Grave cross : Unknown Australian soldier, Pozieres

Plain wooden cross with nailed construction, a separate cross piece and a pointed lower end. an aluminium strip is nailed across the upper edge of the cross piece and is impressed 'UNKNOWN. AUSTRALIAN. SOLDIER'. The lower arm bears a black enamelled plate reading: '1914-1918 THIS CROSS TEMPORALLY MARKED THE GRAVE OF AN UNKNOWN BRITISH SOLDIER ON THE WESTERN FRONT AND IS ENTRUSTED TO YOUR CARE BY THE IMPERIAL WAR GRAVES COMMISSION.'

This cross was placed over the grave of an unidentified Australian soldier who died at Kay Sap, Pozieres in 1916, when bodies from the battlefield came to be exhumed and placed in the formal war cemetery known as the Pozieres British Cemetery at the end of the First World War. The Imperial War Graves commission replaced it with a formal headstone in the early 1920s and the wooden cross was forwarded to Australian War Museum (later Memorial) as an example. The cemetery contains the graves of 2,760 identified Commonwealth servicemen, from the period 1916-1918, and a further 1,380 who could not be identified.