Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Outdoor portrait of Leslie Coe on horseback. He is possibly Leslie Coe, an aboriginal labourer from Cowra, NSW, who enlisted in Cowra, NSW, on 27 January 1916. On 29 January he left Cowra for Sydney with the Boomerang recruitment march. Also in the large group of recruits were his brothers Cecil, John Augustus, Walter and his uncle John Henry Coe. Pte Leslie Coe was allocated to the 13th Reinforcements, 17th Battalion, but was discharged on 26 April 1916, prior to leaving Australia. No record has been found of an attempt by Leslie Coe to enlist in Victoria late in 1914 or early in 1915, prior to his enlistment in NSW in 1916.This is one of a series of photographs taken by the Darge Photographic Company which had a permit 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. The names are transcribed as they appear in the notebooks.