Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Portrait of G S Hamilton copied for the Cobram Honour Roll. The soldier is probably 3475 Private (Pte) Gordon Stanley Hamilton, a railway shunter from Cobram, Victoria, prior to enlistment. Pte Hamilton embarked from Sydney with the 11th Reinforcements, 2nd Battalion, aboard HMAT Euripides (A14), on 2 November 1915. Hamilton transferred to the 14th Field Artillery Brigade as a Gunner and was killed in action at Passchendaele, Belgium, on 1 October 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial, Belgium. Gordon Hamilton's brother, 5037 Pte George Ausustus Hamilton, also served in the AIF. (See SCAS0270.) During the First World War the Cobram and District Soldiers Fund initiated a project to create a Cobram Honour Roll. It was to include portraits of servicemen who had links to the Cobram area. The Fund arranged for portraits to be copied by the Darge Photographic Company at its Collins Street Studio, Melbourne. Around 100 copy prints were supplied by the Darge company but it is not known if the roll was ever constructed. In the 1930s, the Australian War Memorial purchased 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.