Lost Boys of Anzac

By Peter Stanley

Australians remember the dead of 25 April 1915 on Anzac Day every year. But does anyone know the name of a single soldier who died that day? What do we really know about the men supposedly most cherished in the national memory of war? Peter Stanley goes looking for the lost boys of Anzac: the men of the very first wave to land at dawn on 25 April 1915 and who died on that day. There were exactly 101 of them: the first to volunteer, the first to go into action, and the first of the 60,000 Australians killed in that conflict. Lost Boys of Anzac traces who these men were, where they came from, and why they came to volunteer for the AIF in 1914. It follows what happened to them in uniform and, using sources overlooked for nearly a century, uncovers where and how they died, on the ridges and gullies of Gallipoli—where most of them remain to this day. It shows how the lost boys were remembered by those who knew and loved them, and how they have since faded from memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Jun 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781742241692

Peter Stanley

Peter Stanley is Professor of History at UNSW Canberra and has been a winner of the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. He has published over thirty-five books on British India and on Australian military social history, including White Mutiny: British Military Culture in India, 1825–75.

Book preview

Prologue: The Lost Boys

‘I live with the lost boys’,

says Peter Pan in Act I of

JM Barrie’s ‘fairy play’, Peter Pan.

‘The lost boys’ is a phrase recognised by readers, theatre-goers and, indeed, anyone who has watched the numerous adaptations of Barrie’s Peter Pan over the century and a bit since it was created; on the stage, in Disney’s film. The idea of the lost boys and their leader, Peter Pan, ‘the boy who would not grow up’, still has a power to enthral or even appall, over a century after its first performance. Barrie’s lost boys, living in an eternal youth of adventures with pirates, Indians and the Darling children (Wendy, Michael and John), still catch our imaginations and engage our sympathy precisely because they do not age, but are destined to be forever as they appear in Barrie’s strange and certainly unprecedented drama.

Barrie’s play opened on the London stage just after Christmas in 1904. (It was supposed to open a week earlier, but technical problems with its elaborate sets and the harnesses that allowed its characters to fly around the stage got in the way.) An immediate success with audiences of all ages, it was revived annually, despite the cost of its staging and props, and the difficulties of employing a cast including children. In 1911 Barrie adapted the play as a novel, Peter and Wendy, and it was restaged and revived in Britain, the United States and Europe, and even in Australia.

The great American-born theatrical impresario JC Williamson, who had built his theatrical empire by spotting and buying the rights to overseas hits from HMS Pinafore to Ben Hur, recognised the appeal that Peter Pan could enjoy in Australia. Beginning with the flagship Theatre Royal in Melbourne, he produced Peter Pan in Australia, opening in Melbourne in May 1908.

The play was not only a phenomenon in Australia’s capital cities, attracting unusual attention when the tour manager gave poor children free seats and held charity performances. Williamson took Peter Pan on tour across five states, travelling to many places where those who became the Lost Boys of Anzac and their families could have seen it or heard of it. They included Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, but also towns within those states – including mining towns at the extremity of European settlement, such as Broken Hill and Kalgoorlie. Though playing in major cities, the play attracted widespread attention beyond the state capitals. ‘A lot of Strathalbyn people have been down to see the play’, the Southern Argus reported; and Broken Hill, Kalgoorlie and Strathalbyn all became part of the Lost Boys’ story.

Peter Pan became one of JC Williamson’s last hit shows in his 30-year career in Australia. Australian critics and audiences had read of its success in London and the United States (where it was seen by two million people) and hailed the play rapturously, never before having seen such a spectacle. It was ‘a play for children and a play for adults’, wrote the Brisbane Courier. From Barcaldine (also part of the Lost Boys’ story) the Western Champion and General Advertiser described its Brisbane run as ‘something phenomenal’, in which people queued for tickets from before dawn. In Broken Hill there was ‘a big booking of seats’, and the Barrier Miner reported ‘genuine tears and wholesome laughter’ in a packed Crystal Theatre.

Barrie’s play about the lost boys he loved became a sensation in Australia as it had in London and elsewhere. Children clamoured for ‘Peter Pan hats’, charitable bodies raised funds by holding ‘Peter Pan fetes’; and the play inspired parents to name sons Peter and dog-lovers to name their pets Peter Pan, including an Australian terrier who took first prize at the Boulder Dog and Poultry Show in 1909. It sparked crazes for soft ‘Peter Pan’ collars (acceptable for women and children; decried for men), with illustrations of Wendy Houses in newspapers, even in remote Barcaldine. Motor launches, race horses (in several states) and even a brand of cigarettes were named in its honour. The appearance of the book Peter Pan and Wendy in 1911 renewed the appeal of the story. Its characters became staples of fancy dress balls and parties (with costumes frugally reused – ‘Peter Pan’ took out many prizes at children’s balls around Kalgoorlie for several years, including at a ball held the day before war was declared in 1914).

As its durability and adaptability suggest, Barrie’s play is far more than an obscure Edwardian children’s pantomime. The idea of a boy who would not grow up came from regions of Barrie’s own psyche, the shadow cast over his family by the accidental death of an older brother forty years before. And it expressed his own persistent infantilism, in which he seemed incapable of sustaining relationships with adults but formed intense, intimate friendships with the children of his neighbours living around Kensington Gardens. But if this was all Peter Pan added up to it would have been forgotten long ago, merely a psychological curiosity of arrested development. Not only did the vividness of Barrie’s imagination and the daring of his stage drama thrill and inspire audiences (adults as well as children have for generations clapped and called out ‘Yes!’ when challenged by Peter to save Tinker Bell’s life by affirming their belief in fairies), but the play speaks to deep concerns of central importance to the century that had just begun as it appeared.

Peter Pan first toured Australia when the young men who were to volunteer for the war were, on average, about 20: not an age to have taken much interest in what was widely promoted as a ‘fairy play’. Few can have wanted to see a play they probably thought was intended for kiddies, or at best families: none of them had children of an age to see it, and about one in ten of them were not even in Australia in 1908. It is possible, though, that some of them smoked Peter Pan cigarettes, and perhaps put a few bob on the race horses named Peter Pan.

Barrie’s play is about the innocence of childhood, innocence that the twentieth century would do its best to deprive the world’s children of. It is about the discovery and expression of a childlike imagination first identified and celebrated in that century. And it was created in a century that ensured that through two world wars and a host of other conflicts millions of boys would not grow up. The reality of the sacrifices demanded by war even affected the make-believe world of the play. When Peter Pan was first performed after the outbreak of the Great War, Barrie agreed to cut the scene in the lagoon, partly for reasons of economy, but also because it ends on Peter’s line, ‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’. When JC Williamson revived Peter Pan in Australia in 1917, in a vain attempt to lighten the nation’s sombre mood and meet its need for distraction, the line was cut in it too. By then everyone knew that to die in the Great War was no adventure at all, and that war brought grief and pain, with the rhetoric of nobility of duty and sacrifice offering at best a partial consolation. But that was not how they had felt in August 1914, and it is hard now to recapture the innocence of those first weeks of war.

The poignancy of the idea of the ‘lost boys’ is evoked through this book by the use of epigrams from JM Barrie’s Peter Pan.

Introduction

‘Then at last he stopped.

I hadn’t really any hope, he said.’

Peter Pan

Sunday, 25 April 1915 is, you might think, the most over-worked day in Australian history (and not just its military history). A shelf of books has been written about the events of that day and the campaign that followed. You might think that the events of that day have been picked over and examined exhaustively in the relentless stream of military history books that appear in bookshops each April. You would be mistaken. As you’ll find, there are things about Gallipoli that we do not know; have not asked; have not realised; and some things we will never know.

I have myself added to that shelf, with four of my previous books dealing with the Gallipoli campaign in one way or another (one, Quinn’s Post, the first ‘biography’ of a place on Gallipoli), not to mention contributing as an historian to the Australian War Memorial’s 1984 Gallipoli gallery, the exhibitions The Riddles of Anzac in 1990 and Çannakale in 2005. I am not alone in finding Gallipoli absorbing. Australia as a nation returns, metaphorically or literally, to this place on the anniversary of what is known simply as ‘the landing’. Every 25 April, Australians gather to remember the dead of Gallipoli and, by extension, the hundred thousand-odd Australians who have lost their lives in wars (mostly overseas) since colonial Australians first went away to fight in the mid-nineteenth century. As this book was being researched and written, they are still going away to fight wars: still dying. This seems to be one of the burdens Australia seems unable to escape, and our annual reflection on what Anzac means and has cost is a part of what it is to be an Australian.

Anzac Day traditionally begins with what is usually called the Dawn Service, at which Australians remember the landings that began the invasion of Ottoman Turkey almost a hundred years ago. Australian remembrance of war begins with the 749 men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) who (according to the Australian War Memorial’s Roll of Honour) died on that day, killed in action or dying of wounds inflicted soon after they leapt ashore on the little shingly beach soon to be called Anzac Cove.

You might think that those 749 men are among those most dearly remembered by Australians. Again, you would be wrong. Australian travellers (many regarding themselves, understandably, as pilgrims) go to Turkey and spend hours among the headstones in the 20-odd cemeteries maintained in perpetuity by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission at Anzac. But they will find very few of the dead of 25 April in those impeccably maintained cemeteries. At best, they will be able to find the names of the dead of 25 April inscribed on the stark, imposing panels on the Australian memorial at Lone Pine, though there is nothing there to indicate who died in the landing. The laudable Australian tradition of commemorating war dead democratically equal in death – without distinction of rank or decoration, as they say – has one significant disadvantage. It means that with only a surname and initials to go on no one can tell who died where, when or how.

The dead of 25 April are certainly among those most often referred to in addresses delivered on Anzac Day across and beyond the nation. Usually though, they are mentioned in the abstract, as carriers of the Anzac virtues of courage, endurance, ingenuity, self-sacrifice and, above all, mateship. They have become more familiar as symbols than as individuals, and the abstract qualities they stand for – courage, mateship, ingenuity – give little insight into who they really were. We need this knowledge now more than ever, as we approach the centenary of the Great War. At a time when the mythic qualities of the Anzac legend are being celebrated like never before, we see a heightened interest in and regard for the Anzacs. But also, paradoxically, we see a greater ignorance of the reality than ever. If the anniversary is to help us understand that conflict, what it was like and what it meant, we need to strive to escape the hyperbole of the legend and to try to understand ‘the Anzacs’ as men.

So who were they, the dead of 25 April? Can you name any of them? Do you know who they were, where and how they died and where they are buried or commemorated? No, I thought not. You might, if you happen to be related to one, and have investigated your family history, or know your local war memorial unusually well. Nor could I name any of them when one day, while writing Digger Smith and Australia’s Great War, I realised that the dead of 25 April truly are the lost boys of Anzac. I resolved to investigate men whom I soon came to think of as the Lost Boys of Anzac. After much research, I determined that my definition of Lost Boys would be ‘the men of the very first wave to land at dawn on 25 April 1915 and who died on that day’. There were exactly 101 of them, and they came from just six companies of the 9th, 10th and 11th Battalions.

This book tells their stories, and those of their families. With very few exceptions, they are the only people named in this account. Pragmatically, with 101 Lost Boys to keep track of, and many relatives named, there are actually many more characters here than a Russian novel, so I have reduced anyone else – officers, officials, witnesses, onlookers and observers, to ciphers, and have deliberately not named them. This will help to restore to the Lost Boys the prominence they have been denied for the best part of a century. The few exceptions to this rule of anonymity are some Red Cross officials, the commanding officer of ‘Base Records’, and the journalist and correspondent whose official history and the collection he created documented both the history and the legend.

But this book is about more than just 101 (mainly young) men, killed at random on a spring day in Turkey. Their stories, individually obscure, collectively can tell us things we need to know. Physicists investigate the first seconds of the Big Bang to unlock the nature of matter. Australian military historians might think of this story as a study of the first hours of our Big Bang. Just as physicists can understand the processes of the universe by studying its initial event, so we might hope to understand Anzac better by following those who died in its initial event. The only justification for this book is that we might understand Gallipoli and the phenomenon we call Anzac through the lives and deaths of the Lost Boys of 25 April 1915.

Not that most of them were ‘boys’. The Lost Boys were on average exactly 26 years old when they volunteered, just about the average age of volunteers accepted for the Australian Imperial Force in 1914. In other circumstances, I would have (and indeed have) decried referring to them as ‘boys’. But ‘lost boys’ here seems to be a fitting phrase. They themselves did refer to each other so. Their families certainly thought of them as their boys, and they were certainly, as we will see, lost to them and to us, forever.

It might seem risky to write a book in which all the seemingly central characters are dead by page 145. In fact, while the Lost Boys are the professed subject of the book, more than half of the book deals with how their deaths affected their families. The ostensible subject of this book is one day of fighting on Gallipoli, but it is really an extended reflection seeking to understand how the Great War and the anxiety and grief it brought affected the people of Australia, not just in 1915, or indeed for the rest of the war, but in a very real sense for the rest of their lives.

But we must begin with the Lost Boys whose lives and deaths we will follow, from the patriotic enthusiasm of August 1914 through to the drama, confusion and horror of the landing, to the long, gruelling silence of uncertainty and grief that their loss brought to their loved ones. And that journey will take us in the end back to Gallipoli itself, where we will return to ponder whether the Lost Boys of Anzac might ever be found.

The list of Lost Boys, 1914

This list gives essential biographical details for the men who became the Lost Boys, as they were in 1914. ‘S’ is for single, ‘M’ is for married; religious denominations are ‘CofE’ Church of England, ‘RC’ Roman Catholic, ‘Pres’ Presbyterian, ‘Meth’ Methodist, ‘Bapt’ Baptist, ‘Cong’ Congregational. The ‘place’ refers to one to which the man seemed most attached; sometimes place of birth or residence, but for migrants where his next of kin lived. The occupation given may be a trade he had followed for years, or might be a job he happened to be doing when he enlisted: there is so much we do not know about the Lost Boys before they volunteered for the AIF.

William Bentley (also known as ‘Barney’) Allen, clerk, S, Heywood, Vic, CofE

William Richard (also known as ‘Dick’) Annear, 39, commercial traveller, S, Subiaco, WA, CofE

Charles James (also known as ‘Rappie’) Backman, 30, boilermaker’s assistant, S, Adelaide, SA, Cong

Richard Hamilton Baker, 20, bank clerk, S, Sandgate, Q, CofE

Cecil Thomas Barrack, 30, engineer, S, Chatswood, NSW, CofE

Frank Batt, 31, miner, S, London, UK, CofE

William Charles Belson, 22, architect, S, Malanda, Q, Pres

William John Bradley, 30, labourer, Newport, UK, CofE

Charles George Brown, 22, labourer, S, Newmacher, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, Pres

Albert John Byrne, 24, electrician, S, Broken Hill, NSW, CofE

Hugh Calderbank, 32, motorman (tram driver), M, Perth, WA, CofE

Thomas George Carroll, 23, contractor/farm labourer, S, North Fremantle, WA, RC

Joseph Henry Cooke, 32, accountant, M, Wickepin, WA, CofE

Tom Courtney, 19, engine cleaner, S, Ipswich, Q, RC

Alfred (also known as ‘Lizzie’) Crowther, 26, iron moulder, S, Wayville, SA, CofE

Frederick Dann, 30, carpenter, S, Melbourne, Vic, CofE

John (known as Jack) Davey, 19, labourer, S, Woombye, Q, Meth

John Dow, 25, miner, S, Perthshire, Scotland, Pres

John Curry Duckworth, 36, labourer, M, Perth, WA, Pres

Wolverton Mason Edgar, 36, lumper, S, Great Bulling, Hants, UK, CofE

Charles John Falk, 30, clerk, S, Yatala, SA, CofE

John James Ferguson, 19, labourer, S, Perth, WA, RC

George Clement Ferrett, 29, wheelwright, S, Blinman, SA, CofE

James Fielding, 26, labourer, S, Sheffield, Yorks, UK, CofE

Edward William Fitzgerald [Edward Edwards], 37, agent, S, Kalgoorlie, WA, CofE

Thomas Walter Ford, 19, medical student, S, Brisbane, CofE

Herbert Howard Kentwell Fowles (also known as Bert), 21, schoolteacher, S, Zillmere, Q, CofE

Walter John Genery, 26, printer, M, Subiaco, WA, CofE

William James (known as Billy) Gibbons, 34, labourer, M, Adelaide, SA, CofE

John Woodside (known as Jack) Gibson, 26, labourer, S, Canada/ India, CofE

Anthony Simpson (also known as ‘Alec’) Gilpin, 24, ironmonger, S, Ballarat, Vic, CofE

Albert Glatz [Alexander Glades], 27, miner, S, Kapunda, SA, Pres

Kenneth Douglas (known as Ken) Gordon, 28, clerk, S, Port Pirie, SA, CofE

John Lewes Davidson Gower, 29, clerk, S, Littlehampton, SA, CofE

George Charles Gracey, 28, motorman, S, South Brisbane, Q, CofE

Harry John Graham, 19, sheep farmer, S, Barcaldine, Q, CofE

James Joseph Grant, 22, shipping clerk, S, Brisbane, Q, RC

Keith Eddowes Green, 21, shipping clerk, S, Mitcham, SA, CofE

Percival Charles Greenhill, 26, labourer, S, London, UK, CofE

Wilfred Carl Hill, 22, labourer, S, Concord, NSW, CofE

William Albert (also known as ‘Fatty’) Hobson, 25, potter, Stourbridge, Worcs, UK, CofE

Cuthbert Oliver Holcombe, 33, farmer, S, London, UK, CofE

John Holden, 19, farm hand, S, Bromley, UK, CofE

Henry (known as Harry) Jackson, 20, carpenter, S, Coen, Q, RC

Leslie Job, 19, telephonist, Perth GPO, S, Fitzroy, WA, CofE

William Johnston, 21, clerk, S, Edinburgh, Scotland, Pres

Leo James Kerswill, 21, hide and skin cleaner, S, Newman Park, Q, Bapt

Patrick Kiely, 28, engineer, S, Cork, Ireland, RC

Leslie John (also known as ‘Langey’) Langdon, 28, farmer, S, Melbourne, CofE

James Llewellyn (also known as ‘Lyn’) Lewis, 20, bank clerk, S, Port Adelaide, SA, CofE

James Mulcaster Lovatt, 33, farmer, S, Bettwys-y-Coed, Wales, Meth

Robert Stirling Mackie, 19, draper, S, Clydebank, Scotland, Pres

Frederick Dennis Mangan, 27, telegraph operator, M, Dublin, Ireland, RC

Harold Osborne Mansfield, 32, miner, S, Parkside, SA, CofE

David Joseph McCarthy, railway porter, S, Woolloongabba, Q, RC

Francis Ronald Reid McJannet, 23, farmer, S, Kununoppin, WA, Pres

Alexander McPhail, 25, farmer, S, Glasgow, Scotland, Pres

Albert (also known as ‘Peter’) McConnachy, 25, miner, S, Renmark, SA, CofE

Keith Mitchell, 18, labourer, S, Lancefield, Vic, Bapt

Joseph Russel Moir, 24, farmer, S, Taranaki, NZ, Protestant

Donald Munro, 19, bricklayer, S, Thurso, Scotland, Pres

George Alfred Nicoll, 35, accountant, S, Sydney, NSW, CofE

Edward Castle Oldham, 38, gentleman, S, Hackney, SA, CofE

Michael John O’Sullivan, 19, clerk, S, Rosewood, Q, RC

William Thomas Payne, 19, clerk, S, Brisbane, Q, Wesleyan

Ambrose Stanley Pearce, 20, carpenter, S, Quorn, SA, Meth

James Willis Plummer, 20, horse trainer, S, Yorketown, SA, RC

William Alexander Pollock, 37, labourer, S, Glasgow, Scotland, CofE

William George Price, 19, jeweller, S, Newcastle, NSW, Bapt

Patrick Thomas Pyne, 19, postal assistant, S, Strathalbyn, SA, RC

Walter Reeves, 24, labourer, S, Cambridge, UK, CofE

Henry John Riekie, 35, grocer/bread carter, M, Subiaco, WA, CofE

William John (also known as John or ‘Jack’) Rigby, 22, clerk, S, Yeronga, Q, CofE

Sydney Beresford Robertson, 28, law clerk, S, Ipswich, Q, Cong

John Rundle, labourer, S, Kalgoorlie, WA, Meth

George Alfred Rush, 24, labourer, S, Nelson Bay, NSW, CofE

Victor Joseph Sanders, 34, overseer, Toowoomba, Q, CofE

Harry Sawley, 22, painter, S, Southport, Lancs, UK, Wesleyan

Basil Archdeacon (also known as ‘Archie’) Scott, 23, motor mechanic, S, Northam, WA, CofE

Guy Allen Sharpe, 26, civil engineer, S, Poona, India, CofE

Hurtle Charles Shaw, 26, blacksmith, S, Hindmarsh, SA, CofE

William Haswell Shelton, 21, farmer, S, Murgon, Q, Meth

Godfrey John Sherman, 24, bank clerk, S, Sydney, NSW, RC

Raymond Ferres Shirley, 22, law clerk, S, Brisbane, Q, CofE

Richard Smith, 33, tinsmith/fitter/silversmith, S, Birmingham, UK, CofE

William Millar Smylie, 21, motor mechanic, S, Belfast, Ireland, Pres

Rupert James Sparrow, 22, horse driver, S, Broken Hill, NSW, CofE

George Spence, 32, carpenter, S, Lanarkshire, Scotland, Pres

Edward Harvey Statham, 34, contractor, S, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, CofE

Joseph Stratford, 34, labourer, S, Lismore, NSW, CofE

Charles Joshua Sussex, 34, labourer, Richmond, Vic, Pres

Frederick John Thompson, 33, traveller, S, Feilding, NZ, Pres

Edward James Thrum, 22, painter, S, Sorrento, Vic, Pres

Ernest Percy (also known as ‘Wakka’) Walker, 23, sleeper cutter, S, Lillimur, Vic, CofE

William Frederick Walker, 22, labourer, S, Shipton Winslow, Bucks, UK, Anglican

William John Walsh, 33, tinsmith, M, Brisbane, Q, CofE

Arthur Walton, 27, bushman, S, Gravesend, UK, CofE

William John Wilcox, 23, labourer, S, London, UK, CofE

Percy Williams, 21, miner or grocer?, S, Kalgoorlie, WA, Meth

Arthur Edward Wise, 22, iron moulder, S, Woolloongabba, Q, RC

Roy Wyld, 26, fireman, S, Semaphore, SA, CofE

Part I

Lost Boys in 1914

‘the lost boys –

but where are they?’

Peter Pan

Australia in 1914

The Lost Boys came from properties, towns and cities all over Australia’s mainland states, and, as we will see, from far beyond. How can we understand the world they inhabited; a very different Australia to ours? This was a nation – a very new nation, almost the youngest in the world – that in the space of a century-and-a-quarter of European settlement had established a distinctive identity. Though much divided, its people – with religious and ethnic differences, political and class allegiances, state loyalties, a corrosive racial feeling, both pride and disdain – had characteristic ways of talking, of carrying themselves; even a ‘look’ that could belong to no other place, except perhaps other ‘British’ settler societies. They shared a culture, one created in the space of a little more than a century.

Even so, the range of places in which they lived varied about as much as they could: from the suburbs and slums of Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, to the furthest reaches of the bush. Many came from country towns and provincial cities (Toowoomba, Port Pirie or Kalgoorlie). Most lived in cities and towns, but those hailing from ‘the bush’ came from a wide range of places. Lost Boys came from the steamy rainforests of far north Queensland and the state’s open western plains to the wide salt-bush plains and wheat-lands of South Australia and the tall forests and sandy bush of Western Australia. Very few of the Lost Boys came from the same places – the exceptions are that several clustered in towns like Broken Hill and suburbs like Subiaco. Let’s look at some representative communities across the country: towns, a provincial city and a suburb of a state capital: Barcaldine in Queensland, Broken Hill in New South Wales, Strathalbyn and Blinman in South Australia, Wickepin in Western Australia and the Perth suburb of Subiaco.

In central Queensland, 350 miles inland from Rockhampton lies the town of Barcaldine. Famous, or notorious, in the 1890s for the militancy of the great shearers’ strike, the ‘Tree of Knowledge’ beneath which strikers gathered still grew outside the town’s railway station. Twenty-odd years on, Barcaldine was a small but prosperous community. Neatly laid out in a grid on the great western plains, the town boasted a court house, schools, a bowls green and a swimming pool constantly replenished from a bore. With its ‘made’ roads, lined by tin-roofed bungalows and bushy gardens, it was, its historian wrote, ‘a garden city’: though only by the measure of western Queensland. Saplings lined the main street, promising shade in years to come.

The years just before the war’s outbreak saw a boom in civic amenities – the opening of a new shire hall, several churches or halls, a new water tower, and in 1913 the town’s first garage and a picture theatre-cum-roller skating rink. But without a system of rubbish removal or effective town drainage, rain turned the main street, Oak Street, into an open sewer, draining into a swamp at one end, and stench, flies and a persistent ophthalmia tormented the town’s 2000-odd residents. It was a condition familiar to Barcaldine’s resident pharmacist, Mr Thomas Graham, whose chemist’s shop sold Graham’s Golden Rose eye drops and salve. (Was this named after his wife, Mrs Rose Graham?) Besides his own remedies and proprietary pills and potions, Mr Graham’s ‘firstclass establishment’ sold ‘a great variety of photographic goods’, cigars and ‘choice brands of smokes’. We will return to the Grahams of Barcaldine.

Founded only in 1885, after a stockman famously discovered silver on the Barrier Range, Broken Hill boomed in the 1890s, luring young men prepared to trade their labour for the mines’ higher wages (and its higher living costs) but subjected to its dangerous working conditions and harsh climate. Australia’s largest inland city, by 1914 Broken Hill had become ‘a stately city, with well laid out streets, large and handsome buildings, … an established and cultured community’. Despite boasting solid stone public buildings – a hospital and an impressive Trades Hall – its population of 40 000 lived in metal-roofed cottages, subjected to the fierce heat of summer and dust storms raised by the loss of the town’s surrounding vegetation. Though in New South Wales, Broken Hill looked to South Australia as the source of everything but its government. Food and supplies came by railway from Port Pirie, and the ore mined below the Barrier went off to the smelters at Port Pirie by the same route. Six Lost Boys hailed from Broken Hill, the largest single group among them.

Three of the Lost Boys came from the Perth suburb of Subiaco. Named incongruously by Benedictine monks after their founder’s Italian monastery, Subiaco lies to the west of the city. Settled from the 1850s, by the first decade of the twentieth century it constituted a town-within-a-city, a suburb of cottages of workers and, closer to the city, the villas of Perth’s comfortable middle class. The former tended to call it ‘Subi-arko’, the latter ‘Subi-acko’, but when buying a train or tram ticket all called it ‘Subi’. The suburb had its own focus in the shopping area of Rokeby Road (which tram drivers like Hugh Calderbank tended to mispronounce as ‘Rok-e-by’). There, crowds flocked for Friday evening shopping, and on weekends strolled in its handsome Municipal Gardens, complete with band rotunda. Subiaco’s people loyally supported their embarrassingly bad football team, though after a long run of wooden spoons it won the premiership in 1912 and 1913.

By 1914, despite the power of its ‘bush legend’, Australia was already one of the most heavily urbanised nations in the world – a third of South Australia’s population lived within 10 miles of Adelaide’s General Post Office. None of South Australia’s Lost Boys lived in the same place as any other, but let’s look at two from small towns. Strathalbyn, on the Angas River in the rolling hills over the range from Adelaide, was first settled by Scots migrants in the 1840s. Its reliable rainfall and rust-resistant wheat crop led to the town experiencing a resurgence in the decade before the war. The erection of a new, mock classical post office and a new Catholic church in 1913 reflected the town’s optimism. Patrick Pyne, a son of the local police sergeant, worked in one and worshipped in the other, and in August 1914 became ‘among the first to answer the call of his country’. In the north of the state’s settled areas lay Blinman, in the Flinders Ranges, 330 miles directly north of Strathalbyn. Blinman, in the country of the indigenous Adnyamathanha people, had been settled in the 1850s after the discovery of copper. At first a tented camp, Blinman, named after the shepherd who discovered the ore, acquired a hotel and post office only in the 1860s. Once home to two thousand, by 1914 Blinman’s population had fallen to about one hundred and fifty. They included the Ferrett family, John and Clarice, their grown daughter and son George Ferrett, like his father a wheelwright. The Ferretts (soon to leave Blinman like almost everybody else) seem to have left almost no mark in the written records, but we can imagine why George might have wanted to leave the ailing, drought-stricken township.

Western Australia, which for its first seven decades as a settler society limped along with few people and poor prospects, suddenly boomed with the discovery of gold in the 1890s. Coinciding with a depression in the eastern colonies, the rush attracted Victorians especially. The population of the west grew. In the wheat belt, communities of hopeful migrants (many from Britain) carved farms out of scrub, or in the goldfields, where men lived in tents, trading heat, thirst, typhoid and hard work against the hope of striking it rich. Wickepin, where Joseph Cooke set up as an accountant in 1911, is representative of the small wheat-belt towns from which many of the Western Australian Lost Boys hailed. Settled around 1893, when it was no more than a bore called Yarling, Wickepin was opened up for selection under a plan to encourage settlement by opening Crown land. Construction of the Great Southern Railway (on which some other Lost Boys laboured) encouraged settlement. The town’s earliest buildings were erected around 1906. Soon after followed a local government body and the railway in 1909, a newspaper in 1910, and a doctor, police station and school in 1911. The name of the local community group, the New Jerusalem Progress Association, says it all.

Despite the optimism and confidence of a federal Australia fulfilling its promise, 1914 had been a hard year for a nation so dependent upon primary production. The drought that gripped the southern half of the continent threatened livelihoods and even lives. In the wheat country of Western Australia and the belt of farming country stretching from South Australia to southern Queensland, wheat yields fell disastrously. Animals lay desiccating in paddocks from Geraldton to Moree. Farmers went bust, and the shopkeepers who lived from them likewise. In the West, the August and September rains failed, and some of those who queued up at drill halls had been put out of work at exactly the time when in August 1914 the call went out for volunteers to serve in the empire’s war.

‘He joined at once’: volunteers for the AIF

The Great War did not burst out of a cloudless sky. Through July 1914 anyone who kept even half an eye on the newspapers could see that something was brewing among the empires of Europe. A Serbian extremist had shot and killed an Austrian Archduke, causing a ruction between the Serbs and their protectors, the Russians, and the Austrians and their protector, the Germans. Long columns of type told the story as it developed. You need not read all of the close-set type to get the drift – the headlines told it all. Not that this hadn’t happened before, more or less, and been sorted out. Crises had broken out in the past decade, when the Powers (as they were known) faced off over some slight or misunderstanding, over Morocco or Agadir, or competition over the building of battleships or the obscure affairs of the Balkan clients of one or another of the great empires of central and eastern Europe. But they had always been settled before. In any case, what concern was the affairs of eastern Europe to Britain and its empire?

Except for conflict accompanying the birth pangs of nation states (Germany and Italy especially) Europe had not known war for over half a century. Britain had fought many small wars in the course of the long reign of Queen Victoria, but mostly on the frontiers of empire in India or Africa. Only the Anglo–Boer war of 1899–1902 had become a costly, drawn out business. Over 15 000 Australians had served in South Africa, most as part of contingents sent by the six Australian colonies; a few as part of a new Commonwealth force. If Australians thought about the possibilities of war in the years before 1914, they imagined a war against the navy and army of imperial Japan. In response to this threat, Australia had created both a huge citizen militia army intended to defend the country from invasion, and a modern navy intended to protect the ‘white dominions’ of the Pacific against the threat posed by Japan. But the idea of a great European war was certainly about. Some nursed a niggling assumption that war – known even before it broke out as ‘the Great War’ – would occur between the empires of Europe. In the southern winter of 1914, that event at last seemed to be imminent.

In Barcaldine, the Western Chronicle’s editor headed a story ‘Peace v. War’. He could ‘scarcely realise the fact that within the space of a few weeks nearly the whole of Europe would be at war’. He had before him the Daily Mail of 25 July, which gave not a hint of impending war. We can imagine the Barcaldine pharmacist’s family reading these portentous words: none could have imagined how this war would end for them. Perhaps their eldest son, Harry Graham, might have wondered whether this war might transport him out of a small outback Queensland town. By the time July’s Daily Mail had arrived in Barcaldine, by sea and rail, the overseas cables were full of the news of the mobilisation of half of Europe. The British government had notified Australia’s Governor-General, just after midnight on 5 August, that the empire was at war. State premiers and officials had read declarations in their capitals later that morning. In Perth, the premier foresaw that ‘this terrible war … will probably be the worst known in history’.

On the morning of 5 August 1914, the news