Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Studio portrait of 4311 Private (Pte) John Stark. Originally from Carlisle, England, Pte Stark was a railway employee from Cranbourne, Victoria and had previously been rejected due to bad teeth. He later embarked with the 13th Reinforcements, 5th Battalion from Melbourne on HMAT Demosthenes on 29 December 1915. On 18 August1916, aged 21, he was killed in action and buried in the Sunken Road Cemetery, Contalmaison, Picardie, France. 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.