Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Portrait of 216 Private (Pte) Raymond Patrick Brown, 38th Battalion. A clerk from Bendigo, Victoria, he initially enlisted in the 7th Battalion on 28 August 1915 but was discharged in January 1916 as he did not have parental consent. On obtaining consent, he then enlisted in the 38th Battalion on 22 February 1916 and embarked from Melbourne on 20 June 1916 aboard HMAT Runic for Plymouth, England, and joined his unit on the Western Front, France, on 22 November 1916. Pte Brown was killed in action in Belgium on 28 May 1917. He has no known grave and his name is commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial. He was aged 20 years. This is one of a series of photographs taken by the Darge Photographic Company which had the concession to take photographs at the Broadmeadows and Seymour army camps during the First World War. In the 1930s, the Australian War Memorial purchased the original glass negatives from Algernon Darge, along with the photographers' notebooks. The notebooks contain brief details, usually a surname or unit name, for each negative.