Darge Photographic Company collection of negatives

Studio portrait of 455 Private (Pte) John Fitzgerald Nugent, 21st Battalion from Brisbane, Queensland. A 21 year old driver prior to enlistment on 26 January 1915, he embarked for overseas with B Company from Melbourne on 10 May 1915 aboard HMAT Ulysses. After serving at Gallipoli, he transferred to the Imperial Camel Corps in Egypt on 1 February 1916. He was wounded in action near Gaza on 19 April 1917 and evacuated to Cairo for medical treatment. While enroute back to Australia, he was taken ill and transferred to No 2 General Hospital at Cape Town, South Africa where he died of meningitis on 15 August 1917. He is buried in the Cape Town (Maitland) Cemetery. 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. The names are transcribed as they appear in the notebooks.