Blog category - Wartime
The Dinkum Oil
30 September 2010 by Nicholas Schmidt.
1 Comment
ANZACS online,Collection Highlights,From the collection,News,Wartime
This afternoon I will be talking about an interesting collection, held in the Memorial’s Research Centre, on Canberra’s 666 ABC Drive program. (Update: listen to it here)
While serving overseas Australian servicemen and women have often produced publications for their own entertainment and the Memorial collects these in the Troopship and Unit Serials collection. The collection is diverse including publications from the Boer War up to the Peacekeeping in 1980s. However, I think the First World War publications are perhaps the most interesting as they were often less regulated. This means that a lot of the character and humor of the First AIF is able to shine though. My favorite is a trench newspaper which was created during the Gallipoli campaign, The Dinkum Oil .
The Dinkum Oil is an early and unique example of trench newspapers and can be seen as an important way in which the ANZAC ‘legend’ has been transmitted and understood as copies were sent home to families and extracts were published in various newspapers.
The Dinkum Oil. First edition.Fromelles: identifying the fallen
19 March 2010 by Aaron Pegram.
6 Comments
News,Wartime
Earlier this week the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs Allan Griffin announced the results of the first Joint Identification Board held to identify the remains of 250 Australian and British soldiers killed during the battle of Fromelles on the night of 19/20 July 1916. The remains were recovered from a recently discovered mass grave at Pheasant Wood where 203 were identified as Australians, and through DNA testing, 75 were identified by name. News of the results bought closure for the families of the men who had been officially missing for nearly 94 years and have now been reinterred in the newly-created Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery. A final burial will take place during a ceremony to mark the 94th anniversary of the battle on 19 July 2010.
In December 2008, the Memorial’s official magazine Wartime ran several feature articles on the discovery of the mass grave at Pheasant Wood by key researchers involved in the project: Lambis Engelzos, a retired Victorian school teacher, wrote of his research which ultimately led to the discovery of the mass grave at Pheasant Wood; Dr Tony Pollard, the Director of Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, wrote the story of the archaeological excavation conducted in May 2008; and Peter Barton wrote of his research in the archives of the Bavarian Kriegsarchiv in Munich, Germany. Memorial historians Ashley Ekins, Nigel Steel and Peter Pedersen gave accounts of the battle itself.
Due to the high level of public interest, copies of Issue 44 of Wartime are no longer available, but the magazine can be accessed here in digital form free of charge.
It is intended that the Joint Identification Board will continue DNA testing until 2014. People who believe their relative may be buried at Fromelles and have not already registered should do so at www.army.gov.au/fromelles or by calling the Australian Fromelles Project Group on 1800 019 090.
