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.
Victorian police officer reunites family with WWI medal lost almost 100 years ago
A Victorian police officer has returned a WWI medal, thought to have been lost in 1925, to the soldier s family.
The woman who located the medal, a member of the Upwey Belgrave RSL Sub Branch, met Sergeant Vaughan Atherton from Lilydale Police, in outer Melbourne.
Mr Atherton was also a member of the branch after serving as an army reservist for nine years.
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A Victoria Police officer has returned a WW1 medal, thought to have been lost in 1925, to the soldier s family.(Victoria Police)
Mr Atherton found the rightful owner of the medal, a Private Robert Stanley Gordon Smith of the 5th Battalion Australian Imperial Force (AIF).
In a few months, pandemic permitting, Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies’s recently completed feature-length documentary
Walter Kaufmann: Welch ein Leben! (Walter Kaufmann: What a Life!) will hit cinemas in Germany. But its subject, a German with an Australian passport, won’t be there for the film’s opening night. He died in Berlin on 15 April.
Kaufmann had turned ninety-seven in January. Virtually anybody who reaches such a ripe old age has led a life worth making into a film or writing about, for that matter. Kaufmann’s story, that of a refugee from Nazi Germany who became an Australian writer and then moved to the old East Germany, was particularly rich.
Background: Research into capital punishment has focussed on the length of time it will take to abolish. It will take decades or centuries. A key moment in the movement to abolish the death penalty was the 1980s when the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR was developed. This was also the decade that the last significant changes were made to the United Nations drug conventions. At the time, awareness of the issue of capital punishment for drug offences was increasing around the world as more people were getting executed. This article looks at how western countries and the United Nations responded to Malaysia which introduced the mandatory death penalty for drug offences in 1982. Methods: Over 30,000 pages of documents have been accessed through the National Archives of Australia in Canberra. These have been photographed, scanned and converted to OCR. The most relevant folders have then been analysed through NVivo 12 to look for relevant mentions of the research question: capital puni