Private Ernest Robert Oliver was killed on the night of July 19, 1916, during World War I. 

His remains were identified recently and will be buried at the Pheasant Wood Military Cemetery in Fromelles on the 98th anniversary of the battle. 

As the Germans cleared their lines after victory at the Battles of Fromelles, they collected the identity disks of the British and Australian soldiers killed, before burying them in a mass grave.  

They sent the disks to the Red Cross, which then passed them on to the soldiers’ families. 

Private Oliver was hit by a shell behind German lines during the Germans’ rout of Australian and British troops in northern France.

 He was last seen by his brother-in-law, Private Matthew O’Shannessy, who gave an account when he returned to Australia in 1919. 

“We heard him shout and a shell burst behind us. We got the live and injured men out afterwards, but nothing was seen of Oliver,” Private O’Shannessy related.

The mass grave where Private Oliver was buried was only identified in 2002 by former high school teacher Lambis Englezos, who noticed a discrepancy between the Red Cross’ wounded and missing register and the number of soldiers buried at Fromelles.

 His work and pressure on the Australian government led to the site being properly excavated in 2009. 

Of the 205 Australians and 45 Britons found in the mass grave, 61 are yet to be identified.

 Volunteers are working through information to give closure to the families of those still to be identified.

After more than a decade of fighting for proper burials for these diggers, Mr Englezos said providing a resting place should outweigh any other considerations. 

“This is our moral obligation. That comes before any practical or financial concern,” Mr Englezos said. 

As a team from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission was unearthing the remains in 2009, Private Oliver’s great nephew, Kevin Anderson, was looking into his family history. 

Mr Anderson initially thought Private Oliver was his grandfather, as his mother could not be sure. She was put up for adoption at birth and had little record of her biological family. 

After Mr Anderson confirmed his grandfather was, in fact, Private Oliver’s younger brother Raymond, he kept investigating the Fromelles connection. 

There were eye-witness accounts of Private Oliver’s death, but his remains had never been found, despite his identity disk being en sent home. 

There was also uncertainty at the time of his death. Two months after the battle, Private Oliver’s widow Alice received a telegram from London, saying her husband was missing. 

Mrs Oliver looked for answers at the time, but was left continually frustrated by the lack of information. 

“It took several letters to England for any more information, and even then it took months and months for anything further to happen.

 It was also possible he was wandering around France with shellshock, or he’d made his way back to England,” Mr Anderson said of his great uncle.  “While this enabled the families to hold out some hope, ex-soldiers knew it generally meant they had been killed.”

Private Oliver’s death was confirmed with a simple letter, listing only his name and status as killed in action. 

His name was on the Red Cross list Mr Englezos had used to narrow down the missing names of the 250 men killed behind enemy lines.  There was resistance to his push to find these men, he said, but Mr Englezos persisted. 

“We had active discouragement from the ‘owners of history’, but we kept on. The volunteers and advocates kept on with the project and we finally got through.” 

The recognition from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission came only in 2008 and led to confirmation on the site through research by a team from Glasgow University.  As the bodies were uncovered, identification proved difficult because the men’s identity disks had been taken by the Germans. 

Former police officer Tim Lycett, now based on the Gold Coast after 25 years with Victoria Police, has been interested in World War I history all his life, with his grandfather surviving both the Gallipoli landing and the trench warfare on the Western Front, documenting it all in a diary. 

Mr Lycett heard Mr Englezos speak during his campaign in 2006 and saw where there needed to be further efforts – descendants would need to be found to identify the bodies. 

He also came across the resistance to the project.

“There were academics who argued the relatives would not know or care about these diggers, which has consistently and completely been proven wrong. All that was needed for this was the effort. We have the technology for this kind of operation and can do so much more than the British, Australian and Canadian researchers from the 1920s. They did as much they could then, but they reached the limits of the technology,” Mr Lycett said. 

His efforts were necessary, he said, because families were not always aware their relatives were not in marked graves on European battlefields. 

“The government was only going to put out a call for family members to come forward, so I knew we had to reach to them in some way.” 

He started an internet forum devoted to Fromelles and moved the group to Facebook in 2012. “Without the internet, this would not have been possible,” he said. 

Using the connections made on the page, Mr Lycett provided the links to the majority of the DNA samples from relatives of the identified men. 

Private Oliver was counted among the dead just in time to be included in the Bacchus Marsh Avenue of Honour, which was established in a tree-planting ceremony in 1917. 

Great War Centenary Committee member Faye Threlfall said the ceremony would be recreated in 2017. 

“(At the original ceremony) the townpeople planted the oaks all at once to the sound of the bugle. We’ll do something similar.” 

Bacchus Marsh residents have been fighting to protect the memorial in recent years, with a truck bypass proposed by VicRoads and Moorabool Shire Council in 2010 looking to remove nine of the trees.

alex.hamer@fairfaxmedia.com.au