Anzac Day not a celebration but commemoration Martin O’Meara VC served bravely in Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
about 3 hours ago Gary Gray
Tipperary native Martin O’Meara: “During four days of very heavy fighting he repeatedly went out and brought in wounded officers and men from ‘No Man’s Land’ under intense artillery and machine gun fire.”
In July 2020, I visited the Australian Army Museum of Western Australia at Fremantle. A terrific facility, it holds machines, materials, medals and awards including the Victoria Cross ) awarded to Irish-born Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) sergeant Martin O’Meara, currently on loan to the National Museum of Ireland in Collins Barracks, Dublin.
WWI medal lost on a Melbourne beach in 1925 returned to soldierâs family
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A war medal lost by a soldier at a beach in Melbourneâs south-east in 1925 has been returned to the manâs descendants almost a century later in the lead-up to Anzac Day.
The British Victory medal was owned by Private Robert Stanley Gordon Smith, who served in France during the First World War, and was lost on Chelsea beach in 1925.
In 1980, this WW1 British Victory medal was located at Beaumaris beach.
Private R.S.G. Smith s WWI British Victory medal.
News by Jack Paynter 23rd Apr 2021 10:39 AM A war medal lost at a Melbourne beach almost 100 years ago has been reunited with the family of a World War I digger just in time for Anzac Day. Private R.S.G. Smith lost his WWI British Victory medal at Chelsea beach in 1925 and passed away on April 23, 1963 without ever getting it back. The medal was found about 10km away at Beaumaris beach in 1980, but it s rightful owner remained a mystery until it was recently passed to Lilydale police Sergeant Vaughan Atherton. The man who found the medal 40 years ago was married at the time but later passed away, and his wife later remarried.
Book of Remembrance
A signature in a collection of autographs reveals a story of Indigenous service that extends from Australia to Canada and Trinidad.
The legacy of Indigenous Australian service in the First World War has long been overlooked, in part due to wartime policies that initially restricted service to those of ‘substantially European’ descent. Australia had been settled on the legal fiction of
terra nullius, which ignored the rights of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who had inhabited the land for thousands of years. Indigenous Australians were not recognised as full citizens until 1967. As a result, attestation papers rarely explicitly referred to a soldier as ‘Indigenous’. Some recruits were rejected because of their race, but other enlistment papers refer obliquely to a recruit’s ‘dark complexion’.
Proud of family s service | Dandenong Star Journal starcommunity.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from starcommunity.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.