Studio portrait of 467 Sergeant (Sgt) Colin Gordon Thomson, 27th Battalion. Sgt Thomson enlisted ...

Studio portrait of 467 Sergeant (Sgt) Colin Gordon Thomson, 27th Battalion. Sgt Thomson enlisted on 28 January 1915 and after serving at Gallipoli was killed in action near Pozieres on 4 August 1916. A farmer from Mount Stuart Station, Tibooburra, NSW, Sgt Thompson was thirty years old. His mother Agnes Thomson wrote the following on the Roll of Honour circular she completed and returned to the Australian War Museum: " I am a widow with a family of eight children. Colin was the eldest and on the death of his father in 1909, he took his place in the business and looked after us all until he enlisted in 1915. He was engaged to Dr Mary C Degaris [then a resident doctor at Tibooburra] who was afterwards with the British Women's hospital unit in Salonika (Greece)". The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) includes the following biography of Dr Degaris: "Mary Clementina (1881-1963), born on 16 December 1881, elder of twin girls, achieved distinction. Her father's Mildura business prospered just in time to pay for a final year's schooling for 'Clemmie' at the Methodist Ladies' College in Melbourne, where she was dux in 1898. She matriculated with exhibitions in English and history, then graduated with high honours in medicine from the University of Melbourne. In 1907 she became the second woman in Victoria to take out an M.D. On the death of her fiancé in World War I, she served for fifteen months as head of the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service attached to the Serbian Army and was decorated by the Serbian government. After post-graduate study overseas, she practiced with distinction as an obstetrician in Geelong and was a pioneer in the feeding of high protein diets to pregnant women. Her publications include Clinical Notes and Deductions of a Peripatetic (London, 1926). She died at Geelong on 18 November 1963.