With the camera at Anzac Cove

AT FIRST GLANCE, Australian World War I service records might be considered the exclusive and arcane province of military historians trying to piece together the “big picture”. But the carefully catalogued collection of enlistment papers, paybooks, medical records, official correspondence, photographs and ephemera contained in the National Archives of Australia also tells us much about the aspirations and ambitions of ordinary people during four terrible years and beyond.

Through an initiative known as Discovering Anzacs, thousands of paper files and photographs held by the Archives have been electronically scanned in recent years. Thanks to the modern miracle of digitisation, the stories of everyday Australians and New Zealanders caught up in WWI can now be readily retold.

One such story among many in the Archives’ digital files involves three young mates from Sydney. On 17 September 1914, Henry Lowe, a 21-year-old railway clerk, walked into a former Carmelite convent-turned-army-barracks in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville and signed up for military service. The following day, his workmates from the New South Wales Government Railways – fellow clerks Arthur Cook