The Australian Red Cross was formed in Melbourne in 1914 directly in response to the First World War by Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, the wife of the Australian Governor-General.

Both men and women volunteered to work for the Red Cross, whose remit was to look after the sick and wounded.

The Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Information Bureau to trace the whereabouts of the sick, missing and wounded was formed in 1915 after the death tolls from Gallipoli began filtering through.

Pictured here is a cablegram to Lady Helen Munro Ferguson from Egypt in July 1915 announcing the formation of a Red Cross Information Bureau for the Sick, Wounded, Killed and Missing.

The name would later be changed to the ‘Information Bureau’ or the ‘Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau’.

Volunteer lawyers, searchers, and an army of clerical workers, men and women, worked for the Bureau to provide answers for families of the missing, a detective effort that has now come to be known as ‘tracing’.

Central to the Bureau’s operation was an office hub close to the fighting. The first Bureau was in Cairo, close to the Australians in Gallipoli and the Middle East, and it then moved to London when the Australians moved to the Western Front.

The operational head, known as the secretary, of the Cairo and then the London bureau was a remarkable young woman called Vera Deakin, who was the daughter of the ex-prime minister Alfred Deakin.

Each Australian state had an Information Bureau division, hosted by law firms as a volunteer or pro-bono contribution to the war effort by the legal profession.

The Victorian Division of the Australian Red Cross Information Bureau was located at the Colonial Mutual Chambers at 60 Market Street Melbourne and was managed by the Honourable Secretary John Beacham Kiddle a well-respected Melbourne solicitor.

Pictured here is the Colonial Mutual Chambers building (the tall building to the right of the picture), which was a well-known edifice near the corner of Collins and Market Streets, in 1926, a few years after the Victorian division bureau closed due to the war ending.

Families looking for answers would write to or visit their state division bureau. This office would forward the request on to the central bureau in Cairo or London operated by Vera Deakin and her colleague Winifred Johnson and a clerical team of mainly women. They would in turn pass assignments to a group of field detectives called searchers, a select group of men (some searchers were women but the majority were men) who would seek details from eyewitnesses about the last known location of the missing.

Pictured here is the South Australian Division Red Cross Missing and Wounded Bureau card for Private Joseph James Woodgate of the 50th Infantry Battalion.

He was announced as missing in action in France on the 2 April 1917. He had two enquiries as to his status initiated in 1917, one from a friend of the relatives and one from his aunt. The Bureau sent out searchers for eyewitness reports and confirmed that Private Woodgate was killed on the attack on Noreuil, France, 2 April 1917.

This card is one of many thousands of cards created by the state and international divisions of the Australian Red Cross Missing and Wounded Enquiry Bureau during WW1.

Searchers would move about the ‘hospitals, convalescent camps, bases, and detail camps’ carrying the details of missing men and trying to locate them, or eyewitnesses who could provide testimony to the whereabouts of the missing person.

The reports of the searchers and eyewitnesses would be compiled and assessed by the central bureau, and then sent back to the state bureaus to be forwarded to the families requesting information.

Pictured here are Red Cross searchers and their cars at Le Touquet, France. During WW1 Le Touquet was home of the Red Cross hospital for British wounded troops.

To the right of the picture is Australian searcher Stanley Addison seated behind the wheel of his car ‘Gladys’, which he brought to Europe at his own expense.

Pictured here is one of the London Bureau’s rooms at the Red Cross headquarters at 36 Grosvenor Place London, in 1918. Vera Deakin is on the telephone in the rear far left of the photograph.

The organisation documented enquiries systematically, and dispatched tens of thousands of answers per year. The volume of work was incredible, the letters from families filled with anguish, and dealing with the rush of queries after such devastating engagements at Passchendaele, Ypres and Messines on the Western Front, was emotionally draining, particularly when those in the offices and on the ground knew that those reported as ‘missing’ would in most cases be found to be dead.

Yet every enquiry deserved investigation and a letter home.

The work continued after the declaration of Armistice in 1918, as many soldiers still remained classified as ‘missing in action’ when the war ended. Pictured here is Vera Deakin, far right, in the London Bureau in 1919.

The Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau would reopen at the outbreak of World War 2, helmed again by Vera Deakin, now using her married title Lady White.

Throughout the 20th century the Red Cross Tracing Service, as it became known, would be activated in times of natural disaster and humanitarian crisis, migration and conflict around the world, helping families trace the whereabouts of missing loved ones.

Today the service still operates as part of a global response network called Restoring Family Links.