Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

W. O. Summers [Register caption].
Studio portrait of 245 Private (Pte) Walter Olveston Summers, 23rd Battalion, of Seville, Vic. Pte Summers enlisted on 11 February 1915 and embarked aboard HMAT Euripides on 10 May 1915. On 15 August 1916 he was promoted to Sergeant and on 20 August 1917 he was commissioned and served as a Lieutenant (Lt). On 18 September 1918 he was awarded a Military Cross (MC) for overpowering an enemy post, capturing two machine guns and fifteen prisoners, during an attack on Villers Bretonneux. On 28 December 1918 he died at Nalinnes in Belgium of accidental injuries caused while defusing a German shell which suddenly exploded.
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