Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Studio portrait of Captain (Capt) Herbert Peter Phillips, 3rd Pioneer Battalion. An engineer from Brisbane, Qld prior to enlistment, Capt Phillips embarked with C Company from Melbourne on HMAT Wandilla on 6 June 1916. Later promoted to Major he was Mentioned in Despatches on two separate occasions and was also awarded the Military Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and the French Croix de Guerre. At the completion of the war he applied for discharge in England and this was granted on 7 December 1919. He later returned to Australia via the United States where he had gone to study engineering techniques. This is one of a series of photographs taken by the Darge Photographic Company which had the concession 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.