Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Studio portrait of 5418 Acting Sergeant William Jacob Watriama, 18th Battalion. A gardener of Paddington NSW, he enlisted in the AIF on 15 December 1915 and embarked for overseas service six months later as a private with the 13th Reinforcements on HMAT Kyarra. He was wounded in the neck and suffered a broken fibula and was returned to Australia medically unfit on 27 May 1917. A Kanak born on Mare, one of the Loyalty Islands of New Caledonia, he lived in Sydney, NSW, from about 1890. He was a member of the St George Rifles militia unit for 12 years, during which time he served as a Trooper with the 2nd NSW Mounted Rifles in the Boer War and also enlisted in the Australian Naval & Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF), serving from 12 August 1914 until 4 March 1915. Hostile to French rule in New Caledonia, he urged British expansion of their territories in the Pacific. He has been described as a patriot and an idiosyncratic member of Australian society. He was a member of the National Association of New South Wales, an organisation "favouring conservative Australianism". He died in 1925 and his funeral was attended by Billy Hughes. 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 1930's, the Australian War Memorial purchased the original glass negatives from Algernon Darge.