Fromelles Site Works

Major General Mike O’Brien, the senior Australian Army Officer with responsibility for the investigation and recovery of any Australian War Dead at Fromelles, recently outlined at the FFFAIF Regional Meeting at Bathurst, the broad timetable for the development of the new Commonwealth War Grave Commission (CWGC) Cemetery at Fromelles and the exhumation of the soldiers remains at Pheasant Wood and their re-interment in the new cemetery:

February 2009 – CWGC announced Oxford Archaeology as the successful tenderer for exhuming the soldier remains;
March 2009  – expected the CWGC will announce the successful tenderer for scientific testing (including DNA analysis) of the remains;
May 2009 – exhumations to commence;
Late 2009 – preparation of the new CWGC Cemetery completed;
February 2010 – reburial of soldier’s remains in the new CWGC Cemetery will commence at a rate of about 20 soldiers per day with a simple service for each soldier;
March 2010 – a Joint Information Board will consider the scientific and physical evidence to assign identities to those soldiers where DNA or other evidence indicates a match;
April 2010 – Next of Kin will be advised of the outcome of the identification process;
19 July 2010 – the Dedication Ceremony for the new CWGC Cemetery will take place.

 As the following photographs from Carole Laignel, Secretary of the Fromelles & Weppes Terre de Mémoire 14-18 show, the site development work has commenced (visit the FWTM website at www.asbf14-18.org).

Bilingual signs have been erected where the new access road to Pheasant Wood joins the main road.

Site-work has commenced on the development of the new Commonwealth War Grave Commission (CWGC) Cemetery with the removal of some of the top soil.  Convoys of large trucks have been involved in the site preparation work.

Heavy earth moving equipment has been used in the development of access roads and site preparations.

The burial pits before Pheasant Wood have been largely undisturbed for the past 9 decades, but site preparations have now commenced so that the exhumations can commence in early May.

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The Families and Friends of the First AIF thanks the Australian, UK and French governments for affording Australian and British soldiers – presently buried in mass graves at Pheasant Wood – dignified individual reburials in a new CWGC cemetery at Fromelles, and applauds Minister Snowdon and his British counterpart, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence and Minister for Veterans, Kevan Jones MP, for their joint decision to DNA test the remains at exhumation and use every reasonable method to attempt identification of each soldier.