The first major reports of Australian war casualties arrived in 1915 after the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey. Casualty lists were published in the national and local newspapers.

Pictured here is one of the early casualty list reports from the Australian engagements at Gallipoli: 1686 wounded in the Dardenelles, reported in the Age newspaper on the 15 May 1915.

The numbers of wounded and dead from Gallipoli were a dreadful shock. No one then had any idea how high the number of dead would reach once the Australians were sent to the Western Front of France and Belgium, where from 1916 to1918 tens of thousands of Australian soldiers died. Campaigns such as Fromelles, Somme 1, Ypres/Passchendaele and Menin Road would become notorious for the number of Australian deaths in battle.

Pictured here is a crowd gathered on a Sunday morning outside the Melbourne offices of the newspaper The Argus, late in 1915.

The caption on the picture, from CEW Bean’s Official History of the First World War, reads: ‘Newspapers were not ordinarily published on Sunday in Melbourne, but special editions were sometimes issued during the war. The news most anxiously awaited was always that contained in the lists of casualties.’ Families might read in the newspaper that their loved one was classified as “missing in action”.

Amongst the military, soldiers knew that “missing in action” meant the person was probably dead. But few people in Australia in 1915 comprehended how suddenly and brutally bodies could be destroyed by 20th century mechanised warfare.

For those at home being informed someone was “missing” generated intense anxiety because it implied there was a hope of life.

Pictured here is a makeshift wooden cross marking a grave on a ridge at Gallipoli in 1915.

The confronting stories of dead bodies lying on the battlefields of WW1 are well known: military authorities were overwhelmed by casualty numbers. Soldiers dealt with the scene of death in many ways, including inventing macabre and descriptive names for places where corpses and body parts lay exposed for weeks or longer.

Bodies weren’t left lying in the open callously – burial duty was constant. Soldiers would find and bury dead comrades where they could, looking after their friend’s graves often with great care and reverence.

But not all bodies could be buried or found.

If a battle had been lost, there was little chance to go into enemy territory and seek out fallen mates, such as, for instance, at Gallipoli, where almost half the Australians who died there have no known grave.

Even in friendly territory not all bodies were found to be buried. Machine weapons could obliterate bodies beyond recognition.

Sometimes even the dead who had been identified and carefully buried would be churned into the earth as territory shifted back and forth over the four years of war.

The dual-identity disc system –dog-tags – was introduced during the First World War. It helped identify partial body remains and otherwise unrecognisable bodies.

Pictured here is the aluminium identity tag worn by World War I serviceman G.W. Connell, #1924 (aka 1924A), during his service in the Middle East during World War I.

Private George Walter Connell, a young country labourer from Victoria, served at Gallipoli in the 5th Battalion from mid-1915. He returned to Australia in 1916 after receiving a gunshot wound to the head. He lived for many decades more, and in 1967 was living at 3 Vail St, Prahran.

The war ended in November 1918. Pictured here is one of the first attempts to number the dead.

Reported in March 1919, an estimated 8 million people were dead from the conflict. Scholars now estimate that if you include civilian casualties, at least twice that number, 16 million, died.