Story by:- David McMillan Truth can be stranger than fiction can’t it? Frank Day’s life is stranger than most and shouldn’t be forgotten. Blackboy Hill was the Western Australian training camp established in 1914 to house local Australian Imperial Force (AIF) recruits before they left for the battlefronts in the Middle East and Western Europe. […]
Royce Woodhead – a soldier in the making
North Kalgoorlie School Cadets, winners of the best shooting school cadets. Taken in 1909. Back row ? SMITH, Jack BACKHOUSE, Captain Lionel JEFFRIES, E STRANGER, Eric LEAN Front Row: Royce WOODHEAD, Tom CLEMENTS, B CAPLE, Sid KINGS. Young Royce Woodhead would have been about 14 yrs old in the above photograph, although he look younger, […]
The Last Australian at Gallipoli:
The following story was recently sent to me by Ian Shaw. He told me that he had lost track of a relative by the name of Eli Shaw. This is what he said- It wasn’t until I started looking outside Victoria that Eli Shaw again appeared, this time hunting for gold on the Eastern Goldfields […]
The Boyland Brothers:
Young men “turned to stone”. George Boyland George Boyland was born in Garden Gully, Bendigo, Victoria, on the 8th March 1872. The son of a miner, he and his brother and sister moved with their parents from Victoria to Queensland, and then around 1894 to Western Australia. He seems to have travelled back and forth […]
In Search of Mordaunt Reid:
More than one third of the 62,000 Anzacs who died in WW1 are still listed as missing with no known graves. This is the story of one woman who never stopped looking for her soldier. Lieutenant Mordaunt Reid was paid the ultimate accolade by war historian and correspondent, Charles Bean, on the morning of the […]