A shirt marked “Anderson” names a lost Digger after 109 years, one of 11 identified on the eve of Remembrance Day

For 107 years, the grave at Hooge Crater Cemetery in Belgium held “an unknown Australian soldier”. The clue to who he was sat in the record the whole time: the grave registration note from 1919 said “Anderson on shirt”.

On Tuesday night the federal government confirmed that the soldier is Lieutenant Andrew Anderson of the 7th Australian Machine Gun Company, from Bundaberg in Queensland, killed at the Battle of Menin Road near Ypres on 20 September 1917, aged 23. He is one of 11 Australian First World War soldiers formally identified by the Australian Army in time for Remembrance Day, which on Wednesday marks 108 years since the Armistice.

Mr Marles said the identification was “deeply personal”: Lieutenant Anderson was his great-uncle.

Who are the 11?

The Army named them as:

• Private Roy Hawkins, 3rd Battalion, of Armidale, NSW
• Sergeant Charles Henry Nicholls, 46th Battalion, of Ballarat, Victoria
• Lieutenant Howard Victor Morey, 58th Battalion, of Lilydale, Victoria
• Lieutenant John Maher Lyons MC, MM, MSM, 17th Battalion, of Randwick, NSW
• Lieutenant Andrew Anderson, 7th Australian Machine Gun Company, of Bundaberg, Queensland
• Second Lieutenant James Albert McMichael, 37th Battalion, of Melbourne, Victoria
• Private Thomas Easton, 30th Battalion, of Adamstown, NSW
• Corporal Harry Maitland Whiteoak, 2nd Australian Field Ambulance, of Preston, Victoria
• Private George Laban Lupson, 2nd Australian Field Ambulance, of Fremantle, WA
• Private James Campbell, 2nd Australian Field Ambulance, of Queenstown, Tasmania
• Lance Corporal Alexander Joseph Jack, 2nd Australian Field Ambulance, of Brunswick, Victoria

Seven served in infantry and machine-gun units. The other four were field ambulance men killed together when a shell hit their Regimental Aid Post during the Second Battle of Bullecourt in May 1917. Their remains were recovered in France in April last year.

Between them, the men died at Fromelles, the Somme, Bullecourt, Menin Road, Passchendaele, Amiens and the Advance to the Hindenburg Line: almost the full map of Australia’s war in France and Belgium.

How do you name a soldier after a century?

Slowly. Lieutenant Anderson was buried on the battlefield near Westhoek by the men he served with; an eyewitness described a roadside grave under a wooden cross. In March 1919, an unknown soldier was recovered from almost exactly that spot and reburied at Hooge Crater. An independent researcher spotted the possible link and submitted her findings in 2020. The Army’s Unrecovered War Casualties team then built what it calls an evidentiary link between the two.

The same team worked with the Office of Australian War Graves, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, French authorities, independent researchers and descendants, combining archival, archaeological and DNA evidence. Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh said the men “will be commemorated by name for the first time in more than a century”.

Who was Thomas Easton?

Private Easton is a reminder of who these men were before the war. Born at Jesmond in 1888, he was a miner at Teralba, near Newcastle, when he enlisted in Newcastle in 1915. He sailed from Sydney on HMAT Ballarat on 16 February 1916, reached France that June and was killed at Fromelles on 19-20 July 1916, in the 5th Australian Division’s first major action on the Western Front. The division suffered more than 5,500 casualties in a single night. He lies in Fromelles (Pheasant Wood) Military Cemetery, which holds the 250 Australians buried by German forces in a mass grave after the battle.

Why does this still matter?

Fromelles shows the scale of the task. The mass grave at Pheasant Wood was located in 2008 after years of work by Melbourne amateur historian Lambis Englezos, and all 250 men were reburied by 2010, many as unknowns. By April this year, Defence had named 181 of them. Each new name depends on a descendant giving DNA, a researcher reading an old file differently, or a dig turning up a badge or a button.

For families, it ends generations of uncertainty. For everyone else, it turns “known unto God” into a person with a hometown: a miner from Teralba, a lieutenant from Bundaberg, four field ambulance men who died together at their aid post.