doing all they can for them Ive just received a letter from my dear boy he say if he much longer at Ada Pagar he will be quite insane his cards always cheerful till this one 24.12.17… would it be asking too much to write him a note he does not receive many of my letters it may cheer him up oh how dreadful to think he may become insane it will be 3 years next Aug my son says you love your work and give all your time doing deeds of love…

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I remain yours sincerely

C Boyle

David Boyle did not go mad, and returned to Australia on 15 November 1918. He died in 1969.

Dr. Elsie Dalyell, Dr. Mary de Garis and Dr. Vera Scantlebury Brown

Women’s service: Fourteen Australian women doctors paid their own way to Europe to volunteer for service in hospitals on the front line. At that time neither the Australian nor the British armed services would employ women doctors.

They included Dr. Vera Scantlebury who was attached to the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War and later was an assistant surgeon at London’s Endell Street Military Hospital, which was staffed by women. She was educated at Toorak College before entering medical school at the University of Melbourne. She graduated Bachelor of Medicine (MB) in 1914 and became resident medical officer at the Melbourne Hospital. Dr Scantlebury then moved to the Children’s Hospital in 1915, where she was appointed senior medical officer before leaving for England in 1917.

In 1926 she was appointed director of infant welfare, a new section within Victoria’s Health Department, and created the structure of infant and child health services and the pre-schools that Victoria has to this day. Married in 1926, Vera Scantlebury Brown died on 14 July 1946, after a long battle with cancer. She is buried in the Cheltenham cemetery.

Mary Clementina de Garis, born 1881, was the second woman in Victoria to take the degree of MD. On the death of her fiancé Sergeant Colin Gordon Thomson, 27th Battalion, who was killed in action near Pozières on 4 August 1916, she served for fifteen months as head of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service attached to the Serbian Army and was decorated by the Serbian government. After post-graduate study overseas, she practised with distinction as an obstetrician in Geelong and was a pioneer in the feeding of high protein diets to pregnant women. Her publications include Clinical Notes and Deductions of a Peripatetic (London, 1926). She died at Geelong on 18 November 1963.

Elsie Jean Dalyell was born in 1881 Sydney, and graduated from the University of Sydney as MB in 1909 and Ch.M (Master of Surgery) in 1910. In 1911-12 Elsie Dalyell was the first woman on the full-time medical-school staff, employed as a demonstrator in pathology,

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and in December 1912 took up a fellowship at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, London. She joined Lady Wimborne’s Serbian Relief Fund unit, which went to Skopje to help with the typhus epidemic in 1915. In 1916 she joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service unit at Royaumont, France, and afterwards enlisted with the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving in Malta and Salonika, Greece. Early in 1919 she went to Constantinople to deal with cholera, and in June was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE); she had been twice mentioned in dispatches. She died in 1948.

Sergeant Maurice Buckley VC DCM

Determined to serve: Maurice Vincent Buckley was born in Hawthorn in 1891 and enlisted on 18 December 1914. In June 1915, he embarked for Egypt as a reinforcement for the 13th Light Horse, but by late September 1915 he had contracted a serious case of venereal disease and was returned to Australia. Five months later, he walked out of camp. He was declared a deserter on 20 March 1916 and delisted. On 16 May, he re-enlisted in Sydney as Gerald Sexton—a combination of his mother’s maiden name and a deceased brother’s first name.

Buckley, as Sexton, left for France in October with 13th Battalion reinforcements and joined his unit on the Somme in January 1917. That year he fought at Bullecourt, Polygon Wood, Ypres and Passchendaele, and, early in 1918, at Hébuterne and Villers-Bretonneux.

On 18 September 1918, the 13th Battalion took part in the attack on Le Verguier, in the final campaign of the war. By the end of the day, Buckley had rushed at least six machine-gun positions, captured a field gun and taken nearly a hundred prisoners. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. The award was gazetted under the name Sexton, and Buckley then decided to reveal his identity; a second gazettal was made in his real name.

Buckley returned to Australia and was discharged in December 1919; the next year he began work as a road contractor in Gippsland. On 15 January 1921, he was injured when he tried to jump his horse over the railway gates at Boolarra. He died soon after in hospital at Fitzroy, and was buried in Brighton Cemetery.

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Brigadier Walter CassI did want you to come and nurse me: Walter Cass was a Victorian teacher and Boer War veteran, who joined the Australian Permanent Forces in 1906. He was badly wounded at the terrible charge at Krithia, Gallipoli in May 1915, and suffered further at the even more tragic battle at Fromelles in France on 19 July 1916. Here there were 5533 Australian casualties.

Cass broke down in health after Fromelles. He told a fellow officer: ‘I tell you that it was wholesale murder; they have murdered my boys … This is not war. They have murdered my boys.’

Cass returned to England and then Australia. He served in various capacities on the AIF staff here until his death in 1931.

He wrote to his fiancée, Canadian nurse Helena Holmes, after the action at Krithia:

On the 8th I was leading the right of our brigade against the Turkish trenches when I got a bullet through my chest on the left side. It pierced the top of my lung but was high enough to miss all the important blood vessels. I dropped bleeding freely back & front & the line went on. Almost twenty minutes later I got another bullet in my right shoulder which went diagonally across my back breaking my collar bone, a rib & damaging some nerves & muscles on the way … I thought I was done but remained conscious & was still able to send messages regarding the progress of events and to counteract a move made by the Turks to get round our right flank. It was from there that I got my second bullet.

The fire was very heavy from that side all night until more troops moved forward. I got my first bullet at 6 pm but it was 9 pm before I was moved from there & 11 pm before I was put on a stretcher to go away to be dressed & plugged up.

But I did want you to come and nurse me!...lying out on that plain for five hours on a biting cold windy night I had time to think of many things and many people. I thought -

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when I got the second bullet - that I was going to join the aviation corps and flit round amongst the angels for the rest of my time.

His life was almost certainly saved by Private CW McDonnell of Mooroopna, who at great risk dug a protective barrier of earth, and carried messages back and brought back stretcher-bearers.

Sergeant George ChallisFootball and war: George Challis played in Carlton’s 1915 Premiership side – he was one of five VFL (as the AFL then was) footballers killed in July 1916 at Fromelles. Another five footballers were killed elsewhere in France in that month; two more were mortally wounded, and died in Melbourne. They had played for Carlton, Collingwood, Essendon, Geelong, Melbourne, South Melbourne, St Kilda and University. University disbanded as VFL club during the war as so many of its players had enlisted.

As a premiership player Challis was by far the best known of them.

He was born in Launceston in 1891, an excellent student who became a teacher at his school Launceston High directly after he finished as a student, and played football for the local team. He was starring in Tasmanian representative teams, and was recruited by Carlton after being best player at the 1911 interstate carnival.

Challis developed into a champion over the 1912 season, (Carlton lost the Grand Final to Essendon in a thriller) and worked as a clerk for the Victorian Railways at Spencer Street headquarters. His career blossomed over the next few years, as did his interests – he was an enthusiastic member of the Melbourne Esperanto Society.

In 1914, Carlton finished on top of the ladder, and won the premiership but without Challis who was injured in the semi-final against Fitzroy. War had broken out and footballers were among the first to volunteer. In the rigorous selection process for the first 20,000 men, Challis was rejected three times because he had one toe overlapping another – a ‘defect’ which had not prevented him becoming one of the fastest and most skilful footballers in the country.

The VFL had decided to continue playing the 1915 season, which commenced the day before the landing at Gallipoli. One of Challis’s Carlton teammates, Fen McDonald, had

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been killed on the first day. Challis, like most players, was affected by the growing casualty list and again tried to enlist, this time successfully in July 1915. He had leave to play against Collingwood in the Grand Final, where he was best on ground.

In July 1916 he was a Sergeant in the 58th Battalion on the front line at Fromelles. By 15 July ferocious German shelling had caused more than 160 casualties in the 58th Battalion. One of them was George Challis. His family heard of his death on 19 August, Carlton wore black armbands on 26 August, and his name appeared in the newspaper casualty list on 1 September, the day before the 1916 Grand Final in the four-team VFL completion. Carlton lost.

Frank Tate & Charlotte CrivelliN’oublions jamais l’Australie - Never forget Australia: Villers-Bretonneux, key to the port of Amiens was captured by the Germans during their last-gasp offensive in early April 1918. It was recaptured by Australians, in particular by Victorians of the 15th Brigade, on Anzac Day, 1918, at a cost of more than 1200 lives. Locals returned to their ruined town and became friendly with the Australians billeted nearby, as the Australian divisions led by General John Monash took part in the battles that ended the war. Soldiers began rebuilding the school in 1918.

After the war, Madame Charlotte Crivelli, a long-standing French resident of Melbourne, appealed to the Victorian Education Department War Relief Fund, controlled by Department Secretary Frank Tate, for £2,500. Mme Crivelli had run many appeals for the Société d’Assistance Maternelle et Infantile, and founded the French Red Cross Society in 1916 in Australia. She was appointed official godmother of Villers-Bretonneux by the French Government in 1919, the year before the town was adopted by the City of Melbourne.

In 1921 Tate announced that he had in mind a ‘worthy object’ for the War Relief Fund to finalise the funds raised by the schoolchildren of Victoria during the war. It was the completion of the Villers-Bretonneux school with a donation of a further £10,000 in March 1922.

The foundation stone of Victoria College was laid on 16 June 1923, a public holiday in Villers-Bretonneux. Tate was there and said that the school would ‘stand as a memorial of the fine work’ the school children of Victoria, ‘did for their country in raising nearly £600,000 in money and in kind for war relief.’

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His daughter laid a wreath in honour of the French victims of war on behalf of the school children of Victoria and they were presented with deeds renaming two of the town’s streets to Rue Victoria and Place du Melbourne. The French children sang a specially arranged French version of Australia Will Be There.

The Victoria school was completed in 1927. A plaque in English and French says:

This school building is the gift of the school children of Victoria, Australia, to the children of Villers-Bretonneux, as a proof of their goodwill towards France.… May the memory of great sacrifice in a common cause keep France and Australia together forever in bonds of friendship and mutual esteem.

A sign in the schoolyard reads:

N’oublions jamais l’Australie – Never forget Australia.

Lieutenant Robin Cuttle

Robinvale – Farewell Robin: Robinvale in northern Victoria is named for Lieutenant George Robin Cuttle, killed flying with the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) in France on 9 May 1918. Lieutenant Cuttle was known as Robin by his family and friends.

Robin Cuttle was born in 1896, the second son of Herbert and Margaret Cuttle who had a general store (Cuttle’s Mallee Stores) at Ultima near Swan Hill. In 1914 his father made him manager of a large property across the Murray River from Euston, on the Victorian side, not far from what is now Robinvale. He was just 18.

On the outbreak of the First World War, Cuttle, who was 203 centimetres and over 100 kilos tried to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force but was rejected. Perhaps he was too big. But he was also very determined. He travelled to England and tried to enlist in the RFC but was again rejected as too heavy and tall for the flying machines. Instead he joined the Royal Field Artillery in July 1916 and served on the Somme where he was awarded the Military Cross.

In late 1917, conditions for entry to the RFC had changed, and Robin joined as an observer. He was flying with the 49th Squadron, flying DH9 bombers. Returning from a mission on 9 May 1918, the aircraft was shot down. The bodies were never found and Cuttle is remembered on the Arras Flying Memorial and the Ultima and Euston War Memorials.

After the war, in 1923, Robin’s mother Margaret and other family members went to France to search for him. At Caix, 10 kilometres from Villers-Bretonneux, they found evidence of the wreck of his aircraft but searched in vain for his body. 

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In 1924, and once the railway had reached the area, the Cuttles developed the land they had acquired on the bend in the Murray.  The story goes that at the opening of the land sale at the new railway station, Robin’s mother embroidered with flowers a piece of hessian with the words Robin Vale — (in Latin, ‘Farewell Robin’) and so it came about that Robinvale was named.

Robinvale was ‘twinned’ with Villers-Bretonneux in 1984.

Vera Deakin

Where is my son? Daughter of former Australian Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, Vera founded the Red Cross Australian Wounded and Missing Bureau in 1915, which was a service to trace the fates of the tens of thousands of Australians lost in the turmoil of war. Official notification of death or injury was not enough. People wanted to know more. Grieving family and friends would write to the Bureau in London , and Miss Deakin (or Miss Chomley) would enquire of fellow soldiers, and elsewhere, and sometimes interview them when on leave – and write back with details. The Bureau dealt with some 25,000 requests a year from 1916. It was an extraordinary service and a great comfort to the families involved. Some 31,885 records are held by the Australian War Memorial.

Vera Deakin said, ‘What we tried to accomplish as a Bureau was to relieve as quickly as possible the anxiety of the relatives in Australia, to make the men realise that we were there to help and assist them in every way in our power, and to shield the authorities from unnecessary and duplicated enquiries.’ After nine months in Cairo from 1914, Vera Deakin and her staff worked tirelessly in London, organising the thousands of enquiries (27,000 in 1917 alone) from concerned families in Australia.

Deakin married Sir Thomas White in 1919. They had corresponded during the war when Captain White was an Australian prisoner of war, and he gave the Bureau valuable information about missing men taken prisoner.

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Deakin received an OBE for her work during the war. She continued with the Red Cross for the rest of her life, repeating her work in World War II by setting up a bureau of enquiry in Melbourne, and witnessing the same scenes of anxiety and heartache.

Sir Thomas White was TW White, author of the best seller Guests of the Unspeakable : The Odyssey of an Australian Airman – being a record of Captivity and Escape in Turkey.

C.J. DennisChampion poet: CJ Dennis captured the hearts and feelings of the men who volunteered in the AIF and the Australians who waited at home. Poetry was a national sport in those days, in The Bulletin magazine and elsewhere. Dennis was the popular champion. The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke was published in October 1915. It was an immediate success, requiring three editions in 1915, nine in 1916, and three in 1917. The Moods of Ginger Mick, a sequel to the ‘Sentimental Bloke’, was published in October 1916 in an unprecedented first run for verse of 39,324 copies. In addition so-called trench editions of the books were published and sent to the men. Stories abound of pages ripped and favourite passages being recited.

Dennis as Ginger Mick saw Gallipoli as a victory, walloping the Turks, and concluded:

But Sari Bair, me Sari Bair, the secrets that you ‘oldWill shake the ‘earts uv Southern men when all the tale is told;An’ when they git the strength uv it, there’ll never be the needTo call too loud fer fightin ‘men among the Southern breed.

Dennis’s friends believed he would have liked to enlist but was too old, had flat feet and his general health was poor – but his poetry served. Shortly after the first reports of the Gallipoli landing were published in the newspapers, Dennis wrote ‘Sari Bair’, (the ridgeline at Gallipoli) and published it in The Bulletin in May 1915.

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Clarence Michael James Dennis, was born on 7 September 1876 at Auburn in the Clare Valley, South Australia. He left school at the age of 17, and had a variety of jobs, learned to drink and published his first verse in The Bulletin in 1903.

At the end of 1907 Dennis travelled to Victoria. After a period of hard living in Melbourne, he went to live in a hut at Toolangi. Here Dennis was able to concentrate on his writing. In early 1913 he published his first volume of poetry, Backblock Ballads and Other Verses, which did not meet with success.

From 1913, however, Dennis’s fortunes improved thanks to the support of John Garibaldi (‘Garry’) Roberts, and a group of artists and writers who congregated at the Roberts’s holiday house ‘Sunnyside’, at Kallista in the Dandenongs, where he wrote Songs of a Sentimental Bloke and The Moods of Ginger Mick. He used some of the proceeds of his publishing success of the ‘Bloke’ and ‘Ginger Mick’ to purchase land at Toolangi.

After the war, in 1922 Dennis joined the staff of the Melbourne Herald as ‘staff poet’. His last publication, The Singing Garden, was based on Dennis’s observations of his garden at ‘Arden’. He died of a heart condition brought on by asthma on 22 June 1938.

Corporal William Dunstan VCLone Pine hero: Ballarat-born William Dunstan was awarded the Victoria Cross for his courageous actions at Lone Pine, Gallipoli, in August 1915.He was born at Ballarat East in 1895 and attended Golden Point State School. He left at the age of 15 to work as a clerk at a drapers’ shop in Ballarat. In July 1914, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the militia. On 2 June 1915, he enlisted in the AIF and embarked with the 6th reinforcements of the 7th Battalion commanded by ‘Pompey’ Elliott at Gallipoli.

The battle of Lone Pine in August 1915 was originally intended as one of the diversionary attacks while New Zealand and Australian units tried to force a breakout from the ANZAC perimeter on the heights of Chunuk Bair and Hill 971. The attack, launched by the 1st Brigade AIF in the late afternoon of 6 August 1915 pitched Australian forces against formidable, entrenched Turkish positions, sections of which were securely roofed over with pine logs. In some instances the attackers had to break in through the roof of the trench systems in order to engage the defenders. The main Turkish trench was taken within 20 minutes of the initial charge, but this was the prelude to four days of intense hand-to-hand fighting, resulting in over 2,000 Australian casualties. It was the only ‘success’ of the August offensive.

On 9 August, the Turks made a determined counter-attack on a newly-captured trench held by Lieutenant Frederick Tubb and ten men. Two men were told to remain on the floor of the trench to catch and throw back enemy bombs, or to smother their explosions

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with overcoats; both were soon mutilated. Tubb, with Corporal Dunstan, Corporal Alexander Burton and six others, kept firing over the parapet. Several bombs burst simultaneously in the trench, killing or wounding five men. Tubb continued to fight, supported only by Dunstan and Burton, until a violent explosion blew down the barricade. Tubb drove the Turks off and Dunstan and Burton were rebuilding the barricade when a bomb burst between them, killing Burton and temporarily blinding Dunstan. Uniquely, these three 7th Battalion men were each awarded the Victoria Cross.

Dunstan was invalided to Australia and discharged on 1 February 1916. He joined the militia and moved to Melbourne to work in the Repatriation Department. In 1921, Dunstan joined the staff of the Herald and Weekly Times Ltd as an accountant under (Sir) Keith Murdoch. He gradually took over the administration of the Herald group as chief accountant, company secretary, and general manager from 1934.

He died in 1957.

Will Dyson

The artillery of art: Will Dyson was born near Ballarat in 1880. He followed his brother Edward into illustration, poetry and journalism. He was an Australian Official War Artist, and was twice wounded in 1917. Exhibitions of his war cartoons were held in London, and in November 1918 he published Australia at War, an evocative collection of words and illustrations made during the terrible winters on the Western Front.

In his introduction, GK Chesterton wrote:

‘Against such elemental emptiness of bare lands and bleak waters Dyson has moved and showed his comrades moving; and his strike is here none the less militant because he is now using only the artillery of art, which fights not with fire but with light.’

Dyson drew his astonishingly prescient cartoon ‘Peace and Future Cannon Fodder’ on 13 May 1919. It showed David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando and Georges Clemenceau (the Prime Ministers of Britain, Italy and France) together with Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, emerging after a meeting at Versailles to discuss the Peace Treaty. Clemenceau is saying to the others: ‘Curious! I seem to hear a child weeping!’ And there, behind a pillar, is a child in tears; it is labelled ‘1940 Class’.

Dyson returned to Australia in 1925 to work on the staff of the Melbourne Herald and Punch, and stayed for five years. He returned to London by way of New York, where he had a successful show of his dry-points, and he held a similar exhibition in London in

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December 1930. Dyson resumed his connection with the daily Herald and contributed cartoons to it until his death. He died suddenly on 21 January 1938 from a long-standing heart condition.

Brigadier Harold ‘Pompey’

Elliott Revered fighting leader: ‘Pompey’ Elliott was the most-loved fighting commander of the AIF in the First World War. He was born on 19 June 1878 at West Charlton, Victoria, and was educated at Ballarat College and at the University of Melbourne. In 1900, while still a student, he enlisted in the 4th Victorian (Imperial) Bushmen and served in South Africa in 1900–01. He was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for an audacious exploit.

Elliott returned to university and founded a firm of solicitors. In 1904 he was a second lieutenant in the 5th Infantry Regiment (militia) and in 1913 he became Lieutenant Colonel commanding the 58th Battalion in the new universal training scheme.

At the beginning of the First World War, Elliott was appointed to command the 7th Battalion in the 2nd Brigade and was soon given the nickname ‘Pompey’, after Carlton premiership captain Fred ‘Pompey’ Elliott.

Elliott was wounded on the day of the Gallipoli landing, 25 April 1915; he was evacuated, and did not return until early June. He missed the slaughter of the 7th Battalion at Krithia. On his return in June, he won high praise for his and the 7th’s work in the charnel house at Lone Pine on 8 August. Of the seven Victoria Crosses awarded for Lone Pine, four went to Elliott’s 7th Battalion.

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On 1 March 1916, Elliott was given the task of organising the 15th (Victorian) Brigade in the new 5th Division and promoted to Brigadier General. The first action of the 15th Brigade on the Western Front was at Fromelles, an event he was personally opposed to, and where there were 5,533 casualties in less than twenty-four hours. Elliott greeted the survivors with tears streaming down his face.

Elliott’s greatest triumph, however, was at Villers-Bretonneux, where the 15th Brigade charged the enemy with a roar ‘sufficient to make the enemy’s blood run cold’.

When Elliott returned to Melbourne in June 1919, he began to rebuild his firm, but by September he was back in the militia as commander of the 15th Brigade. In the elections of 1919, he stood for the Senate as a Nationalist and topped the Victorian poll; he was re-elected in 1925.

Elliott’s deep and abiding sense of career injustice combined with the strain of his war service and his ceaseless activity undermined his health. Early in 1931, he was in hospital under treatment for blood pressure. When discharged, he did not return to the Senate. He committed suicide on 23 March 1931.

Lieutenant Colonel Walter Percy Farr

Accepted Mustafa Kemal’s Surrender: Mustafa Kemal was the Turkish commander and victor at Gallipoli, and later as Kemal Atatürk, the first President of Turkey. Little remembered is the fact that he was defeated in Palestine as commander of the Turkish forces, and that he surrendered to an Australian. That man was Lieutenant Colonel Walter Farr, a professional soldier, who served with distinction as a staff officer under General Harry Chauvel in Palestine.

Farr was sent to intercept Kemal near Aleppo in present day Syria. Aleppo had been taken by the Light Horse and Kemal was trying to escape to Turkey on a special train. Kemal at first refused, saying he could only surrender to an officer of equal rank, but, when Farr told him that surrender would be ‘enforced’, handed over his sword.

After the First World War Farr attended the Staff College at Camberley in England, and had staff appointments in Australia until 1932. For a period was selected for special duties with the Commonwealth Government as several departments moved from Melbourne to the new city of Canberra.

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In 1932 he became assistant secretary of the Australian Jockey Club. Lieutenant Colonel Farr died in Sydney in November 1940, shortly after being recalled to duty at Eastern Command Headquarters.

Trooper Sid Ferrier

Bravery unrewarded: Sutton Henry ‘Sid’ Ferrier was born at Carapook and educated at Carapook, Portland and Casterton State Schools. He left the family farm and was a contractor at Carnaroo in Western Australia when he enlisted in the 10th Light Horse, aged 35, on 12 December 1914 and went to Gallipoli. He survived the fateful charge at the Nek on 7 August.

On 29 August, he and a handful of Lighthorsemen were sent to man the trenches at Hill 60, north of Anzac Cove. Here, ‘under most murderous bomb machine gun and rifle fire’ they caught and threw back some 500 bombs in forty-eight hours of attack in seven hours. Lieutenant Hugo Throssel, who was awarded the Victoria Cross in this action told a newspaper:

‘As the Turks were making one of their charges in the early morning, we saw a German Officer picking up clods of earth and throwing them at the Turks to urge them on to the charge. Ferrier and [another young soldier named] McMahon put their rifles up and got a sight on the German against the skyline, and fired simultaneously. One or both of them got him, and of course both claimed it. McMahon said ‘It’s been my ambition ever since I enlisted to get a German Officer, and now I am satisfied.’

‘He rose up to get another shot, and got a bullet clean through his head. As he fell back a Turkish bomb crashed into the trench, and landed on top of him, blowing him to pieces.

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‘At about 7.30 in the morning, after the last charge had been repulsed, I went back from the trench to get material to fix shrapnel shelters. Just as I came back, young Ferrier came out with his right arm blown to smithereens. He said ‘Get the boys out of that, it’s too hot altogether.’ He walked about five or six yards and then sat down. There were no stretcher bearers, but someone gave him a tot of rum, and he walked to the dressing station about 300 yards away … I was with him most of the time and never heard him groan or complain.’

On 9 September, Ferrier died on the ship taking him back to England and was buried at sea off the Portuguese coast. He is commemorated on the Lone Pine memorial, as well as at Casterton and Echuca. Throssell recommended Ferrier (and McMahon) for a bravery award, but, sadly, was not successful.

Throssell survived the war and married writer Katherine Susannah Prichard, but committed suicide in 1930, like ‘Pompey’ Elliott, a casualty of the war. He left a note saying ‘I feel my old war head. It’s going phut’.

Skipper FrancisAustralia Will Be There: Skipper Francis was a Welsh vaudevillian touring Australia and New Zealand in 1914. He arrived in Sydney as the war broke out and was astonished to hear Australian soldiers marching and singing ‘Tipperary’. ‘Had they no native tunes? No native Australian patter songs?’ he asked. Walking down a Sydney street he answered his own question, when the first four lines of ‘Australia Will Be There’ came into his head:

There has been a lot of argument Going on they say As to whether dear old England Should have gone into the fray Skipper then went to bed, inspiration lost, but happily woke up next morning with the rest of the words, and the tune complete:

But right-thinking people All wanted her to fight For when there’s shady business Britannia puts it right.

Rally ‘round the banner of your country Take the field with brothers o’er the foam On land or sea Where’er you be

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Keep your eye on Germany But England, home and beauty Have no cause to fear Should auld acquaintance be forgot No, no, no! Australian will be there.

He then took it to music publishers in Sydney who told him to go away – they had thousands of war songs ‘All the old ladies in Australia think they are inspired!’

He then came to Melbourne where he sang the chorus at the Gaiety Theatre. It was encored - he sang it again and the audience tried to take it up; next day soldiers in the street were asking him for the words. He rushed out a cheap edition and sold a thousand copies at the Broadmeadows camp. It was sung and played for the Governor-General as he reviewed troops leaving for the front from the Old Treasury Building in Spring Street. It was a sensation – and the only song Skipper Francis ever wrote.

Simon Fraser

Don’t forget me, cobber: Simon Fraser was born at Byaduk in 1876 and enlisted in 1915. In 1916 he was in the 57th Battalion at Fromelles. The battalion was in reserve during the terrible battle, which meant that Fraser and his comrades were alive to bring in the wounded. They brought in over 250 men.

In 1917 he wrote to his family:

One foggy morning in particular, I remember, we could hear someone over towards the German entanglements calling for a stretcher-bearer; it was an appeal no man could stand against, so some of us rushed out and had a hunt. We found a fine haul of wounded and brought them in; but it was not where I heard this fellow calling, so I had another shot for it, and came across a splendid specimen of humanity trying to wriggle into a trench with a big wound in his thigh. He was about 14 stone weight, and I could not lift him on my back; but I managed to get him into an old trench, and told him to lie quiet while I got a stretcher. Then another about 30 yards out sang out ‘Don’t forget me, cobber.’ I went in and got four volunteers with stretchers, and we got both men in safely…

Fraser was killed in action at Bullecourt on 12 May 1917.

Cobbers, the sculpture that is the Australian memorial to the battle at Fromelles at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, is modelled on the inspiration provided by Sergeant Simon Fraser.

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Private Abdul Ganivahoff

A Russian volunteer: Nearly 1,000 men of Russian heritage enlisted in Australia for the First World War. The Russian Empire was a vast multi-ethnic country that entered the war on the Allied side by attacking Germany on 17 August 1914, after Germany had declared war on 1 August.

Abdul Ganivahoff was a seaman, aged 30, who found himself in Melbourne in 1916 and enlisted as a reinforcement to the 2/2nd Pioneers. He said he was a Russian subject, a Tatar, from Kazan, and, as his parents were dead and he had no friends or relatives in Australia, he nominated Henry Nicholson who was in the recruiting depot and helped him fill out his attestation form. Ganivahoff nominated him as his ‘friend.’

Private Ganivahoff sailed for the war and after a bout of measles in Egypt joined his unit on 29 July 1916. He was wounded in action a week later but remained on duty. In January 1917 he transferred to the 19th Battalion, and was killed in action on 27 February 1917 in the advance to the Hindenburg Line on the Somme. His body was never recovered. And he is remembered on the Villers-Bretonneux memorial.

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The Gillespie Brothers of CarltonFamily service: The Gillespies were typical of many Australian families during the First World War. Four brothers, three served, three badly wounded, one died. The only consolation for those who survived is that Doug Gillespie died of his wounds in Melbourne, and they had a place to grieve. Hundreds of thousands did not have that.

Dave and Doug Gillespie were twins born in December 1887 in Royal Park. They went to school at Princes Hill, where they loved playing football. Watching the Carlton players train one afternoon early in 1906, Doug retrieved a ball that had come over the fence, and booted it back to the group, including coach Jack Worrall. Worrall liked his style and invited him to train. A few weeks later, Doug made his debut for Carlton in Round Two, and went on to play in the Blues’ first premiership later that year. He played ninety games before retiring in 1912.

Sergeant Douglas James Gillespie joined up in October 1914, listing his occupation as gardener, possibly at the Zoo where he listed his mother’s address. He served with the army Veterinary Corps in Egypt and France, and was something of a larrikin, once being fined for untidy dress on parade, and once for being drunk on Christmas Day 1915. He was discharged in March 1919.

Dave also played a few games for Carlton in 1907 and 1908, making his debut in a big win over Fitzroy with his brother in the team. Unhappily he broke his collarbone in the next game and missed the rest of the season. Dave made his name playing for nearby Brunswick, and played in the 1909 premiership side. He was a policeman when he enlisted on 8 July 1915 in the 59th Battalion.

At Fromelles on 19 July 1916, Company Sergeant Major David Francis Gillespie suffered severe internal wounds, as well as gunshot wounds to the arm in the charge across no-man’s-land, swept by German machine-gun fire. He was alive, but paralysed, and was

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evacuated first to England, and then to Melbourne, where he arrived by the end of the year. He died on 27 March 1917, and was buried with full military honours at Coburg.

Dave’s younger brother, 18-year-old Private Wallace William, electrician, had enlisted a few days after him in July 1915. He was also badly wounded while serving with the 13th Field Artillery Brigade in France, on 19 January 1917, and returned to Australia in May that year.

A fourth brother, Gordon Charles Gillespie, also enlisted in July 1915, but was discharged as unlikely to become an efficient soldier after being arrested by the police and jailed at Victoria Barracks after a drunken night in October. He rejoined in September 1916 and was badly wounded with gunshot wounds to the legs while serving with the 14th Battalion on 11 April 1917. Private Gordon Charles Gillespie returned to Australia in July 1917, and was discharged in March 1918.

Lieutenant Robert Grieve VC

VC recommended by his men: The Victoria Cross is usually on the recommendation from an officer, which is why many individual acts of bravery have not been recognised. No one survived to make the recommendation. In the case of Lieutenant Grieve, his men performed the service after witnessing his actions at Ypres in June 1917.

His citation reads, in part:

After all his officers had been wounded and his company had suffered very heavy casualties, he located two hostile machine-guns that were holding up the advance and causing most of the casualties. He ran forward alone a distance of 50 metres in the open and under the constant fire from the two machine-guns, he single-handedly, bombed and killed the machine gun crews. It was his action alone that enabled the advance to be continued and the objective reached.

His men wrote to him in hospital in England:

We, as men of your company, will cherish with pride your deeds of heroism and devotion which stimulated us to go forward in the face of all danger, and at critical moments gave the right guidance that won the day and added to the banner of Australia a name which time will never obliterate. We trust that your recovery may be a speedy one, and we can assure you that there awaits you on your return to the boys a very hearty welcome.

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Geoffrey HaggardAE2 submariner & prisoner of war: Geoffrey Haggard was born in London in 1888, son of a British army officer and nephew of the great popular novelist Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines and She.

Geoffrey joined the Royal Navy aged 13 in 1901, and was appointed Midshipman in 1905. He chose to join the submarine service in 1910, and in 1913 on loan to Australia was appointed second-in-command of the AE2.

In December 1914 AE2 escorted the second fleet of the AIF from Albany to the Mediterranean, and on 25 April 1915 was ordered to ‘run amok’ in the Dardanelles.

The AE2 spent five days hunting targets, but not sinking anything, before she was holed above the waterline by shellfire from a Turkish gunboat. The boat was sunk and the crew were captured. They were treated well initially, but as prisoners of war were then sent to forced-labour camps, where they suffered greatly from overwork and disease. Haggard said it was a ‘living death.’ He made plans to escape, but was discovered and was locked in solitary confinement with nothing to read but a jam tin label.

Haggard returned to England on 1 January 1919, and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry on the AE2 during the passage of the Dardanelles on 25 April 1915.

Unhappy with his post-war prospects in the Royal Navy, Haggard applied for the position as Aid-de-Camp to the new Governor of Victoria, the Earl of Stradbroke.

His appointment in Victoria ended in 1922 by which time Haggard had met Marjorie Syme (of the family that published The Age). They married in 1923 and he took up farming on a Syme property at Pendleside, in Woori Yallock. On 10 October 1939 after walking to the post office at Woori Yallock, where he had hoped was a letter recalling him to the Navy, Geoffrey Haggard was struck by a train and killed.

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Lieutenant Edward Ellis Henty

Agony at Anzac: Edward Ellis Henty was the grandson of Stephen Henty, one of the pioneers who settled Portland on the Victorian coast in 1834. Ted Henty enlisted as a lieutenant in the 8th Light Horse on 21 September 1914, having served as an officer with the Light Horse in the militia in Hamilton.

Henty died in the charge at the Nek. He was carrying bombs in his haversack, which was hit by a bullet causing the bombs to explode and blow his hip away. Henty was found screaming in agony by Sergeant William Sanderson of the 10th Light Horse. Henty cried ‘I can’t bloody well stand it,’ when men tried to drag him back to the trenches. He was taken back, but died there, and is buried in Ari Burnu Cemetery at Anzac Cove.

The Nek was a narrow bridge of land that stretched between Russell’s Top and Baby 700 on the ridgeline above Anzac Cove. The Turkish trenches were higher up on the slopes of Baby 700, allowing an unrestricted field of fire.

As part of the diversionary effort for the August offensive, the 8th (Victorian) and 10th (Western Australian) Light Horse Brigades were ordered to attack at the Nek at 4.30 am on 7 August 1915 to support an attack by New Zealand troops on the high points of Chunuk Bair and Baby 700. A naval bombardment ended seven minutes early, and rather than attack there and then, the Light Horse officers delayed until the planned time, giving the Turks time to get back to their machine guns.

The first and second waves from the 8th Light Horse Regiment were nearly all casualties. Major John Antill, effectively in command, rejected a call to cancel the attack. The third line, from the 10th Light Horse, went over the top and was also shot down. Cancellation was again suggested, but in the confusion the fourth line also charged and was mowed down before a halt was called. The 8th Light Horse suffered 154 killed and 80 wounded, and the 10th, 80 killed and 58 wounded.

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Captain Mervyn Higgins

A last parting: Mervyn Higgins was the son of Henry Bournes Higgins, High Court judge, Victorian and federal politician, father of Australia’s industrial relations system.

Mervyn was born in 1887, attended Melbourne Grammar and was sent to Oxford University, where he graduated in 1910 in law. His father had reservations about war in general, and the Boer War in particular. In 1914, HB Higgins was travelling in Britain with his wife when war was declared. Mervyn sent him a cable on 19 October saying that he was anxious to join up, and enlisted in the 8th Light Horse in January 1915. His parents were still making a leisurely departure from Europe via the south of France and Italy. They arrived in Egypt in February 1915, and waited to see Mervyn in Cairo who arrived on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1915. They had a few days together before Mervyn had to return to camp, and his parents had to board their ship at Port Said. It was the last time they saw him.

The 8th Light Horse landed at Gallipoli in late May, without their horses. On 7 August, the 8th Light Horse were part of the tragic charge at the Nek. Captain Higgins was part of the second line, which attacked after all ten officers of the first wave had been killed. He was one of two officers not killed or wounded, and was mentioned in despatches.

He was killed on 23 December 1916 at Maghdaba on the Sinai Peninsula, victim of a misunderstanding when the Turks in one part of the trench line put up white flags.

Thomas Lee, 3rd Light Horse Field Ambulance, told the Red Cross: ‘Anyhow the Captain on seeing the white flag put up immediately started to cover the distance to that part of the enemy trench. A shot from further down the lines got him through the head … It was the general idea that it was not treachery.’

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A special memorial erected by his father in the Dromana Cemetery, where HB Higgins was later buried. ‘My grief has condemned me to hard labour for the rest of my life’, his father wrote.

The Horwood Brothers of Preston

Four served, two survived, one died at home: Four of the five sons of William and Emily Horwood of Gower Street Preston enlisted in the First World War. One was killed in France, one wounded and died at his home in Preston.

Private Robert Horwood embarked with the 8th Battalion on 19 October 1914, was wounded at Gallipoli and evacuated to England. He was killed at Pozières on 26 July 1916 when a shell hit his trench. Of the seven men in the trench, three men were buried and killed and the other four were wounded. His body was never recovered and he is remembered on the Villers-Bretonneux memorial.

Private Edwin Horwood enlisted in the 24th Battalion on 20 March 1915. He served at Gallipoli, and was severely wounded in the head and arm between 27 and 31 July 1916 at Pozières. He was sent to hospital in England and discharged for return to Australia as a result of his wounds, arriving home in March 1917. He was discharged from hospital on 29 May, but died at home on 20 July, aged 28. He was buried in the Coburg Pine Ridge Cemetery.

Driver Vincent Horwood enlisted on 26 August 1914 and served with the 1st Australian Division Headquarters and served in Egypt and France. In July 1916, he was admitted to hospital in England with bronchitis and influenza. He was hospitalised again in March 1918 and returned to Australia in May 1918.

Private Leonard Horwood was an apprentice wheelwright aged 18 who embarked with the 13th Light Horse on 28 May 1915. He served at Gallipoli and the Western Front and returned to Australia in May 1919.

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Captain Cedric ‘Spike’ HowellFighter Pilot : Cedric Howell was a 19-year-old draughtsman living in Eaglemont when he joined up on New Year’s Day 1916. He joined the Royal Flying Corps as one of the original 200 Australian recruits in 1917. He joined the 45th Squadron, and became one of the war’s and Australia’s greatest fighter pilots, having shot down nineteen enemy aircraft.

Howell flew Sopwith Camels mostly over northern Italy. He was awarded the Military Cross, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Service Order in 1918.

Howell was demobbed in July 1919, and took the opportunity to fly a Martinsyde back to Australia in the England-to-Australia Air Race, with a prize of £10,000 offered by the Australian Government. His navigator and engineer was Lieutenant George Henry Fraser.

Howell and Fraser took off on 4 December 1919 and ploughed through bad weather to reach Naples on 6 December. Three days later, they began their flight to Athens.

At 7.30 pm on 9 December they were heard circling St George’s Bay at Corfu, looking for a landing place. Instead, the aircraft landed in a rough sea, perhaps having run out of fuel. Howell’s body washed ashore a few days later. Fraser’s body was never recovered.

Howell was initially buried in Corfu, but was exhumed in 1920 and returned to Australia where he was re-interred in the Heidelberg Warringal Cemetery in Upper Heidelberg Road.

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George Mawby Ingram VC

Courageous leadership: George Mawby Ingram was born in 1889 near Bendigo and spent most of his childhood around Lilydale, where he went to the local state school, and then was apprenticed as a carpenter and joiner.

From 1905 to 1914, Ingram was a member of the militia forces and was attached to the Australian Garrison Artillery. On 10 December 1914, he enlisted as a private in the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force, and served in New Guinea until his discharge on 19 January 1916. On the same day, he enlisted in the AIF and, a year later, was with the 24th Battalion in France.

Sergeant Ingram was awarded the Military Medal for ‘great courage and initiative as a member of a bombing section, by excellent placing of his bombs’ at Grevillers, near Bapaume, in March. He was in hospital from April until June, and again during September and October, after which he rejoined his battalion.

Lieutenant Ingram was awarded the Victoria Cross for his part in the last Australian infantry action, the attack on Montbrehain on 5 October 1918. In the advance, which began at dawn, the 24th suffered heavy casualties because of strongly defended enemy positions. Without hesitation, Ingram, at the head of his platoon, rushed a post, captured nine machine guns and killed 42 Germans who had shown stubborn resistance. Later, after his company had suffered severe casualties and many officers had fallen, he took control of the situation once again, rallied his men under intense fire, and led them forward. He rushed another fortification and overcame serious resistance. Twice more that day, he displayed great courage and leadership in the capture of enemy posts and the taking of sixty-two prisoners.

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In April 1919, he returned to Melbourne and on his discharge became general foreman with E A and Frank Watts Pty Ltd, building contractors. After the completion of the Shrine of Remembrance, he became a guard there. During the Second World War, he served with the Royal Australian Engineers and attained the rank of captain.

Captain Ingram died at home in Hastings on 30 June 1961 and was buried in Frankston cemetery.

Captain Albert Jacka VC MC & BarBravest of the brave: Albert Jacka was born in 1893 near Winchelsea but moved to Wedderburn when he was five. He landed at Anzac Cove on 26 April 1915.

At 3am on 19 May, the Turkish forces attacked along just about the entire front line above Anzac Cove. The Australians repelled the Turks, except at Courtney’s Post, where the ground favoured the Turks. At about 4 am, the Turkish soldiers entered part of Courtney’s trenches, forcing the Anzacs to withdraw. Lieutenant Keith Crabbe asked Jacka if he could retake the trench. The attempt he made failed. A second attempt was made. Jacka entered the trench, shot five men and bayoneted two others. Jacka’s first words to Crabbe were ‘I managed to get the beggars, sir’. For this action he received the first Victoria Cross to be awarded to the AIF in the First World War, and became a national hero.

After being commissioned as second lieutenant in early 1916, Jacka and the 14th Battalion were at Pozières in August. Here he was awarded the Military Cross for what historian Charles Bean called ‘the most dramatic and effective act of individual audacity in the history of the AIF’.

The now Captain Jacka was awarded a bar to his Military Cross at Bullecourt on 8 April 1917 when he led a night reconnaissance party into no-man’s-land to inspect enemy defences before an Allied attack against the new German line. He penetrated the wire at two places, reported back, then went out again to supervise the laying of tapes to guide the infantry. The work was virtually finished when two Germans loomed up. Realising that they would see the tapes, Jacka knew that they must be captured. He pulled his pistol; it misfired, so he rushed on and captured them by hand.

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Many thought he should have been awarded three, or four VCs. A member of the 14th Battalion wrote: ‘He deserved the Victoria Cross as thoroughly at Pozières, Bullecourt and at Ypres as at Gallipoli ... The whole AIF came to look on him as a rock of strength that never failed. We of the 14th Battalion never ceased to be thrilled when we heard of ourselves referred to ... by passing units on the march as “some of Jacka’s mob”’.

A large crowd, including the Governor-General, greeted Jacka’s ship when it berthed at Melbourne in 1919, and a convoy of eighty-five cars with Jacka at its head drove to the Town Hall where men from the 14th Battalion welcomed their famous comrade. He was demobilised in January 1920. After his return, Jacka established an electrical goods business with two former members of the 14th Battalion. Fellow directors included prominent Melbourne identities John Wren and Dick Lean. The business went bust in 1930 during the Depression. Jacka then became a commercial traveller. In September 1929, he was elected to the St Kilda Council and became Mayor a year later. He devoted most of his energies on council to assisting the unemployed.

Jacka fell ill, entered Caulfield Military Hospital on 18 December 1931 and died on 17 January 1932. Nearly 6,000 people filed past his coffin when it lay in state in Anzac House. The funeral procession, led by over 1,000 returned soldiers and flanked by thousands of onlookers, made its way to St Kilda cemetery where he was buried with full military honours. Eight Victoria Cross winners were his pallbearers.

John William Alexander Jackson VC

Bravery and compassion: John William Alexander Jackson) was born at Gunbar near Hay, New South Wales, in 1897 and worked as a drover. He enlisted as a private in the 17th Battalion on 20 February 1915 and embarked in May.

On the night of 25–26 June, Jackson was a member of a scout group for a raiding party that reconnoitred the approaches to the enemy positions in the face of withering machine-gun fire.

Jackson brought a prisoner back and returned to bring in a wounded man. Again he went out and was carrying in another man with a sergeant when his right arm was shattered by a bursting shell and the sergeant was rendered unconscious. Jackson returned for help, disregarding his own condition, and went out again to help bring back the sergeant and the wounded man; one of them was recovered.

For this act of courage, he was immediately awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. This was cancelled, however, and instead he was awarded the Victoria Cross for his ‘splendid example of pluck and determination’. Jackson was evacuated and his arm was amputated.

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Carl and Ernek JanssenFather’s heartbreak: Carl Wilhelm Janssen and younger brother Ernek Valdemar Janssen both enlisted in the 5th Battalion in 1914. Ernek was 23 and Carl was 26. They were born in Sebastopol near Ballarat. Carl was a process engraver who had attended the Ballarat School of Mines; Ernek was a storeman, and had served in the citizen forces in the old 49th Infantry, Prahran.

The brothers were among the first to enlist, doing so on 15 August 1914, and were given successive numbers in the 5th Battalion, 662 and 663. They sailed for Egypt on 21 October 1914 on the Orvieto, flagship of the first convoy, thinking they were headed for France. The Orvieto carried General Bridges and the 1st AIF Division headquarters’ staff, as well as the 2nd Brigade staff officers, and the 5th (Victorian) Battalion.

After the convoy assembled and sailed from Albany in Western Australia, the destination changed. The AIF was to go to Egypt for further training. On the voyage, HMAS Sydney captured and destroyed the German raider Emden, and the crew were brought aboard as prisoners of war. But Gallipoli was unknown, not on the horizon of the men of the 5th until they boarded another ship in Alexandria in April 1915 and landed at Anzac Cove on the 25th.

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Carl was the first to be killed. He was hit by shrapnel just as he was landing on the beach. His body was taken aboard the ship , and he was buried at sea between Gallipoli and Alexandria. He is remembered on the Lone Pine memorial and in Ballarat, as well as at Mentone.

Ernek, called Ernie by his mates, was killed in the tragic charge at Krithia on 8 May 1915. Initially posted as missing, there was heartbreaking confusion for his father Inuk living in Mentone - perhaps he was laying wounded in Malta. His body was never found, and he is now remembered on the Cape Helles memorial.

Major Doctor Frederick Miller Johnson

Doctor killed at Gallipoli: Disease through lack of sanitation was a major problem at Gallipoli. Major Johnson was killed while undertaking an inspection as part of his duties as a doctor.

Frederick Miller Johnson was a surgeon who lived in St Vincent’s Place South, Albert Park. He had been a captain in the militia medical corps and had practised medicine for some twenty-five years before enlisting in the 6th Field Ambulance on 1 March 1915 at the age of 51. He had studied at Edinburgh and Melbourne Universities. Newly promoted, Major Johnson was killed by a shell explosion at Lone Pine on 29 November.

Official historian Charles Bean wrote:

These deep saps and shallow tunnels had always given excellent protection against bullets and field-artillery; now that they were bombarded by heavy guns, they proved merely a dangerous trap. The sides and roofs were blown in, burying members of the garrison. In the 24th Battalion fourteen men were thus suffocated. The divisional sanitary

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officer, Major Johnson, who had been inspecting the Pine when the bombardment started, and who had at once established an improvised aid-post, was smothered, along with the men whom he was tending. Major Johnson is buried at Lone Pine with the epitaph, ‘Faithful Unto Death’.

Brigadier General George Johnston

Johnston’s Jolly, Gallipoli: George Jameson Johnston was born in East Melbourne in 1868 and saw active service in the Boer War with the Royal Field Artillery before being invalided home with fever in July 1900.

On 18 August 1914, Johnston was appointed to command the 2nd Field Artillery Brigade, 1st Australian Division. His 4th Battery landed the first 18-pounder field gun at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915.

The guns of ‘Johnston’s Jolly’, near Lone Pine used to ‘jolly up’ the Turks. Johnston was described as ‘a hard-goer, fearless, enduring, capable’. Johnston remained at Gallipoli until the evacuation.

In January 1916, in Egypt, Johnston was appointed commander of the 2nd Divisional Artillery and sailed for France in March. From 27 April, when his artillery placed its first barrage on the enemy parapet near Armentières, the division’s infantry felt confident

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that its gunners could lay down a protective barrage. Johnston commanded the 2nd Divisional Artillery in all its engagements from 1916 until late 1917, including the battles of Pozières and Bullecourt and the Third Battle of Ypres. He relinquished command on 1 November 1917. He was Military Administrator of German New Guinea from 1918 to 1920. He died on 23 May 1949.

Johnston’s Jolly Cemetery near Lone Pine at Gallipoli (called by the Turks Kirmezi Sirt, or ‘Red Ridge’), was named for Brigadier-General Johnston. The position was reached by the 2nd Australian Infantry Brigade on 25 April 1915, but lost the next day and it was never retaken. The cemetery was made after the Armistice when graves were brought in from the battlefield.

There are now 181 Commonwealth servicemen buried or commemorated in this cemetery. 144 of the burials are unidentified and there are special memorials to 36 Australian casualties believed to be among them, almost all of whom were killed in the capture of Lone Pine in August 1915.

Lieutenant William Donovan Joynt VCConspicuous bravery: William Donovan Joynt was born at Elsternwick in 1889. He was dairying and digging potatoes on Flinders Island when the First World War began.

Joynt enlisted in the AIF on 21 May 1915 and joined the 8th Battalion in July 1916. On 30 September, he was wounded near Ypres. In January 1917, Lieutenant Joynt rejoined his battalion and served on the Western Front until August 1918, fighting in the second battle of Bullecourt and at Menin Road and Broodseinde.

On 23 August 1918, when an attack near Herleville was pinned down, with heavy losses, by intense fire from Plateau Wood, Joynt rallied the attackers and led an advance that cleared the wood’s approaches, then captured it and over eighty prisoners in a bayonet

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charge. For his ‘most conspicuous bravery’ he was awarded the Victoria Cross. He was seriously wounded on 26 August and evacuated to England.

Promoted to Captain in October, he was posted to AIF Headquarters, London, in March 1919. In February 1920, he returned to Melbourne, where his AIF appointment terminated on 11 June.

Joynt had studied agriculture and sheep-breeding in England in 1919, and in 1920 he became a soldier settler, dairy-farming near Berwick. When his property was resumed in 1929, he was pursuing interests in Melbourne. He was a pioneer of colour printing in Australia and was a printer and publisher for over sixty years.

Mobilised on 26 September 1939, he commanded the 3rd Garrison Battalion at Queenscliff and then, from March 1941, Puckapunyal camp. From June 1942, he was Staff Officer then Quartermaster at Seymour camp. He was placed on the Retired List as an honorary Lieutenant Colonel on 10 October 1944.

Joynt wrote two evocative autobiographical books about the First World War: Saving the Channel Ports, 1918 (1975) and Breaking the Road for the Rest (1979). He died on 5 May 1986 at Windsor, and was buried with full military honours in Brighton Cemetery.

Private Walter Henry ChibnallMen of Snake Valley: Lieutenant William Charles Cheeseman, a farrier from Beaufort, wrote to the Red Cross in January 1918 that he had made all sorts of inquiries about Walter Henry Chibnall of their unit, the 10th Light Trench Mortar Battery:

As he is my first cousin and I got as many particulars as I could so I could write and tell his wife, for she lives quite close to my wife, so you can see I went fully into it. We went to Passchendaele near Ypres on 12 October 1917 and after the battle he failed to answer the roll call. It is my belief that Corporal Chibnall was killed by a shell with his mate Gunner Ron Bryant of St Kilda. They were resting in a shellhole in the advance when hit by another shell.

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Chibnall was killed at Broodseinde one of the battles around Ypres in 1917.

At the end of July 1917, the British launched a major offensive in Flanders, at Ypres. Initial advances were successful but soon bogged down under stiffening enemy resistance and wet conditions. The ground became a morass. By September, the ground had dried, and the Australian divisions were brought in.

Three successful pushes – Menin Road, Polygon Wood and Broodseinde – in September and early October steadily drove the Germans back to the top of Passchendaele ridge. Through October and into November, wet weather and sheer exhaustion meant further attacks became hopelessly bogged down.

Though the final ridge was eventually gained, no breakthrough was possible. Losses were horrendous on both sides. During the five-month campaign, almost half a million men were lost. The fighting in these weeks cost the Australians another 38,000 casualties.

Chibnall, Bryant and Cheeseman had all enlisted in early 1916 and sailed to France on the same ship, HMAT Ascanius, on 27 May. Chibnall and Bryant are commemorated on the Menin Gate.

Lieutenant Cheeseman was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for ‘consistently good service, untiring in his energy and devotion to duty’, in the words of the citation. He returned to Australia in 1919.

Three other Chibnalls served, two died.

Arthur Leonard Chibnall enlisted in 1915 at the third attempt. He was a quite small man, really a boy aged 19. He served in the 7th Battalion and was killed at Pozières on 25 July. He has no known grave and is remembered on the Villers-Bretonneux memorial. His brother, William Henry Chibnall, served with the 23rd Battalion and returned to Australia in 1919. A cousin from Ballarat, Walter Lawrence Chibnall, 24th Battalion, died of wounds at Dauors in northern France on 18 August 1918.

Nurse Alice Ross-King

My world has ended: Nurse Alice Ross-King had met Lieutenant Harry Moffitt in Egypt in September 1915 and wrote in her diary: ‘I have not written this up for the past 4 days. In that time a wonderful thing has happened. I am really & truly in love. I have never felt like this before for anybody. It is such a great pure love with none of the old smallness in it …’ Harry felt the same way.

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Alice, born in Ballarat in 1891, and Harry, born 1883 in Bendigo, soon parted, as his 53rd Battalion headed for battle in France. Tragically, he was killed in the first major engagement, one of the 5,533 casualties at Fromelles on 19 July 1916. When he saw the 53rd’s Colonel Norris hit, Moffitt instantly called for four men to carry him back to the Australian lines. As he did so, he too was hit and fell dead across Norris’s body.

Learning of Moffitt’s death, she wrote simply: ‘Well, my world has ended. Harry is dead. God what shall I do!’ By then, she too was in France at a hospital in Rouen. In July 1917 she was at a Casualty Clearing Station near Armentières. On 17 July it was bombed. In her diary she describes the horror and carnage that followed, and it was for her bravery during the attack that she was awarded the Military Medal. The citation praised her ‘great coolness and devotion to duty’ during that night. Ross-King was one of only seven nurses of the AANS to be awarded the Military Medal during World War I.

Alice Ross-King returned to Australia in 1919, where she eventually married and had a family. In the new Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery there are still 126 unidentified soldiers exhumed from the mass grave. Harry Moffitt is probably one of them.

Captain Joseph Peter Lalor

Eureka connection: Captain Joseph Peter Lalor was the grandson of Peter Lalor, leader at the Eureka Stockade, giving the family a connection to the two founding events of the Australian story.

A long-standing myth has it that Captain Lalor went ashore at Gallipoli on the first day, bearing the sword that his grandfather had used at Eureka. While it is true Captain Lalor had a sword, it was not given to him by his grandfather – and in fact, did not have one at

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Gallipoli. However, Captain Lalor was one of the handful of men to have reached the objective of the Third Ridge on 25 April, where he was killed.

Lalor was born in 1884, and was serving as professional soldier on the Administrative and Instructional Staff when he enlisted in the AIF on 26 August 1914 as Captain in the 12th Battalion. His wife Hester was in London with his son Peter Bernard Lalor, when he was killed.

AIF efficiency soon had his meagre effects back in Australia. This was a great comfort to the families. Lalor’s effects were returned to Australia later in 1915, comprising ‘2 rugs, I pr boots, I khaki shirt, 1 tunic, 1 singlet, 1 towel, 1 waterproof sheet, 1 oilstone, 2 prs socks, 1 razor strop, 1 flag.’ There was a black kit bag with more clothes, and a haversack, containing papers, plus a leather trunk with a dress tunic, books, haversack, and a Sam Browne belt – but no sword.

His company account was quickly deducted £12/15/8 the amount he was indebt at the time of his death, before the balance was sent to his widow. Hester, Peter Bernard and Lalor’s widowed mother were all granted pensions – which, however meagre, were also an important part of the Australian commitment to those who served.

Lalor’s obituary in The Argus said: ‘He had an extremely varied experience of life, having served in the Royal Navy in the Foreign Legion of France, after which he fought through a South American revolution. Wherever trouble and fighting were to be found Captain Lalor was to be found until he came to Australia and gained an appointment in the administrative and instructional staff, rising to the rank of captain before the war broke out.’

Captain Lalor’s is buried in Baby 700 Cemetery, near the furthest point reached by Australians on Anzac Day 1915.

Major James Francis Lean

Base Records: Major James Lean was a professional soldier who, during the First World War worked extraordinary hours dealing with the requests from soldiers and their relations for information about illness, death, whereabouts, personal effects, location and medals. He was in charged of the vital connection between people, military and civilian, and his accuracy and diligence in the age before computers were dreamed of is astounding.

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In January 1919, eight families received a letter from Major Lean, Officer-in-Charge, Base Records in Melbourne. It enclosed a photograph, taken at San Stefano prisoner-of-war camp in Constantinople. San Stefano was located where Istanbul international airport now stands.

Major Lean wrote that it was ‘forwarded as a memento of the trials this soldier has undergone whilst serving in the Australian Imperial Force. I trust he will be spared to return none the worse for his trying experience.’

He was born in 1878 in NSW, and served in the Australian Military forces from 1900, qualifying as an instructor in musketry. He was appointed confidential clerk of British Forces in China in 1904. After the war he was engaged in the clothing trade and died in 1931.

Frank Lesnie Anzac from Warsaw: Frank Lesnie was born in Warsaw, Poland. He was educated in London at Norwood orphanage school, where he was school captain, and at Regent St Polytechnic; he emigrated to Australia aged 18 in 1913. Two years later he wrote about why he volunteered in Australia, as Frank Bernard:

Fun, life, beauty, Home, but to return to it all as one of the crowd of workers – no, not I. Australia, home of the workers, will suit me in the capacity of a worker or a soldier. I have a love of freedom which would have been denied me, had I joined a home regiment.

He enlisted in the 17th Battalion, 23 May 1915, a labourer aged 20.

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Lesnie landed at Gallipoli in 1915, and survived. After the battle at Pozières in July-August 1916, he wrote:

We returned from Hell. We were in the trenches 9 days, and every day seemed a week and every night was a month. The last 4 nights a party of 50 men (I was one of the lucky ones) were kept in the reserve on the 18th Battn. The Hunks [sic] bombard the reserves and supports very heavily at night, always fearing an attack. We crouched in reserve for four solid nights, waiting for our turn to come, that is waiting for a shell to lob in the trench and take us on a very long journey.

He was killed near Warlancourt on 2 March 1917 and is buried in the Warlancourt British Cemetery. His mother, in London was informed.

Lesnie’s story is told in Elena Govor’s book Russian Anzacs: Govor notes that a total of 1,000 Russians (from all parts of the Russian empire) volunteered – about 25% of Russian immigrants to Australia.

Captain Aubrey Liddelow

I’ll never leave my men: Aubrey Liddelow was born in Gippsland in 1876, and was a teacher at Melbourne High School when he enlisted in the 8th Battalion on 11 November 1914. After service at Gallipoli, where he was twice wounded, he joined the 59th Battalion.

He was posted missing at Fromelles on 19 July 1916, the first major Australian action on the Western Front. One of his mates wrote to his wife:

I was with the Captain from the time he went over our parapet until all was over, as far as this world is concerned, for a noble hero. On going over our parapet, the Captain was

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wounded in the head; but he rose at once and led us on, for, by that time, he was in charge of the Battalion. He reached the German lines with only a handful of men left, and, in going over their parapet, he was again wounded—this time in the shoulder and then in the arm, but nothing daunted him. In order to spare the few men remaining, he withdrew us, and we took shelter in a shell-crater until reinforcements should come, when we would attack to better purpose. I had been wounded by this time, and I had had quite enough, so I went to the Captain and begged him to return with me, as his wounds needed attention. But he said, ‘I’ll never walk back into safety and leave the men I’ve led into such grave danger! We’ll wait for reinforcements.’ He then ordered me back, but I had gone only about ten yards when a shell ended the life of a hero if ever there was one. Many of his men have since proved this statement perfectly, and all speak beautifully of their Captain. One man said, ‘He was not only our Captain, but our friend and a Christian gentleman.’

Captain Liddelow is remembered on the VC Corner memorial.

Private Percy MansfieldBroken-hearted mother: Percy Mansfield was a 19-year-old farmer when he enlisted as a reinforcement to the 7th Battalion in July 1915. During the ‘second stunt’ near Pozières in August 1916. His mate, Sergeant William Peach MM, was also wounded and cabled Mansfield’s parents when he was in hospital in England.

Mrs Frances Mansfield had received the cable on 15 September 1916:

BROKEN HEARTED—POOR PERSE KILLED INSTANTLY BY A SHELL—LOVING SYMPATHY—GOD HELP YOU ALL IN SAD TROUBLE—AUGUST 25TH— PEACH

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Unfortunately, the family then received an official letter saying their son was wounded, then another where he was said to be ‘wounded—missing’. This glimmer of hope caused of much grief and unhappiness through 1917. Mrs Mansfield wrote to Base Records many times in 1917:

25/1/17

Dear Sir

Being one of the many broken hearted mothers I beg to seek further information regarding my son no 4256 L/Cpl P. D. Mansfield 7th Battalion who is reported by the Defence as missing since the 19th August last, and yet from private advice received from his comrades in France he was killed in action on the Somme 19th Aug but the question is which report are his loved ones to believe? I do wish you could do something to clear up the suspense that we are enduring is worse than knowing the poor boy’s true fate his pay has been stopped by the defence. Final payment was made to me on 11/1/17.

Trusting you will do your best in this matter as you must have an idea of our feelings regarding our boy’s fate—Mrs Frances Mansfield.

A year after his death, on 19 August 1917, Mansfield was officially declared killed in action.

In December 1933, the grave of an unknown soldier was found near Pozières and reverently reburied in Serre Road Cemetery No. 2, Beaumont Hamel, France. When this was done, Mansfield’s identity disk was found. It was returned to the family in January 1934.

Colonel Leslie Cecil Maygar

Light horse Hero: Leslie Cecil Maygar was from Euroa, enlisted in the Victorian Mounted Rifles in March 1891 and went to the Boer War with the 5th (Mounted Rifles) Contingent in March 1901. At Geelhoutboom, on 23 November 1901, Lieutenant Maygar was awarded the Victoria Cross for rescuing a fellow Victorian whose horse had been shot. With the enemy only 200 yards away, Maygar dismounted, put the man on his own horse, told him to gallop for the British lines, and ran back under heavy fire. His VC was presented by Lord Kitchener.

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Maygar enlisted in the AIF on 20 August 1914 and was appointed a captain in the 4th Light Horse Regiment, serving at Gallipoli and given command of the 8th Light Horse Regiment as lieutenant colonel. Maygar led his regiment throughout its service in Sinai and Palestine until his death, and was a much-admired leader. During the second battle of Gaza, on 19 April 1917, official historian Sir Henry Gullett records that ‘It was a day when true leaders recognised that their men needed inspiration, and Maygar gave it in the finest manner’.

Late on the day of the battle of Beersheba, 31 October 1917, a German aeroplane, fighting with both bombs and machine guns, hit Maygar, whose arm was shattered. His grey horse bolted into the darkness and was found later by 8th Regiment troopers, but Maygar was not with him. ‘He was picked up during the night by other troops … and, having lost too much blood, died the next day.’

Maygar was awarded the Distinguished Service Order in June 1917, and was mentioned in despatches three times from 1916 to 1918. He is buried at the Beersheba War Cemetery.

Sergeant Albert Lowerson VC

VC in the finest action of the war: Albert David Lowerson was born in Myrtleford in 1896. He had been dredging for gold before enlisting in the 5th Reinforcements of the 21st Battalion on 16 July 1915. Lowerson joined his unit on 7 January 1916 and accompanied it to France in March. After a period in the quiet Armentières sector, he

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entered the battle of the Somme, seeing heavy fighting for the Pozières heights from 25 July to 7 August.

Two weeks later, he was back in the front lines near Mouquet Farm where he was wounded on 26 August. He rejoined the battalion a month later and was promoted to Corporal on 1 November. Promoted to temporary Sergeant on 11 April 1917, he was again wounded during the second battle of Bullecourt on 3 May.

Lowerson won the Victoria Cross on 1 September 1918 during the capture of Mont Saint-Quentin, led by General (later Sir) John Monash and regarded as the First AIF’s finest military action of the war,. The citation reads:

Regardless of heavy enemy machine-gun fire, Sergeant Lowerson moved about fearlessly directing his men, encouraging them to still greater effort, and finally led them on to the objective. On reaching the objective he saw that the left attacking party was held up by an enemy strong post that was heavily manned with 12 machine-guns. Under the heaviest sniping and machine-gun fire, Sergeant Lowerson rallied seven men as a storming party, and directing them to attack the flanks of the post, rushed the strong point, and, by effective bombing, captured it, together with 12 machine-guns and 30 prisoners. Though severely wounded in the right thigh, he refused to leave the front line until the prisoners had been disposed of, and the organisation and consolidation of the post had been thoroughly completed.

He then refused to leave the battalion for two days until evacuated because of his wound. He resumed duty on 17 September, in time to participate in the last Australian infantry action of the war, at Montbrehain on 5 October, where he was wounded for the fourth time. He received the Victoria Cross from King George V at Buckingham Palace on 1 March 1919; a month later, he embarked for Australia and was discharged on 8 July.

Between the wars, Lowerson was a dairy and tobacco farmer on a Victorian soldier settlement block. He named his property, on Merriang estate near Myrtleford, St Quentin. Re-enlisting on 5 July 1940, he served as a sergeant in various training units throughout Australia until discharged in 1944. He died of leukaemia on 15 December 1945 at his home St Quentin in Myrtleford.

Lieutenant Lawrence Dominic McCarthy VC

The most effective piece of individual fighting: Lawrence Dominic McCarthy was born in Western Australia in 1892 and orphaned at an early age. In Western Australia he enlisted in the 16th Battalion on 23 September 1914 and sailed for Egypt in December.

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On 26 April 1915, ‘Fat’ – the affectionate nickname earned by his ‘ample frame’ – landed at Gallipoli and was evacuated with the last party of his battalion on 20 December.

Near Madam Wood, east of Vermandovillers, France, on 23 August 1918, McCarthy performed what Charles Bean, official historian, rated as ‘perhaps the most effective feat of individual fighting in the history of the AIF, next to Jacka’s at Pozières’.

The 16th Battalion, with McCarthy commanding D Company, had attained its objectives, but the battalion on the left was unable to make headway. Accompanied by Sergeant F.J Robbins DCM MM, McCarthy attacked the German machine-gun posts that were preventing its advance. They raced into the enemy trench system, shooting and bombing as they went, destroying three machine-gun positions. When his mate fell wounded, McCarthy pressed on, picking up German bombs as he continued to fight down the trench, inflicting heavy casualties. Coming upon another enemy pocket, he shot two officers and bombed the post until a blood-stained handkerchief signalled the surrender of the forty occupants.

This feat of bravery, which resulted in the award of the Victoria Cross, had an extraordinary conclusion. As the battalion historian records, ‘the prisoners closed in on him from all sides and patted him on the back!’

In twenty minutes he had killed 20 Germans, taken 50 prisoners and seized 450 metres of the German front.

McCarthy moved from Western Australia to Victoria in 1926 and died on 25 May 1975.

Major General James McCay

Minister for Defence at Gallipoli: James Whiteside McCay was a teacher and militia soldier turned Victorian and Federal politician. He was Minister for Defence in 1905, where he was important in establishing the pre- war defence administration, focusing on Australian rather than Imperial needs. He was appointed to command the Australian Intelligence Corps in 1907-13, and, in August, the 2nd (Victorian) Brigade.

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In the confusion of the Landing on 25 April, McCay and his Staff Major Cass retrieved the situation at Lone Pine, the brigade losing half its strength. The 2nd Brigade was sent south to Cape Helles in the first week of May. On 8 May it had just 35 minutes’ notice, before being ordered to advance on the Turkish positions at Krithia. McCay could do little more than rip out an order to his battalions. Reaching ‘Tommies’ Trench’ under a tempest of fire, McCay said to Charles Bean, ‘This is where I suppose I have to do the damned heroic act’ and scrambled on to the parapet shouting, ‘Now then, Australians! Which of you men are Australians? Come on, Australians!’ (‘I said in effect to them’, he wrote home, ‘“Come and die”, and they came with a laugh and a cheer’.) Urging on his senior officers, McCay advanced to probably the most forward position occupied by an AIF brigade headquarters during the war, and realized the attack was hopeless: the rest of the line was held up. They had made the only worthwhile advance in the entire battle of Krithia, but suffered more than 1,000 casualties.

McCay controversially failed to allow a truce at Fromelles to collect wounded. He died in 1930.

Private William Michael McDonald

Have you never heard the call? Many soldiers wrote poetry and verse, some patriotic, some sentimental, some both. Bill McDonald was one of them. McDonald was a gifted

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young poet in the Banjo Paterson tradition; his book, Soldier Songs from Palestine (1918), was published posthumously in Melbourne.

William Michael McDonald was 21 and studying cheese making when he enlisted at Preston on 16 July 1915. He embarked from Melbourne with the 22nd Battalion, but transferred to the Anzac Battalion Imperial Camel Corps in Egypt. McDonald suffered a severe gunshot to the knee at Gaza on 20 April 1917, and died in hospital in Cairo on 8 May following a septic haemorrhage of the wound. He was buried in the Cairo War Memorial Cemetery.

Songs of the Desert—The Call

Have you never felt it comrade?Have you never heard the call?Of a voice I hear so often,When the shades of evening fall.‘Tis the voice of old time memories,Loves and hates of long ago,‘Tis the clan call of my people,That I hear where’er I go.Now I hear it over the ocean,With its phantom mystic lures,The call of blood that through the ages,Still will sound while life endures.The call of blood from kinsmen living,The voice from the buried past,Has blazed the long, long trail of freedom,The soldier hears it to the last.Oh ye have heard the call my comrade,Freedom’s sword is in your hands,And our sire’s old dauntless spirit,Throbs in the lifeblood of our land.

Ronald McDonald

‘Gurkhas on the left, don’t shoot!’ : On the evening of 25 April 1915, Colonel Harold Pope was establishing elements of his 16th Battalion and some Kiwis on the hill above Monash Valley that now bears his name. Pope sent his adjutant, Captain Ronald Tracy Alexander McDonald, to find out what had happened to the 3rd Brigade, which had earlier been driven back from the ridge with heavy losses.

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McDonald spoke to a sergeant of the 11th Battalion who said there were Indian troops fighting on the left – ‘Gurkhas on the left, don’t shoot!’ Pope then sent Lieutenant William Ernest Elston and Private Reginald Francis Lushington to talk to them. Lushington was born at Negrapratam in South India and understood ‘Hindustanee’ as Captain Longmore, wrote The Old Sixteenth in 1929. Bean said Lushington could speak Tamil and Pathan.

Elston and Lushington moved up Monash Valley, and Pope and McDonald heard them talking, apparently asking for a senior officer. McDonald went down the hill into Monash Valley in response and was stopped by a figure with a rifle.

McDonald said ‘I’m an English sahib. I want burra sahib’ (literally meaning the ‘big man’ - the officer in charge).

Pope heard these voices and moved towards McDonald, but then became suspicious, especially when he was shot at. He dived down the steep slope and escaped. There were no Indians, just Turks – and McDonald, Elston and Lushington were made prisoner.

McDonald was born in 1885, and was repatriated to England in January 1919, and returned to Australia serving in the post-war army. He was recalled to the active list of officers in 1942, and was demobilised in November 1945.

Ted McMahon

A cornet solo stopped the war for five minutes: Colonel John Monash thought that a campfire concert would be a good idea to keep the boys in good spirits on the eve of the last attempt to win the battle at Gallipoli on 8 August 1915. Ted McMahon wrote in the Kalgoorlie Miner on 15 June 1935:

Many fine turns were gathered together, one particularly being outstanding, that of Corporal Wilson of the Canterbury Rifles (NZ) who sang ‘The Trumpeter’… both our

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troops and the Turks carried on as usual during the concert with rifle and machine gun fire … I think the spectacle of thousands of soldiers from all parts of the Empire – black, brown and white – lining the sides of steep hills on both sides and in the gully, to the chattering messengers of death, was indelibly printed on my memory as the most inspiring.

During the first verse of ‘The Rosary’, played by me on the cornet, the firing was more rapid, and in the second one could hear only spasmodic shots. During the third and final verse not a sound could be heard – only the strains of Ethelbert Nevin’s famous song…

At the conclusion there was a tremendous outburst of applause from all listeners, including those in the trenches above us, and then everyone settled down to the grim business of war.

Frank McNamara VCOnly VC awarded to Australian airman: Frank McNamara was born at Rushworth in 1894. He was a junior teacher in the State Education Department in 1911 and from 1913 to 1914 studied at the Teachers’ Training College in Melbourne.

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In August 1915, he was selected to train as a pilot at Point Cook and graduated as a pilot in October. He was posted to 1 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps. After additional training in England, McNamara was with the 1 Squadron in the Middle East in 1917.

During the Gaza battles in March 1917, a BE-2C, piloted by Captain D Rutherford, was forced to land after being hit by ground fire while on a raid. It was a twin-seater, but Rutherford was flying it solo.

Enemy cavalry had seen the aircraft land and galloped towards it. McNamara, on the same raid, was

on his way home. He saw what was happening and, despite a severe leg-wound, attempted a rescue. He made a safe landing beside Rutherford who at once climbed aboard McNamara’s single-seater Martinsyde aircraft. He had to stand on the wing and hold onto the struts, which made the aircraft very lop-sided. McNamara was unable to control his machine on the rough ground and it crashed attempting to take off.

The two airmen set fire to McNamara’s aircraft and returned to Rutherford’s machine, which by this time was close to capture by the Turkish cavalry. With bullets flying, McNamara clambered into the pilot’s seat while Rutherford worked on the engine and got it going. Despite pain and loss of blood, McNamara managed to get them off the ground and flew 70 miles (113 kilometres) to their home base at El Arish, where he carried out a safe landing. McNamara was given the only VC awarded to an Australian airman in the First World War.

He retired from the RAAF in 1946 and died in England in 1961.

Dame Nellie Melba

The ‘greatest night of my life’: Nellie Melba had completed a strenuous tour of North America, and dazzled King George as Mimì in La bohème at Covent Garden (13 curtain calls and many more Australian ‘cooees’) in May 1914, in the glorious months before the world stumbled into the catastrophe of the First World War. She returned to Melbourne and her son George at Coombe Cottage near Lilydale on 26 July 1914, just weeks before war broke out.

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Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, and as a consequence Australia was also at war. On 10 August recruiting offices opened and Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, wife of the Governor-General, wrote to the Melbourne daily paper The Argus, calling for the creation of the Australian branch of the Red Cross. Madame Melba immediately became involved in the fund-raising, announcing a Patriotic Concert at the Melbourne Town Hall Auditorium for 10 September.

The mood at concert the mood was patriotic and optimistic – Gallipoli was eight months in the future, and the horrifying daily casualty lists were yet to be published.

It was more like the ‘Last Night of the Proms’ - many of the same songs were sung and the audience joined with Melba in singing ‘God Save the King’, ‘Rule Britannia’, and the ‘Old Hundredth’ – All people that on earth do dwell. There was Verdi, Donizetti and Elgar, orchestral music, old songs and the great actress Ellen Terry gave a recitation.

And Melba sang ‘Home Sweet Home’ - but was so overcome by emotion that she only got to the end of the first verse. ‘I can’t do any more,’ she said.

This was to be the first of an extraordinary series of events Melba organised in Australia, and later in Canada and the United States. The first concert raised £1390/3/2 and in Australia alone she raised more than £100,000 – the equivalent of around $10 million today.

Mauritz MichaelisFour grandsons served, one returned: Michaelis Hallenstein Co. Pty Ltd was a tannery, glue and gelatine business with branches around Australasia and an office in London. It commenced operations in 1864 in Footscray when Isaac Hallenstein joined with his uncle Mauritz Michaelis. The families lived in St Kilda mansions, including Linden and Woonsocket. Michaelis, who died in 1902, had seven daughters and four sons. Four of his grandsons served in the Australian or British forces, and three were killed.

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Lieutenant Dalbert Isaac Hallenstein was a 21-year-old accountant with the family firm. He served in the 64th City of Melbourne Regiment from 1911 and enlisted in the AIF on 16 January 1915. He saw action at Gallipoli, where was wounded in 1917. He was killed instantly when hit by a fragment of a high explosive shell on 2 September 1918 while going forward in the attack on Peronne.

Lieutenant Hallenstein’s cousin, Grant Moritz Michaelis was a lieutenant with the Royal Engineers and was 20 when he was killed at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli.

Grant’s brother Sergeant Frank Moritz Michaelis was 24, a manager at the family tannery and married to Kathleen when he enlisted in the 6th Field Artillery Brigade on 23 August 1916. He had served in the 11th Light Horse in the citizen military forces from 1912. His wife wrote on the Roll of Honour register that he had been the youngest boy to enter Harrow School in England and that the headmaster had reported: ‘His last year has been a great success. He has triumphed over difficulties and shown both tact and strength … he has shown himself loyal, true-hearted and modest.’

Frank sailed from Melbourne on 23 December 1916 and became dangerously ill before he had a chance to get to get to France. He died of meningitis at Tidworth Military Hospital and was buried at the Willesden Jewish Cemetery.

The fourth grandson, (Sir) Archie Reuben Michaelis (1889–1975) was working in the London office at the outbreak of the war. He served with the Honourable Artillery Company in the Middle East and trained for the Royal Flying Corps in 1917, but he became seriously ill with malaria and influenza and was repatriated in 1919. Sir Archie was later a Member of the Legislative Assembly in Victoria for the United Australia Party, and later the Liberal Party for St Kilda from 1932 to 1952. He was Speaker of the House from 1950 to 1952.

Private William ‘Billy’ Miles

The Fromelles Truce that never was: Private William Miles was nearly 35 when he first enlisted on Australia Day, 26 January 1915. He was discharged as medically unfit with pneumonia in July, but re-enlisted in August, and served with the 29th Battalion.

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Born in Newport, England, he was a tailor in Bendigo with his wife Catherine and three children. Miles had seen service in the Boer War with Brabant’s Horse and Kitchener’s Fighting Scouts.

Miles survived the battle of Fromelles on 19 July 1916, and next day was out collecting wounded men in no-man’s-land under the protection of a Red Cross badge. Close to the German trench, a German officer asked him if he would bring back an officer to negotiate a truce to collect the more than 5,000 Australian casualties. Miles returned with Major Alex Murdoch, who in turn asked permission of the commander of the 5th Division, General McCay. Permission was refused. While some 300 wounded were brought back, many rescuers died doing it and hundreds died waiting.

Miles was wounded at Polygon Wood in 1917, and after recovering in 1918, he was sent for training in England. He transferred briefly to the 58th Battalion, and finally to the 5th Battalion, from which he was discharged on his return to Australia in January 1919. Billy and Catherine Miles had another child after the war. They named the boy Aussie. Billy Miles died in 1929.

General Sir John MonashThe greatest Australian: John Monash was born in Melbourne to a family of Polish-Jewish origin in 1865. He went Scotch College and then studied engineering, law and arts for a brilliant but lengthy period at the University of Melbourne.

Monash had business difficulties in the 1890s and early 1900s, but finally made his fortune in reinforced concrete. His military career took off when he was put in charge of the Victorian section of the Australian Intelligence Corps (militia). At the outbreak of war, he commanded the AIF 4th Brigade, and sailed for Egypt on 22 December 1914.

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Monash landed with the 4th Brigade at Gallipoli on 26 April, and while the brigade performed well under difficult conditions, Monash had no part in the planning of the campaign. Charles Bean, official historian, reported the saying that Monash would ‘command a division better than a brigade and a corps better than a division.’ Monash was promoted to brigadier general in July.

In France in July 1916, Monash was promoted to Major General, commanding the new 3rd Division then training in England. His first major success was the battle at Messines in June 1917, as part of Sir Herbert Plumer’s Second Army. In November, the 3rd Division joined the other divisions in the First Anzac Corps and in March–April 1918 beat back the final German offensive in front of Amiens, retaking Villers-Bretonneux on Anzac Day 1918. Monash was made Lieutenant General and the first Australian commander of an Australian Corps on 1 June. The greatest period in Australian military history followed. Australians were for the first time in the spearhead of the Allied advance, facing the major enemy on the main battlefield.

The battle of Hamel on 4 July was the beginning. This has been called the first modern battle where troops, tanks, aircraft and artillery combined successfully: ‘all over in 93 minutes—the perfection of team-work,’ wrote Monash in his book The Australian Victories in France in 1918. General Erich Ludendorff called 8 August Germany’s ‘Black Day’—the Australian breakout, with the Canadians, was the beginning of the end of the war. A triumphant series of battles followed, including Mont Saint-Quentin, Péronne and Saint-Quentin Canal, that saw the AIF break through the Hindenburg Line in October.

Monash’s military victories were models of engineering, planning and confidence. He applied the same skills to the great task of repatriating the 160,000 men of the AIF back to Australia. He returned on Boxing Day 1919.

After the war, Monash worked in many prominent civilian positions, the most notable being head of the Victorian State Electricity Commission. He was a leading and loved public figure after the war, becoming involved in many public and private organisations and in the commemorations of Anzac Day. He was Deputy Chairman of the National War Memorial Committee from its inception and it was his influence that finally saw the construction of the Shrine of Remembrance. He died in 1931.

Rupert Moon VC

‘Come on, boys, don’t turn me down’: Rupert Vance ‘Mick’ Moon was born at Bacchus Marsh, Victoria in 1892. He spent his childhood years at Maffra in Gippsland, Victoria.

Before the First World War, Moon had been a member of the 13th Light Horse and 8th Infantry Regiments. He enlisted as a trumpeter in the 4th Light Horse Regiment on 21

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August 1914. He embarked for Alexandria on 15 May 1915 and served at Gallipoli. Moon was commissioned as a second lieutenant in September 1916 and was posted to the 58th Battalion.

The second battle at Bullecourt, from 3 to 17 May, was somewhat better planned. The 2nd Division was to take the German positions in the village of Bullecourt, and they succeeded, using 96 Vickers machine guns instead of the unreliable tanks. But even with better planning, the attack cost the four Australian divisions another 10,000 casualties.

In the closing stages of the battle, Lieutenant Rupert Moon of the 58th Battalion won a VC. On 12 May, the 58th were sent to clear three German positions—a large dug-out, a cement machine-gun post and another trench. After a horrendous night of bombardment from the Germans, Moon’s platoon set off for the machine-gun emplacement, and Moon suffered his first wound. They took this position after Moon rallied his men, saying, ‘Come on, boys, don’t turn me down’.

By the time the position was secure, Moon had been wounded four times in the four stages of the advance – in the face, the shoulder, the foot and leg, and, finally, with a mutilating wound to the jaw. His leadership and courage had been decisive.

Moon returned to Australia in June 1919, with his AIF appointment ending on 4 October that year, as an honorary captain. He lived for many years at Calder Park, Mt Duneed, and died at Barwon Heads in 1986, aged 94.

The Muxworthys of Daylesford

Worn out Faith, Hope and Charity: Thomas Muxworthy of Vincent Street was 44 when he joined up in February 1916. Like a lot of locals, he was a miner and was assigned to the 2nd Tunnelling Company where he served as a sapper, using his skills to dig tunnels, and lay mines on the Somme. His two sons, David and Tom, had already enlisted—Tom in July 1915 in the 57th Battalion, and David in February 1916 in the 2nd Tunnelling

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Company, where his father joined him. Thomas senior and David sailed for France on the same ship, HMAT Warilda on 25 May 1916.

David appears to have been a bit of a lad. After surviving the war, he was in Britain awaiting repatriation and was often absent without leave – around Christmas time for a week, and later in June for another week. He had met Ada Elizabeth Crewe, and they were married on 25 May 1919. It seems the June absence was their honeymoon.

Tom Muxworthy, of Sailor’s Hill, Daylesford wrote in March 1969:

To the Medal DeptMilitary BarracksAlbert Park

Dear Sir

I am enclosing $1 for 3 Ribbons Faith Hope and Charity as I have worn the ribbons out through service. I want to wear them on Anzac Day.

Yours Faithfully

Thos Muxworthy 3193 Prte 57th Battalion.The usual Bayonets George Medal Angel of Peace Medals.

That was the three medals the original diggers received. Tom had worn out his ribbons.

Thomas senior’s age was discovered, and after two years tunnelling through the freezing hell of winter on the Somme, was returned to Australia worn out with various ailments, including rheumatism and an inability to walk very far.

Captain James Newland VC

Disregard for his own safety: James Ernest Newland was born at Highton in 1881, and embarked as a private in the 4th Battalion, Australian Commonwealth Horse, for service in the South African (Boer) war on 26 March 1903. His unit arrived at Cape Town shortly before the peace treaty was signed and he was soon back in Australia.

Newland served with the Royal Australian Artillery in Victoria from July 1903 until September 1907 and was a policeman in Tasmania from March 1909 until August 1910,

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when he rejoined the regular army there. He served with the Australian Instructional Corps until enlisting in the AIF on 17 August 1914 as regimental quartermaster sergeant, 12th Battalion.

Newland embarked for Egypt on 20 October and landed at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, where he was wounded and evacuated. On 21 August 1916, he led his company in a successful attack on trenches north-east of Mouquet Farm near Pozières and was mentioned in despatches.

Newland was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery on three occasions in April 1917 at Bullecourt. On the third occasion, he repelled attacks that were renewed three or four times. ‘It was Captain Newland’s tenacity and disregard for his own safety that encouraged the men to hold out. The stand made by this officer was of the greatest importance and produced far-reaching results’, noted the official citation.

On 5 May, during the second battle of Bullecourt, he was wounded for the third time and evacuated to England. His AIF appointment ended in Victoria on 2 March 1918. He died at Caulfield in 1949 and was buried in the Brighton Cemetery.

Private Thomas O’Dwyer

I am a heap better than the Doctors expected: Private Thomas O’Dwyer 27, storekeeper from Gordon, enlisted in July 1915 as reinforcement in the 6th Battalion. He was blown up, gassed and buried by a shell at Pozières in early July 1916. He wrote to his wife, Myrtle, on 30 July 1916:

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Just a line to let you know I am in hospital in England. I have just arrived here. You have no need to worry, as there is no danger of me blowing out. I shall be alright in the course of time. It may take three or six months … I will now tell you the little trouble, which is the main thing wrong with me. It is the heart. The doctors say that it has been caused by a very heavy strain or possibly gas. Rest will cure me.

On 11 August 1916 he wrote:

Now I have to tell you that I am getting on very well, in fact, a heap better than the Doctors expected … I was very crook for a start, the cause of the trouble being concussion, caused by an explosion which buried me. There is not a mark on me for which I have to be thankful … It was three days after the smash that I felt myself failing, and in seeing a doctor in the field, he sent me with all haste to the nearest hospital.

O’Dwyer was invalided home in October 1916 suffering from ‘strain’ and was discharged as permanently unfit in January 1917. Thomas was granted a pension of £2, Myrtle £ 1 and their son Thomas Matthew 13s/3 a fortnight from 19 January 1917. Thomas O’Dwyer died 16 July 1919 from gas poisoning and shell shock.

Joe Pearce

If I don’t come back, well, it won’t matter: Arthur Mueller ‘Joe’ Pearce was 29 when he was one of the first to enlist in 7th Battalion, No. 418, on 17 August 1914.

Joe Pearce was born and educated in Bendigo, where his father was headmaster of Bendigo Church of England Grammar School.

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He worked for the AMP Society in Melbourne and played 152 games for Melbourne, between 1904 and his retirement at the end of the 1913 season, as a dashing full-back who knew what to do with the footy He represented Victoria in the 1908 Jubilee Carnival. Like many of his team-mates he played as an amateur.

He was a regular congregant at Holy Trinity Church in East Melbourne and a man of high ideals. He told the club at a farewell dinner: ‘I have thought this thing over and I have considered it every way. I am young, strong, healthy and athletic and I think I ought to go, and if I don’t come back, well, it won’t matter.’

At the time, no-one knew what they were in for, and Joe never had a chance to find out. He was in one of the first boats ashore north of where they should have landed, north of Anzac Cove at Fisherman’s Hut. This was in plain sight of the Turkish defenders on the ridge above, and Pearce along with many comrades was killed by machine-gun fire before he had a chance to get out of the boat. He is buried at the No.2 Outpost Cemetery with 22 comrades of the 7th Battalion.

Private Walter Peeler VC

Hero of two world wars: Walter ‘Wally’ Peeler won the Victoria Cross on the Western Front, and, understating his age by 14 years, talked his way into the 2nd AIF. He served in Syria, Java and then suffered on the Thai-Burma Railway. He was a Custodian of the Shrine of Remembrance from 1934 to 1940 and from 1945 to 1964.

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Walter Peeler was born on 9 August 1887 at Barker’s Creek near Castlemaine, and worked on his parents’ orchard at Barker’s Creek, then at Thompson’s Foundry, Castlemaine, and around Leongatha.

Peeler enlisted as a private in the AIF on 17 February 1916 in the machine-gun section of the 3rd Pioneer Battalion. He was one of twenty-four Lewis-gunners of the 3rd Pioneers who were attached for anti-aircraft duties to the 37th Battalion for the assault on 4 October on Broodseinde Ridge, Belgium. He joined in the first wave, leading an attack against three enemy posts that were sniping the advancing Australians, and then turned on a machine-gun post. He accounted for 30 of the enemy and for his fearlessness and fine example was awarded the Victoria Cross.

Peeler was wounded on 12 October and received his Victoria Cross from King George V at Buckingham Palace on 8 January 1918. He returned to his unit on 17 May and to Australia on 11 October.

Peeler enlisted again in 1940 and saw service in the Syrian campaign as company quartermaster sergeant in the 2/2nd Pioneer Battalion. In June 1941, he led a patrol to recover four wounded Australians. His battalion was part of the small Australian force landed in Java in February 1942 to assist the Dutch against the Japanese. Peeler became a prisoner of war after the island’s surrender.

He survived a long period on the Burma Railway. He returned to Australia in October 1945 to learn that his son Donald had been killed on Bougainville in December 1944 while serving with the 15th Battalion. Peeler died on 23 May 1968.

Army Nurse Rachel Pratt

‘Bravery under fire’: Rachel Pratt was born on 18 July 1874 at Mumbannar, near Heywood, Victoria. On 18 January 1909, aged 34, she began nursing training at Ballarat Hospital and received her certificate of competency in August 1912. By October she was on the staff of the (Royal) Women’s Hospital, Melbourne, and remained there until 1915

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when, on 10 May, she enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service, Australian Imperial Force, as a staff nurse.

Posted to the 3rd Australian General Hospital, Pratt embarked for England on 18 May but in August was sent to Lemnos when the hospital was transferred there. Equipment for the unit had not yet arrived and Pratt recalled a ‘state of chaos’ when the wounded began to arrive from Gallipoli. Under the command of Colonel TH Fiaschi, No.3 AGH was soon functioning busily.

One of Sister Pratt’s early experiences was to dress the wounds of four Turkish prisoners – under armed guard. Dysentery was a scourge on the island and when winter came the hospital took in many patients suffering from frostbite and gangrene. Despite the difficult conditions the hospital had only a 2 per cent mortality rate. When word came that Gallipoli was to be evacuated in December, No.3 AGH was enlarged to accommodate more than 1,000 patients and everything was in readiness to receive a heavy flow of wounded. The evacuation was, however, effected without casualties.

No.3 AGH was transferred to Abbassia, Egypt, where Pratt worked until 25 September 1916; she was then posted to the 1st AGH in England. Crossing to France on 11 April 1917 she was attached to the 1st Australian Casualty Clearing Station at Bailleul where, on 4 July during an air raid, she was severely wounded when shrapnel from a bomb lodged in her lung.

For her courage and gallantry during the raid, Pratt was promoted to the position of Sister the next day and awarded the Military Medal, thus becoming one of only seven Australian nurses to win this award for ‘bravery under fire’.

After a period in hospital in England she was posted to the 2nd Australian Convalescent Depot at Weymouth in October and then served with the 1st and 2nd Australian Auxiliary Hospitals in England. She returned to Melbourne in October 1918 and was discharged from the AIF on 13 April 1919.

She died on 23 March 1954.

Private Adolf Thompson Knable

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At peace with where he lies: Private Adolf Thompson Knable, enlisted in the 32nd Battalion in Western Australia in 1915. He was a 21-year-old schoolteacher of Swiss background, born in Melbourne. On 19 July he was wounded out in no-man’s-land at Fromelles, and seen trying to crawl back to Australian lines, unable to be rescued then and not found the next day. He was at first reported missing, then perhaps taken prisoner, but finally declared killed in action when his name was provided by the meticulous enemy on a list of deaths in November 1916. His identity disc had been collected, then sent by the Germans via the Red Cross, the AIF and finally, to his parents.

But where was he? His mother Alice wrote to Base Records November 1921 wondering ‘if my son is buried in the Cemetery at Fleurbaix Rue-Petillon? It would be a great consolation to me if I could be sure of the fact – I would go and visit his grave…’

In 1922 after searching the battlefields had been abandoned by Australian and British teams, with the Pheasant Wood burial site ignored or overlooked, and detailed burial records kept by the Germans unconsulted, Knable’s name was added to the 1,100 names of missing Australians on the memorial at VC Corner Cemetery. The cemetery itself has no individual graves – the 410 Australian soldiers are buried in two mass graves.

But Private Knable has now been found, through the remarkable DNA identification project. Knable is one of the twenty who on the 98th anniversary of the battle had an Unknown Australian Soldier headstone at Pheasant Wood replaced with one bearing his name.

The family witnessed the conclusion to their family story, and had this inscribed on his headstone:

He rests at peace ‘neath foreign skies.We are at peace with where he lies.

Nurse Louise Riggall

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Died on service: Louise ‘Louie’ Blanche Riggall was born in 1868 at Joyce’s Creek near Castlemaine. She grew up in Gippsland, first at ‘Glenfalloch’ north of Glenmaggie, and then at ‘Byron Lodge’ near Tinamba. She studied art at the Sale School of Mines with AT Woodward in 1894 and continued with him at the Art School at the Bendigo School of Mines.

In 1897, Riggall went to Paris and studied at the Atelier Delecluse where she won two medals. After her return to Melbourne in 1899, she exhibited at the Victorian Artists Society with Arthur Streeton and Frederick McCubbin. She returned to Europe in 1905, and afterwards was a successful painter in Melbourne.

Riggall joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Australian branch of the British Red Cross. She served at Heliopolis in Cairo, and then with the First Australian General Hospital at Rouen. She died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 31 August 1918, and is buried at St Sever Cemetery in Rouen. She was mentioned in despatches for services with the Red Cross.

Thirty-eight Australian nurses died as a result of their the First World War service, serving with Voluntary Aid Detachments, Australian Army Nursing Service or Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service.

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Sergeant Nicholas Rodakis MM

American promises: Nicholas Rodakis arrived in Australia in July 1902, and was living in Port Melbourne with his wife Lydia and son when he was naturalised in 1909. The police report indicated he was a native of Greece, a sailor and of good character and that ‘he is not a coloured man.’

Rodakis enlisted in February 1916 in Warrnambool, where he was now an engine driver, aged 36.

Sergeant Rodakis, 4th Machine Gun Battalion was awarded the Military Medal for conspicuous gallantry and skill as a machine gunner at Zonnebeke on 27 September 1917. He mounted his gun in a very exposed position and although the tripod of the gun was hit, and his uniform was ripped by bullets, ‘he fearlessly stood to his post and inflicted heavy losses on the enemy.’

In 1918 he was detached to 2nd American Corps and was awarded an American decoration, the Distinguished Service Cross. He was apparently told by the officer making the presentation that the decoration carried an award of £25 a year and a free pass over the American Railways. In 1920 the RSL in Warrnambool enquired on his behalf where he could apply for the £25. Base Records referred him to the US consul. Nothing is recorded about his success, or not, but he received the medal in 1927 in Preston.

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Fred and Arthur Rogasch

German brothers enlisted and died together: Fred and Arthur Rogasch joined up on the same day 20 March 1916 at the Melbourne Town Hall. Fred was Ernest Frederick, a farmer aged 24, been born in Katyil near Dimboola. Arthur was 31, born Gustav Adolph in South Australia.

That same day, the officer in charge of recruiting in Melbourne sent a memo to the Dimboola Confidential Committee:

His father was born in Germany and came to Australia when 6 years of age and is still alive. It is not known whether he was naturalised or not. Mother was born in South Australia. Forwarded for the written opinion of the Confidential Committee as to this man’s loyalty also for the signature of each member of the committee which is absolutely essential. Will you please obtain same at your earliest convenience and return memo direct to me.

The Confidential Committee replied, ‘We are well acquainted with this man and are quite satisfied as to his loyalty and consider that he should be enlisted.’ It was signed by the Dimboola Shire President and five others.

The brothers enlisted together on 1 August as privates in the 21st Battalion, numbers 5685 and 5688, and embarked together on 25 September 1916. They were killed between Bapaume and Bullecourt on the same day a year after their initial enlistment, 20 March 1917. Their mates told the Red Cross that ‘the brothers were much attached to one another and never left the side of each other.’

Arthur was wounded in the ear and was sent back to the dressing station, where he died. Private Archie Dripps of the 21st Battalion told the Red Cross he saw Fred killed instantly by a shell at the Sugar Factory ‘while we were holding the village of Vaux. I believe that his brother had just been killed and that he went back to the Sugar Factory to look for him, when he was killed himself.’

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Nurse Elizabeth Rothery

‘A noble maid is dying’: Elizabeth Rothery was born in England in 1885, and grew up in Beechworth. She trained at the Ovens District Hospital and volunteered in the Australian Army Medical Corps at the start of the war. She then enlisted for overseas service on 22 August 1916 and nursed in India and England, before returning to Australia for duty in Melbourne in late 1917.

She reenlisted for overseas service in January 1918 and embarked on the Australian hospital ship the Karoola bound for India and South Africa to pick up wounded and ill Australians. After disembarking in Melbourne in June, Nurse Rothery was granted a week’s leave and returned to Beechworth, where she died of complications associated with appendicitis. Her death ‘caused a most profound and painful sensation’ in Beechworth.

Returned soldiers organised an unofficial military funeral and a ‘great concourse of sorrowing people in the cemetery’ watched as here coffin was borne on the shoulders of six returned soldiers to the graveside. The report of here death and the funeral, with a poem by P O’Reilly in the Ovens and Murray Advertiser were published on 19 June – and reprinted on the 22nd.

The sombre clouds hang thick and low,The wintry winds are sighing,And saddened voices softly tell –‘A noble maid is dying’

So: through the mist I dimly seeThe flags at half-mast flying,For in the shrouded halls of deathA silent form is lying.

And now behold an open graveWith weeping friends surroundingWhilst bugle notes ring on the air,The last sad tribute sounding.

Elizabeth Rothery’s 20-year-old brother Private Henry Rothery had been reported missing in November 1915 serving with the 24th Battalion at Gallipoli and confirmed killed in action in January 1916.

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Major William Ruthven VC

Collingwood & Victorian Parliament: William Ruthven was born in Collingwood in 1893, educated at Vere Street State School, and was a mechanical engineer in the timber industry when he enlisted on 16 April 1915. He joined the 22nd Battalion at Gallipoli and was wounded near Fleurbaix after the battalion went to France in March 1916.

Ruthven was acting Company Sergeant Major when his unit launched an attack to capture the high ground near Ville-sur-Ancre. When his company commander was killed, Ruthven took command and led the attack, for which he was awarded the Victoria Cross.

The official citation reads:

Without hesitation, he at once sprang out, threw a bomb which landed beside the post, and rushed the position, bayoneting one of the crew and capturing the gun. He then encountered some of the enemy coming out of a shelter. He wounded two, captured six others in the same position, and…then single handed mopped up another position and captured the whole of the garrison, amounting in all to 32…

After being wounded again, Ruthven returned to Australia in 1918, with several other VCs, to assist in recruiting. He tried wheat and sheep farming on a soldier settlement block near Werrimull from 1923, but moved back to Collingwood in 1931. He was elected to the Collingwood Council in 1931, was official timekeeper for the Collingwood Football Club and was mayor from 1945 to 1946.

Ruthven was a Labor MLA for Preston from 1945 to 1955, and for Reservoir from 1955 to 1961. He was a trustee of the Shrine of Remembrance. He died on 12 January 1970.

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Private Edward John Francis Ryan VC

VC winner fell on hard times: Edward John Francis Ryan (1890–1941) was born at Tumut and worked as a labourer before enlisting in the AIF at Wagga Wagga on 1 December 1915. He joined the 55th Battalion at Fleurbaix, France, in September 1916.

John Ryan won the Victoria Cross for conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty during the Allied assault on the Hindenburg defences on 30 September 1918. During the 55th Battalion’s attack near Bellicourt, Ryan, despite heavy fire, was one of the first to reach the enemy trench. A fierce counter-attack drove the Australians back to the Le Catelet line trenches, where a bombing party at their rear placed them in a critical position.

Ryan quickly organised and led a party to attack the Germans with bomb and bayonet. Reaching the position with only three men, Ryan and his party killed three Germans on the flank and then Ryan alone rushed the remainder with bombs and drove them back across no-man’s-land. He fell wounded, but his action saved a highly dangerous situation and enabled the trench to be retaken.

Private Ryan rejoined his battalion in December, and on 22 May 1919 received his VC from King George V at Buckingham Palace. He returned to Sydney on 24 October and was discharged from the AIF on 10 January 1920.

The subsequent years were not kind to Ryan, who found it hard to adjust to civilian life and to keep a job. His circumstances worsened during the Depression when he was on the road for four years. Destitute, in August 1935 he walked from Balranald, New South Wales, to Mildura, Victoria, where he was given temporary work by the local council and shortly after found employment in a Melbourne insurance office where he remained for several years.

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Sir Stanley Savige

Founder of Legacy: Stanley George Savige was born near Morwell in 1854 and attended Korumburra State School. He enlisted in 1915, and served with the 24th Battalion at Gallipoli. Captain Savige fought in France and Persia and was awarded the Military Cross and the Distinguished Service Order.

For his ‘consistent good work and devotion to duty’ in the fighting at Warlencourt, Grevilliers and Bullecourt (February-May), he was awarded the Military Cross. Volunteering for special service, he was sent to Persia in March 1918 as part of Dunsterforce. He won the Distinguished Service Order for protecting refugees while under fire, and later recorded his experiences in Stalky’s Forlorn Hope (Melbourne, 1920).

Between the wars he served in the militia, but, more importantly, he founded Legacy in 1923. As Brigadier he was seconded to the AIF in October 1939, commanding the 17th Brigade in the 6th Division. The brigade fought at Bardia, Tobruk, Greece and Syria in 1941.

Subsequent appointments saw Major General Savige command the 3rd Division at Wau and Salamaua in 1943, and as Lieutenant General, II Corps on Bougainville in 1945. Prominent in business after the war, he died in 1954.

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Phillip Schuler

‘Well I ask you’: Schuler was the son of then editor of The Age, Frederick Schuler, who had migrated to Australia from Germany as a child. He was The Age correspondent at Gallipoli.

After sailing with the first contingent, and covering the preparations in Egypt, he made his way to the Greek islands, surveyed the Turkish coast aboard a private boat hired with some British colleagues (before the adventurers were banished by the Royal Navy) and lobbied unsuccessfully for permission to go ashore on April 25.

After returning to Egypt, Schuler wrote a pleading letter to the British commander at Gallipoli, General Sir Ian Hamilton, whom he had got to know earlier in the year in Egypt.

Schuler reported more of the less savoury aspects of Gallipoli, such as the treatment of the wounded. ‘Not half an hour after the first troops had touched land at Anzac Cove the boats began to be towed back filled with wounded,’ he wrote:

What did they come back to? The very best attention and comfort that medical skill could provide? No! The bare iron decks of the transports where they had been living for the last three weeks. To medical comforts? No! To the old grey blankets they had just discarded and the decks. To milk and soft food for those unable to take the iron rations and bully beef? No, to their ordinary rations.

And who attended to those heroes who, without a murmur, had faced death, and who came back with a smile on their faces, in many cases severely wounded and maimed? Just a few willing doctors, not more than three to each transport and a nurse or two and some orderlies.

In 1916, after the evacuation and the publication of his book Australia at Arms, Schuler decided to enlist, preferring to get involved rather than write about it.

He died in 1917 at Messines, in Belgium.

Just before his death, Schuler was visited by Colonel Richard Dowse, his former commanding officer. Dowse later wrote to Charles Bean:

His head was all bandaged up but he had use of one eye and when he saw me remarked, ‘Dick, well I ask you’, a favourite saying of his. He knew he was for it and gave me a few messages and instructions before I left. He died about an hour later.

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Major William Scurry

Digger ingenuity: Major William Charles Scurry was born in Carlton in 1886, and listed his occupation as ‘modeller’ when he enlisted on 19 July 1915. After arriving at Gallipoli in November he made himself useful and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for ‘devising and suggesting means of firing rifles automatically by means of an arrangement of water cans so that rifles could be fired in the trenches after all men had left.’ The ‘drip’ or ‘pop off’ rifle was very successful in deceiving the Turks during the retirement from Gallipoli on 20 December 1915, as to the actual time of leaving the trenches.

Later in France he was in charge of the 15th Brigade’s Light Trench Mortars at Fromelles from July to September.

He was wounded in September 1916 at Mouquet Farm when a German trench mortar fuse blew up in his face, badly injuring an eye and destroying a finger. Scurry recovered sufficiently to become Chief Instructor of 1st Anzac Corps School in May 1918 in France.

His commander, Australia’s leading fighting general, Brigadier ‘Pompey’ Elliott said ‘he was the best and most enthusiastic officer in my Brigade, without exception.’ And ‘I would rather have him with one eye than a dozen others with two. In my opinion he is a military genius of a type unfortunately too rare’.

Scurry returned to Australia in May 1919, married an Australian nurse who had been in France, Doris Agatha Barry, and took up an orchard in Silvan. He was a major in the 17th Garrison Battalion in the Second World War and commandant at the Tatura Internment Camp.

Major Scurry died in 1963 and is buried with his wife in the Lilydale Cemetery.

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Sir Nevill Maskelyn Smyth VC Sudan

‘I want to live among them in their country’: Sir Nevill Maskelyn Smyth was born in London in 1868 and graduated from the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, in 1888. He was posted to the Queen’s Bays in India as a second lieutenant.

By 1896, the Bays were stationed in Cairo at the time General Kitchener was about to launch an offensive against the Khalifa in the Sudan. With Britain bent on avenging General Gordon’s death at Khartoum, Smyth helped to chart some of the Nile cataracts in readiness for the push against Omdurman, Sudan.

On 2 September 1898, Kitchener’s Anglo-Egyptian forces assaulted Omdurman. With the battle ending, a dervish tried to spear two war correspondents, one of whom was Bennet Burleigh of the London Daily Telegraph; Smyth galloped forward and, though severely speared, shot the man dead. He was awarded the Victoria Cross for this action.

In the First World War, Colonel Smyth was among several senior officers sent by Lord Kitchener to Gallipoli. He arrived in May 1915 and supervised the truce of the 24th to allow the Turks to bury their dead. Commanding the 1st Australian Infantry Brigade at the battle of Lone Pine in August, Smyth won the trust and admiration of the diggers. Charles Bean, official historian, wrote of Smyth ‘directing reinforcements into Lone Pine tunnels as quietly as a ticket collector passing passengers on to a platform’.

Smyth led his brigade in France through the severe fighting for Pozières and Mouquet Farm on the Somme in 1916, and at the end of that year he was given command of the 2nd Australian Division as major general. Transferred back to the British Army in May 1918, Smyth told Lieutenant General (later Sir) John Monash: ‘The fortune of war has indeed treated me kindly in enabling me to have the honour of being associated with your historic force.’

On 23 July 1918, Smyth had married Evelyn Olwen. The family, including the future Commodore Dacre Smyth RAN, migrated to Australia in 1925, settling on a grazing property at Balmoral, Victoria. Smyth said that he regarded Australians as the finest troops with whom he had ever served, and he wanted to live among them in their country. He took a keen interest in district affairs and in 1931 was an unsuccessful Nationalist Party candidate for the Victorian Senate vacancy caused by the death of Major General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott. Smyth died at Balmoral on 21 July 1941.

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General Cyril Brudenell Bingham White

The great Anzac planner: White was born on 23 September 1876 at St Arnaud, Victoria. He became a bank clerk at the age of 16 and in 1896, aged 20, he joined the 2nd Queensland Regiment.

White transferred to the permanent forces and was commissioned into the Queensland Regiment of the Royal Australian Artillery in June 1899. In February 1902 he sailed for South Africa with the Australian Commonwealth Horse, although, arriving late in the war he saw little action and returned to Australia in July.

In 1904 White was appointed Aide-de-Camp to the General Officer Commanding the Australian Military Forces (AMF) and in 1906 he became the first AMF officer to attend the British Staff College. Returning to Australia in 1908, he was promoted to Captain, joined Colonel William Bridges’s staff but soon returned to England on exchange to the War Office.

Having been promoted to Major in 1911, White returned to Australia in 1912 to take up the post of Director of Military Operations at Army Headquarters, Melbourne where he formulated plans for raising, equipping, training and despatching the Australian component of a combined Australian/New Zealand division should war arise.

White was made acting Chief of the General Staff in July 1914 and upon the outbreak of war August, having prepared, was able to meet the Government’s offer to Britain of a force of 20,000 men for overseas service.

He became Chief of Staff of the 1st Australian Division, AIF, had the first contingent in Egypt by December 1914 and planned the landing at Gallipoli. He was promoted to Brigadier General in October 1915, and planned and supervised the evacuation of Anzac Cove. Back in Egypt he was largely responsible for overseeing the AIF’s expansion.

Although the AIF was commanded by the British General William Birdwood, White has been credited as being the driving force behind its operation on the Western Front.

In November 1918 White was promoted to temporary Lieutenant General and made Chief of Staff, having briefly presided over the Demobilisation and Repatriation Branch. He returned to Australia in June 1919 and worked on the future organisation of the AMF. He retired in 1923 and was appointed Chairman of the Commonwealth Public Service Board and retired in 1928, he continued to serve on a number of business and charitable boards, including the Board of the Australian War Memorial.

In 1940 he was recalled to become Chief of the General Staff, but his tenure was short-lived. On 13 August 1940, White was killed in an aircraft crash near Canberra airport. He is buried at Buangor, near Ballarat.

Charles Bean described him as ‘the greatest man I ever knew’.

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Private Ansselmi Talava

Anzac From Finland: The Imperial Russian Consulate vouched that Ansselmi Talava was a reservist in the Imperial Russian Army, and had to joining the Australian Expeditionary Forces (AIF) ‘owing to his inability to return to Russia.’ Talava enlisted in February 1916 in the 6th Battalion. He was 23 and had been a seaman in France.

He was buried several times by the explosion of shells on the night of 5-6 October 1917, and suffered from shell-shock, but returned to duty and enjoyed a week’s leave in Paris in March 1918.

He was killed on 23 August 1918, in the second phase of the August 1918 offensive by the Australian Corps. The first phase on 8 August, saw German commander Ludendorff say: ‘After the defeat of 8 August, I gave up the last vestige of hope’. It was, a ‘black day for the German army.’

The second phase had begun the next day, and continued until 29 August. On 23 August Talava’s 6th and Joynt’s 8th Battalions attacked across open country. Joynt found some of the 6th sheltering in a sunken road from intense fire that had already caused heavy losses. Joynt spoke to the men advising them to attack ‘anyhow’ by rushes of 25 yards. They were then pinned down again, before Joynt performed his VC actions and led the 6th Battalion forward.

We don’t know if Talava was killed before or after this episode on that day.

Talava’s comrades had reported to the Red Cross that he ‘was on a machine gun – he was wounded in chest by a tank shell – a few hundred yards from the hop-off - he was carried to the dressing station situated by the big German dugout and died there. He was buried in a village by St Martyns Wood.’

His medals were issued to his father in Finland.

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The Stuart Mill Nine

First Gallipoli burial in Australia: Nine First World War names from the area around Stuart Mill are to be found on the special memorial dedicated to Trooper Robert Thwaites in the cemetery.

Thwaites died of injuries received at Gallipoli and is buried there, probably the first Gallipoli casualty to be buried in Australia. Thwaites, 28, a farmer of St Arnaud, enlisted on 10 September 1914 as a trooper in the 8th Light Horse. He was very badly wounded in the charge at the Nek on 7 August 1915, and evacuated to Alexandria and then to Australia. He died in the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne on 10 October 1915 and was buried in the Stuart Mill Cemetery on the 13 October. His father, secretary of the Soldiers Memorial Committee, enquired of Base Records before unveiling the memorial whether his son was the first soldier to be buried in Victoria or the other states. Base Records didn’t know – but Robert Thwaites probably does have that sad honour.

Two of Robert’s cousins enlisted, William James Thwaites, 25, in the 21st Battalion and Thomas Thwaites, 18, in the 5th Battalion. Thomas also served at Gallipoli.

William was killed in action on 26 August 1916 at Mouquet Farm and has no known grave. He is remembered on the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux.

Thomas was killed in action serving as a stretcher-bearer at Flers with the 6th Field Ambulance on 6 November 1916 and is buried in Thistle Dump (High Wood) Cemetery in France.

Hartley Valentine Edelsten, 23, a farmer of Carapooee West, enlisted in the 37th Battalion in February 1916 and was killed at Messines in Belgium between 7–9 June 1917, and has no known grave.

A cousin, Henry Edelsten, 15th Battalion, from Murtoa was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal for gallantry at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915, for keeping communications open and for great bravery in carrying wounded to safety on three occasions. He died of wounds received at Pozières on 30 August 1916, and is buried in Puchevillers British Cemetery, France.

Arthur William Frohlich enlisted on 23 March 1915 in the 24th Battalion. He was killed in action at Pozières on 25 August 1916 and has no known grave.

Robert Turner Farish enlisted on 23 March 1915 and died on 20 September 1915 of wounds received at Lone Pine from a bomb that accidentally exploded before it was thrown into the Turkish trenches.

Lieutenant Robert Swanton, 24, was born in Stuart Mill and was a teacher at Melbourne High School. He enlisted on 18 October 1915 in the 22nd Battalion. He was killed when he looked over the parapet a kilometre east of Villers-Bretonneux on 23 July 1918.

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Corporal Herbert Storer enlisted on 12 May 1915 in the 14th Battalion and was killed at Bullecourt on 11 April 1917.

Lance Corporal John Firebrace, Private Harry Thorpe, Private Reg RawlingsA tragic day for indigenous soldiers: Three Victorian Aboriginal men from three different battalions were killed on the same day – 9 August 1918 – and are buried close together at the Heath Military Cemetery at Harbonnières in northern France.

Harry Thorpe was born at Lakes Entrance and was 28 and married to Julia when he enlisted on 12 February 1916 in the 7th Battalion. He embarked from Melbourne on 4 April 1916 and joined his unit in France. He was wounded at Pozières in August 1916, and again at Bullecourt in April 1917. In October, Thorpe was in the battle around Ypres in Belgium and was awarded the Military Medal for his great courage and initiative in mopping up enemy dugouts and pill-boxes at Ypres on 4 October 1917.

Private Thorpe died at Lihons Wood, in the advance on 9 August 1918 when the 7th Battalion was exposed to heavy enemy fire near Vauvillers. He had been shot in the stomach. He asked a stretcher-bearer for water, but the stretcher-bearer refused, knowing that it would cause Thorpe even more pain. The stretcher-bearer took the casualty he was already caring for back to the clearing station. He returned to get Thorpe, but found him in agony – someone had given him water. He died shortly afterwards.

Lance Corporal John Arthur Firebrace, from Moulamein across the border from Swan Hill. He enlisted in the 38th Battalion on 14 March 1916, but was a member of the Victorian 59th Battalion when he was hit by a ‘whizz bang shell’ at Harbonnières. His uncle, Private William Reginald Firebrace in the 24th Battalion and also from Moulamein, was killed a week later, on 15 August 1915. He had been badly gassed and was being taken back behind the lines when the wagon was hit by a shell. He is buried in the Villers-Bretonneux Military Cemetery. William’s brother Arthur Firebrace also served with the 38th Battalion and then the Australian Army Medical Corps. He returned to Australia in 1919.

Private William Reginald ‘Reg’ Rawlings enlisted on 14 March 1916 in the 29th Battalion. Rawlings was awarded the Military Medal for bravery at Morlancourt on the night 28–29 July 1918. The citation reads:

During the attack on enemy system this soldier had the responsible position of first bayonet man in a bombing team which worked down the enemy communications trench routed the enemy established a block in the trenches. Private Rawlings displayed rare bravery in the performance of his duty killing many of the enemy, rushing aside all opposition and cleared the way effectively for the bombers of his team. His irresistible dash and courage set a wonderful example to the remainder of the team.

Rawlings is buried in Heath Cemetery near Harbonnières with two other Victorian Aboriginal men killed that day.

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Reg Rawlings’s father was an athlete who had won a race at the Stawell Gift meeting in 1884. Reg’s sister Adelaide was the grandmother of champion boxer Lionel Rose. And he was the uncle of Harry Saunders, killed in action in New Guinea, and Captain Reg Saunders, the first indigenous officer appointed in the Australian Army. Reg served in the Second World War in Crete and New Guinea and in the Korean War.

Major General Edwin Tivey

Mentioned in Despatches six times: Edwin Tivey was born at Inglewood in 1947 and was educated at All Saints Grammar School, St Kilda, and at Wesley College. He returned to Inglewood as an accountant where he was an officer in the Inglewood detachment of the Victorian Rangers and a member of the Inglewood Borough Council from 1894 to 1898.

In May 1900, Tivey embarked for South Africa as a captain in the Victorian 4th (Imperial) Contingent. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order ‘in a brilliant little fight where proved the Australian commander to be as resourceful as he and his men were courageous’, noted Edgar Wallace, an English war correspondent.

At the commencement of the First World War, Tivey was a stockbroker and temporary colonel commanding the Victorian 5th Light Horse. He was appointed Commander of the 8th Infantry Brigade, which he personally helped to recruit.

Tivey was appointed temporary brigadier general in February 1916 and in June his brigade left with the Australian 5th Division for France. It went into action at the battle of Fromelles and continued to fight on the Western Front until the war’s end. In December 1916, Tivey was wounded in action, but remained on duty. For brief periods in 1917 and 1918, he temporarily commanded the 5th Division when Major General (Sir) Talbot Hobbs was absent. Tivey was again wounded at Westhoek Ridge, Belgium, in October 1917 and was gassed in May 1918. During the war, he was mentioned in despatches six times.

Tivey died in 1947 and was buried in Brighton Cemetery, Melbourne.

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Private Albert Parkinson & Private Andrei Tolstoi

The night is dark, and I am far from home: Private Albert Parkinson of the 12th Field Ambulance, a 25-year-old furniture salesman from North Fitzroy, was killed on 11 April 1917 in the first battle of Bullecourt. He was one of seven soldiers killed by a German shell while working with the 13th Battalion doctor, Captain Norman Shierlaw, who is buried next to him at Vraucourt Copse cemetery near Bullecourt.

Albert Parkinson’s father John requested this despairing inscription for his son’s headstone – ‘the night is dark, and I am far from home.’ But at least John he knew where his son was buried.

Andrei Tolstoi who was born in Warsaw 1873, served in French army, and emigrated to Australia around 1900. He was 44 when he enlisted in 1916. He was killed in action in 1917 at Bullecourt.

His comrade Lance Corporal Stapleton, No.4901, 15th Battalion, reported to the Red Cross:

Tolstoi was in B Company. He joined in Australia. I had known him about 6 or 7 months. He was well over 40 years of age and was married. He had several wounds on his body which he had got in other wars. He was a Frenchman and spoke French. On the 11th April 1917 we were attacking Bullecourt. We failed to hold our objective which we had taken and when we were retiring to our lines I came across Tolstoi in a shell hole; he was then wounded in the leg and bandaging it himself. We did not hold the ground where he was and I did not see him again. This was about 1.30 pm.

In 1918 his wife thought that he was still alive. She wrote: ‘he is supposed to be in a Naval Yard or under German Rule somewhere. I have written to you before on the matter but unfortunately the boat went down so you did not get my letter…’

He wasn’t. Unlike Private Parkinson’s, his body was never found and he is name is listed among the missing on the Villers-Bretonneux memorial. With more than 2,000 other Australian dead, he still lies somewhere in the fields around the Bullecourt village.

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Nurse Jessie Traill & painter Violet Teague

Painter & Nurse: Jessie Traill, painter and etcher, was born at Brighton in 1881 and studied at the National Gallery School in the early 1900s. In 1907, her studies continued in Paris and London. She returned to Australia, but travelled extensively. In the First World War, Traill worked for three and a half years as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in the Military Hospital at Rouen. After the war, she became a very well-known artist and etcher, and travelled and painted around Australia, including central Australia, in the 1920s. She died in 1967 at Emerald.

Jessie Traill and her friend Violet Teague were part of a remarkable group of financially independent, middle-class women who never married, allowing them to devote their lives to art.

Violet Teague was born on 21 February 1872 in Melbourne. She was educated by a French governess and at the Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Melbourne. In the 1890s she studied in Brussels and London and in 1897 she joined the National Gallery School. She was an accomplished printmaker and portraitist, and in the 1920s turned to making altarpieces. For the Kinglake (War) Memorial Church, Victoria, she made one in which the adoring shepherds were replaced by portraits of Australian light-horsemen. The painting was saved from the Ash Wednesday fires, and now hangs in St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne. She died in 1951.

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Private Martin TroyThe Battle of Troy: Many Australian soldiers were well aware that Gallipoli was located in a very historic area, near the legendary city of Troy, and the battleground of the Trojan War, where, later, Alexander the Great had paid homage to Achilles on his way to conquering the known world.

In 1915, journalist Arthur Adams wrote, in The Bulletin, verse which was included in The Anzac Book, edited by Charles Bean:

We care not what old Homer tellsOf Trojan war and Helen’s fame.Upon the ancient Dardanelles New peoples wrote – in blood – their name.

Those Grecian heroes long have fled,No more the Plain of Troy they haunt;Made sacred by our Southern dead,Historic is the Hellespont.

Homeric wars are fought againBy men who like old Greeks can die;Australian backblock heroes slain,With Hector and Achilles lie.

But in the Official History, the only mention of Troy, located just across the Dardanelles from Gallipoli, is that of an Australian made prisoner of war on the first Anzac Day. Official historian Charles Bean wrote that a ‘man named Troy, when the Turks attacked in the morning, was knocked senseless by a bomb. He woke to find his mates, Privates White and Gray dead beside him, and others all dead or wounded. He attempted to crawl away after dark, but was captured. Of those Australians who fought in this action, he was the only one who survived it in the hands of the Turks.’

Martin Troy enlisted in the 16th Battalion on 19 November 1914 at Blackboy Hill WA. He was a 23-year-old miner, born in Geraldton.

He wrote to the Red Cross in 1918:

All the boys here beg of you to forward to us another suit of clothes and a pair of boots each as the last lot you kindly sent have worn out, and we are just about in rags…We have to go to work every day, consequently we are pretty hard en the articles that I mentioned above. No doubt you have-come to the conclusion that we are always in wants of something, but I can assure you that we ask for things that are absolutely necessary, as we realise that you have plenty of other work on your hands.

Troy was repatriated on 8 December 1918, and discharged on 20 June 1919.

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Fred Tubb VC

Determination: Frederick Tubb was born at Longwood, Victoria, in November 1881. He left school to manage the family farm, and later became a grazier in his own right. He served with the Victorian Mounted Rifles and the 58th Infantry Regiment in which he was commissioned. Tubb enlisted in the AIF in August 1914 and was posted to the 7th Battalion as a second lieutenant. He was promoted to Lieutenant in February 1915, reached Gallipoli in July, and was gazetted Captain on 8 August. On the same day he took over a vital sector of trench at Lone Pine, with orders to ‘hold it at any cost’.

Early the following morning the Turks launched a massive attack, advancing along a sap barricaded with sandbags. Although Tubb was blown from the parapet and the barricade repeatedly wrecked, each time it was rebuilt. At one point a large explosion blew in the barricade and Tubb, wounded in the arm and scalp, was left with Corporals Alexander Burton and William Dunstan. He led them into action, shooting three Turks and providing covering fire while the barricade was rebuilt.

After the attack Tubb was evacuated to Britain to recover, and was awarded the Victoria Cross. An emergency appendectomy left him with an incision hernia and he was invalided to Australia; he arrived home in April 1916 to a hero’s welcome. ‘Hundreds and hundreds did more than I did’, he said, ‘but they, poor chaps, got killed.’

Having persuaded an AIF medical board that he was fit, he rejoined his battalion in France in December and was promoted to Major on 17 February 1917. His company had an important role in the Menin Road attack, third battle of Ypres, on 20 September. Before the battle he was troubled by his hernia, yet refused to be evacuated. With dash and courage he led his company to its objective, but was hit by a sniper; while being taken out on a stretcher, he was mortally wounded by shell-fire. Tubb was buried in the Lijessenthoek military cemetery, Belgium.

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Annie Whitelaw

She gave her utmost: Annie Whitelaw’s headstone in the Briagolong Cemetery is inscribed with these words from Arthur Conan Doyle: ‘Happy is she who can die with the thought that in the hour of her country’s greatest need she gave her utmost’. What she gave were her sons. Imagine getting a letter or telegram every year after they joined up, with notification of death, wounding or illness.

Annie, born in 1862 in Alberton, Gippsland, had six sons. All were casualties of the First World War. Annie died in 1927. Only two of her six sons survived her.

Angus McSween Whitelaw enlisted on 15 February 1915, claiming to be 18. He wasn’t. Angus served at Gallipoli and was killed on 25 August 1916 at Mouquet Farm near Pozières.

Robert Angus (Bob) Whitelaw was born in 1886. He enlisted on 21 January 1915 in the 21st Battalion. He served at Gallipoli and was ‘blown to bits’ by a German shell at Bullecourt on 3 May 1917.

Ivan Cecil Whitelaw was born in 1894 and enlisted on 21 July 1915. He was posted to the 12th Battalion in March 1916, wounded (gassed) in August, twice wounded (gunshot) in 1917. He was awarded the Military Medal at Bullecourt on 6 May 1917. Sergeant Whitelaw was killed on 23 April 1918 at Meteren.

The three brothers have no known graves and are remembered on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial.

Kenneth Whitelaw was badly wounded on 8 October 1918 at Montbrehain in the last Australian action of the war. He was discharged medically unfit in 1919, but married Lizzie that year. Their daughter Pearl was born in 1920. Little Pearl died on Anzac Day 1922, having accidentally drunk petrol. Ken died of his wounds six months later.

Lionel Islay Whitelaw enlisted at Dimboola in the 6th Battalion on 23 November 1914. Private Whitelaw was wounded in action on 31 May 1915 at Gallipoli, and was evacuated to hospital in Malta where he became ill. He returned to Australia in 1916, and died of war injuries in 1933.

Donald John Whitelaw enlisted in 1916 and was wounded in May 1917. He was repatriated to Australia in October 1918 with severe gastritis. Don died in 1965 and is buried in the Briagolong Cemetery, next to Annie.

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Four brothers of Dunkeld

We Lie Dead in Many Lands: The four sons of William John and Margaret Matilda Williams are among the fallen named on the Dunkeld War Memorial.

Iraq: Michael Wright Williams was born on 1 September 1894 and enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy on 7 December 1912 for seven years. He was a stoker who joined the new Australian submarine, the AE2, in England in 1914. He sailed on the AE2’s epic voyage to Australia, and saw service in German New Guinea in 1914. He was on board when the AE2 forced the Dardanelles on the first Anzac Day, 25 April 1915. He was taken prisoner when the AE2 was scuttled. Stoker Williams suffered as a prisoner of war working on the railway in central Turkey, and died of malaria and dysentery at Bozanti. He is remembered on the Bozanti memorial in the Baghdad (North Gate) War Cemetery in present-day Iraq.

Turkey: John Edward Williams was a labourer who enlisted in Queensland on 18 September 1914 in the 15th Battalion. He was wounded at Gallipoli in May, returned to his unit in July and was killed in the August offensive, on 8 August. He is buried in the 7th Field Ambulance Cemetery at Gallipoli.

France: Frank Williams was a 22-year-old labourer who enlisted on 29 July 1915 in the 10th Battalion. He was killed in action at Pozières on 23 July 1916 and has no known grave. He is remembered on the Villers-Bretonneux Australian memorial.

France: Thomas Peter Williams enlisted in Tasmania, aged 22, in the 59th Battalion but returned to Australia from South Africa while en route to France with pleurisy and pneumonia. He re-embarked in July 1917 and was serving with the 14th Battalion when he was badly wounded and died on 18 April 1918 near Villers-Bretonneux. He is buried in the Doullens Communal Cemetery Extension, France.

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Private Harry Willis

Closure: Private Henry Victor ‘Harry’ Willis, 31st Battalion, from Alberton, was killed at Fromelles between 19 and 21 July 1916. Willis was one of the missing, one of the hundreds of Australians and British soldiers unaccounted for after the battle.

Willis was 20 when he enlisted on 14 July 1915 in Melbourne. He embarked for Egypt on 9 November 1915, and went to France with his battalion in June 1916. A month later he was one of the 1,780 Australians killed at Fromelles. Private Hickson of the 31st Battalion saw him lying dead in no-man’s-land 13 hours after the battle. His body was not recovered by the Australians.

Harry Willis was, however, the first of the missing found after a long campaign by Lambis Englezos and Harry’s great-nephew Tim Whitford. During a preliminary search before the initial archaeological dig in 2007, a good-luck charm given to Private Willis by the Shire of Alberton was found. Harry Willis was the only man from the area and there is no doubt that it was his. Harry was identified via through the extraordinary DNA project that, by 2014, had positively named 144 Australians who now have their names memorialized at the Pheasant Wood Cemetery in Fromelles.

Among them is Private Edgar William Parham, 32nd Battalion, of Port Adelaide who carried into the battle at Fromelles a small Bible given to him by his mother when he was on his final leave.

He was severely wounded and after the battle a German soldier named Steinmetz found him dying. Parham said ‘Here Fritz ... you’d better take this.’ Parham was one of the Australians buried in the mass grave at Pheasant Wood by the Germans, lost until found in 2007, and identified in 2014.

In 1937 when the German himself was dying, he asked his brother to ‘Search my old war kit for an English Bible. Give it back…Lebewohl…Kamerad…Gott mit uns.’ (Goodbye…Comrade…God with us) The only clue in the Bible were the words ‘EW Parham’ ‘Mother’ and ‘Australia’. Even in the darkening days of 1937, Parham’s mother, then 83, was traced, and the Bible returned. In turn, she sent a Bible to Germany.

The story of the archeological work, and of the DNA project that traced Harry Willis and Edgar Parham, is told at the new Fromelles 1916 Museum in the village next to the cemetery. The museum, funded by local authorities and the Australian Government, was opened in July 2014 and is a key part of the Australian Remembrance Trail in France and Belgium.

Story 86

Able Seaman William Williams

First casualties: William Williams was a week short of completing five years in the Naval Reserve when war was declared and he signed up for six months’ full-time service with the Navy on 14 August 1914. Williams was 28 and lived with his mother and sister in Northcote. According to The Argus, his mother and sister had no direct contact with him before he was killed and had no idea that he was in a war zone.

Williams was a member of the 2,000-strong Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF), the first Australian force to serve overseas in the First World War. The task of the AN&MEF was to take the German possessions in New Guinea and the South West Pacific, notably the radio stations at Rabaul and Samoa.

Williams was part of a raiding party that landed near Kabakaul near Rabaul on that day. The advance section came across a group of natives in a coconut plantation on the Bita Paka Road. Williams covered another sailor, Stoker Kember, who returned with the information that the natives were just gathering coconuts, but after the pair advanced about ten metres, Williams was shot in the stomach by German soldiers hiding in the plantation huts.

The group’s medical officer, Captain Brian Pockley, after hearing Williams had been wounded, went to his aid, and, after applying what first-aid the conditions allowed, gave his Red Cross armband to Kember to carry Williams to the rear. Pockley was shot shortly afterwards.

The news of Williams’s death was received by his sister, Thelma. His mother was away for the night visiting relatives in Richmond and Thelma had the sad task of telling her mother ‘who was prostrated by the news’.

The Argus reported:

When one realises that this was the first fight in which the Australian Naval Force has been engaged, one realises the significance of his sister’s words when news was broken to her yesterday – ’It is great honour for him to go in that way and father would have been proud of him’.

Story 87

The stories of our World War I Heroes.

Written by Garrie Hutchinson.Edited by Gordon Kerry.

Commissioned by Melbourne Recital Centre as part of Local Heroes 2015.

For more information on Melbourne Recital Centre’s 2015 Local Heroes series please visit melbournerecital.com.au/heroes