The search for identity discs

Depicts a soldier in a muddy, war damaged landscape with wrecked buildings in the background, searching a dead body for an identity disc. Frank Crozier served in Gallipoli with the AIF in March 1915 and in France in January 1917 before being appointed an Official War Artist from September 1918 until June 1920. Frank Crozier (1883-1948) worked as a decorator and clerk and attended the National Gallery of Victoria School in Melbourne from 1905 to 1907. In March 1915 he enlisted with the 22nd Battalion AIF, serving in Egypt and at Gallipoli. In France he served under Brigadier- General Gellibrand who asked Crozier to make sketches of the Battle of Pozieres. He was trained in camouflage work in London in 1918 and in September the same year was appointed Official War Artist. Following the First World War he worked for the Australian War Records Section in London. He returned to Australia in 1919 and his commission was terminated in 1920. In 1936 he was appointed to the Australian War Memorial for 6 months and during the Second World War he worked in a munitions factory at Maribyrnong in Victoria. When this work was acquired by the War Memorial in 1920 it was noted that; 'The artist has recalled in this painting the distressing but inescapable task of searching the battlefield for dead. The soldiers of most combat countries carried some form of identification. After 1916, the system in the British Army- which also applied to the Australians- required each officer and soldier to wear at all times two discs of impervious material, one suspended below the other from a cord around the neck. The lower disc was red and circular; the upper, green and octagonal. Stamped into each disc were the owner's basic personal particulars of number, name, unit and religion'.