Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Studio portrait of Windram H C, believed to be 3279 Private (Pte) Henry Charles Windram, 23rd Battalion from East Caulfield, Victoria. An 18 year old hall porter with service in the Militia with the 47th Infantry prior to enlisting in the AIF on 13 July 1915, he embarked for overseas with the 7th Reinforcements from Melbourne on 26 November 1915 aboard HMAT Commonwealth (A73). After arriving in Egypt he transferred to the 58th Battalion and then to the 59th Battalion and went with the latter to France in June 1916. Pte Windram was killed in action at Fromelles on 19 July 1916 and is buried in the VC Corner Australian Cemetery and Memorial at Fromelles, France. V.C. Corner Cemetery is the only uniquely Australian cemetery on the Western Front. It was formed after the Armistice and contains the graves of 410 Australian soldiers who were killed during the Battle of Fromelles in July 1916 and whose bodies were found on the battlefield. As none of the bodies could be identified, it was decided not to mark the individual graves, but to record on a memorial the names of all the Australian soldiers who were killed in the engagement and whose graves are not known. 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.