In April 1919, The Sun reported the Australian Graves Detachment had been formed to search the fields of Europe. “The work will take considerable time, but is regarded as sacred duty by all Australians to their fallen comrades,” the paper wrote.

A few months later, The Mercury reported from the now-silent Gallipoli peninsula revisiting the places of the Anzacs that “skeletons are still to be seen, showing where the wounded men managed to get into a bush or a little scrub to die. The outline of the body is still there, with knitted socks, puttees, and other fragments sufficient to identify”.

The Australian graves effort post-war occurred across three fronts: The Graves Registration Unit (GRU) at Gallipoli, the short-lived Australian Graves Detachment (AGD) and its replacement the Australian Graves Service (AGS), on the Western Front.

The AGD (Australian Graves Detachment), in particular, was made up of 1,100 men—a mix of volunteer ex-soldiers and new recruits, who had enlisted too late to see action.

Private Will McBeath was one such late recruit, still training in England when the Armistice was announced. Veteran volunteers included the Indigenous war veteran Edward Smith and Frank Cahir MM DSM, who was at the Gallipoli landing and then the Western Front.

The AGD worked in the fields at Pozières and Villers-Bretonneux, which had seen significant Australian loss of life. Detachment worker William Lee wrote “I had the interest of the work at heart, I had fought over areas with our troops and knew all its associations and tragedies”.

Working alongside Canadian and British teams, the AGD searched the battlefields with shovels and stakes to locate burial sites, find unrecorded bodies, and exhume remains.

Bodies were wrapped in canvas or hessian, tied with rope and taken by stretcher on horse-drawn carts to be reburied in a Commonwealth graveyard. Workers would consult with families back in Australia to determine gravestone wording. Once finalised, graves were carefully photographed as mementos for families.

The work was ghastly and unpleasant. The AGD often came across corpses that had lain exposed to the elements for months or years. Henry Whiting wrote “I can assure you it is a very unpleasant undertaking. Mainly all the men we have raised up to date have been killed 12 months and they are far from being decayed properly, so you can guess the constitution one needs. I have felt sick dozens of times.”

It was also dangerous work—active hand grenades and mines were a real threat, the ground was filthy, and the process of exhumation, transportation and reburial, physically exhausting. Will McBeath wrote “this week we have reburied 200 men... You would hardly think there were so many graves in the field… there are hundreds to come in yet.”

In some cases, men of the AGD were digging up people they knew. In other cases, they were doing gruesome detective work, digging up decaying unrecognisable bodies in mass graves and looking for any clue to the dead man’s name—an identity disc, pay book, letter or photo. William Lee wrote about why he persevered: “We carry on knowing we are identifying Australian boys who have never been identified. “

The grim routine took a lasting emotional toll. Frank Cahir volunteered for Graves Detachment duty in Europe without returning to his family in Victoria. When he finally did return, in 1921, he struggled adjusting to life in Australia, eventually suiciding; leaving behind a young family.

Frank Cahir’s example illustrates how difficult it is to understand what motivated these men, particularly the volunteers, to take on the work. Letters from the time show they drew on a mix of duty, loyalty and faith, sometimes simply needing to postpone the uncertainty of life after war. But the work was clearly tough to cope with.

By mid-1919 there were reported incidents of alcohol abuse, mutinous and risk-taking behaviour and accusations of impropriety. Two official inquiries into the AGD’s irregular performance were held, leading to a change in leadership.

The restructured Australian Graves Services (AGS) took over graves duties on the Western Front until 1922. Work undertaken and completed by the AGD, their companion units, the AGS and GRU, and associated Commonwealth workers left a lasting legacy for a 20th century community trying to resolve its sense of loss and grief.

Not all the missing were found.

This resulted in the erection of massive monuments at Villers-Bretonneux, Menin Gate and Lone Pine; places where their names would be recorded in perpetuity. But the regular, peaceful monuments and graves in those foreign cemeteries owe a great deal to this unique group of men who took on the harrowing task of looking after our dead.