ANZAC stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The word is most closely associated with those who fought at Gallipoli, where on 25 April 1915, Allied troops landed on the beaches of a Turkish peninsula under devastating fire. Most of those who landed that day were barely soldiers at all. Eric Bogle captured it precisely in The Band Played Waltzing Matilda: they gave me a tin hat, and they gave me a gun, and they marched me away to the war.
Several of my ancestors from various branches of the family served in the First World War. But finding one who had enlisted before 25 April 1915, and who may therefore have been present at that first landing, proved more of a challenge than I had expected.
Finding William
The first step was the National Archives of Australia. The NAA holds the service records of Australian soldiers from the First World War, and a name search through their digitised records is an essential starting point for anyone tracing an ancestor who may have served. It was there that I found him.
My third great uncle, William Atkinson, enlisted on 16 December 1914, at Flinders Island, Tasmania.
I had noticed while working through various branches of the family that Tasmanians seemed to enlist in disproportionately large numbers from 1917 onwards – or at least those of my ancestry did! Whether there is a specific explanation for that pattern is something I noted down to investigate further. William, enlisting in December 1914, was very much the exception.
His attestation papers filled in the details of a life I had previously known very little about. He was born on 16 November 1890, in Burnie, Tasmania. A town which was still sometimes referred to by its older name, Emu Bay, despite the formal name change having occurred back in the 1840s. He was the sixth of seven children and the only son of William Atkinson and his wife Charlotte, formerly Ling. He was a second-generation Tasmanian on his mother’s side, and possibly third on his father’s. The family were labourers on the West Mooreville Road, outside Burnie, in an area that was heavily farmed and where many of the same families worked the land for generations. Some of those families are still there today.
William signed his oath on 17 December 1914.
The Medical Examination
Of all the pages in a service record, I always find the medical examination the most interesting. In a document otherwise made up of dates, unit numbers and abbreviations, it suddenly produces a person.
William was twenty-four years old when he enlisted. He stood five feet ten and a half inches, which was quite tall for the time. As he’s a third great uncle rather than a direct ancestor, I can only assume the height went down his line of the family, rather than mine. He weighed 161 pounds, had a fair complexion, blue eyes and fair hair. His distinctive marks included what was recorded as an Indian ink mark, almost certainly a tattoo, and an axe cut scar on his ankle. The kind of scar you would expect of a labourer who worked the land.
He was a Methodist. Another small detail, but one that opens doors genealogically, as church records can often fill gaps that civil registration cannot.
His Service
William embarked at Melbourne on 19 February 1915. He served in the 9th Battery Artillery of the 3rd Field Artillery Brigade, where he was a driver. The 3rd Field Artillery Brigade had been formed in Australia in October 1914, and by searching the Australian War Memorial’s records alongside the Virtual War Memorial, it was possible to confirm William’s service number, 3809, and to begin building a picture of where his unit was and when.
The 3rd Field Artillery Brigade provided the firepower for the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli. As a driver, William would have had a specific and important role in that operation. Somewhere between 16,000 and 20,000 ANZACs landed on that first day. Approximately 2,000 of them did not survive the next twenty-four hours.
What went through those young men’s minds as they came ashore under fire from all directions is something no film, documentary, or song has ever quite been able to capture. I say that as someone who has watched and read and listened to many of them. The events of that day have been commemorated in extraordinary ways over the past century. But extraordinary commemoration is still not the same as the thing itself.
William survived Gallipoli. His service record shows a period in hospital before being discharged to Cairo in late 1915. He was then posted to France, hospitalised in England, and returned to France before being sent back to Australia from England in May 1917, suffering from bronchitis. He was discharged as medically unfit on 1 August 1917.
He had gone to war as a twenty-four year old driver from a farming family in Tasmania. He came home two and a half years later, his lungs damaged, his service over. However, he lived until he was sixty-two and died on 23 November 1952.
What You Can Find
Although there is no surviving war diary specifically for William Atkinson, knowing his unit opened up other avenues. The brigade’s commanding officer, Charles Rosenthal, kept a war diary that is held in the New South Wales State Library, covering the period from September 1914 to January 1920. Reading the diary of a commander whose unit your ancestor served in will not give you your ancestor’s story directly, but it will tell you where they were, what they faced, and what the experiences of those particular weeks and months looked like from the inside. There may also be war diaries from soldiers further down the hierarchy in William’s unit which could provide a different perspective, more in line with what William would have experienced.
For anyone researching an ancestor who served, that context matters. A name and a date tells you something. Understanding what that unit was doing on that date tells you far more.
The key resources for Australian WWI research are:
- The National Archives of Australia (www.naa.gov.au) – service records, attestation papers, medical examinations, sometimes a picture
- The Australian War Memorial (www.awm.gov.au) – unit histories, war diaries, rolls of honour
- The Virtual War Memorial (https://vwma.org.au) – searchable by name and service number
- Trove (https://trove.nla.gov.au) – digitised Australian newspapers, honour rolls, casualty notices and local reports; an invaluable source for finding how your ancestor’s service was reported in their home community
Lest We Forget
You do not need to have a direct ANZAC ancestor to feel the weight of this day. According to the Australian War Memorial, more than 100,000 Australian soldiers have been lost in conflict and peacekeeping operations since the First World War. Each of them left behind a family. Many of those families are still out there, some of them only beginning to discover what their ancestors experienced.
William Atkinson was a labourer’s son from Tasmania who enlisted before a lot of his fellow Tasmanians, landed at Gallipoli as a driver in the artillery, survived the campaign, survived France, and came home to resume his life.
He was not famous. He left no memoir. He was simply a young man who went when we felt it was right to go, and did what was required of him when he got there.
That is, in the end, the story of most of them.
