Fromelles

by Tim Lycett, Sandra Playle

For Honor. For Courage. For Remembrance. The Battle of Fromelles in France during World War I was Australia's worst 24 hours. Thousands of men were shot down amid the horror of that blundered attack. The whereabouts of hundreds of dead soldiers was unknown for almost a century until the discovery in 2008 of unmarked mass graves at Pheasant Wood. The remains of these 250 men sparked a mission to reclaim their identities. Tim Lycett and Sandra Playle became key players in the identification project, volunteering their time and working alongside other amateur advocates and international experts. Tim tells how they pieced together fragments of information from relics, military records, and family histories using genealogy data and DNA analysis. They fought to have authorities reopen investigations in their quest to find the untold stories of the diggers and reconnect them with their families. This is an inspiring, heart-rending account of war, its aftermath, and its effect on the lives of the lost diggers' descendants.

272 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2017

About the author

Tim Lycett is a former Victorian police officer and crime-scene specialist with 25 years experience. For his service to the community he has been awarded the Victoria Police Service Medal and the National Medal. He has been performing genealogical research for the past fifteen years but his particular area of expertise is researching Australia's First World War soldiers; a passion he has undertaken for more than twenty years.

During this time he has assisted a great many people to locate, identify and understand their ancestor's military service. Tim is well established within the international military research community and has written several biographies of Australian soldiers that have appeared in national newspapers and military history magazines. His lifelong interest in the First World War and his own historical research led him to establish the Fromelles Descendant Database, which voluntarily works with soldiers' descendants to help identify the lost World War I Australian diggers recently discovered buried in mass graves at Pheasant Wood, France.

Tim now lives on the Gold Coast with his wife.