Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Studio portrait of 5343 Private (Pte) Archibald John Bowman, 14th Battalion. A farmer from Yarpturk, near Warrnambool, Victoria, prior to enlistment on 22 February 1916, he embarked from Melbourne aboard HMAT Euripides on 4 April 1916 for Egypt. The Battalion relocated to the Western Front, France in June 1916. Pte Bowman was killed in action near Bullecourt on 11 April 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial, France. He was aged 23 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.