Jeparit learns about Vera Deakin

Around 60 people attended the ANZAC Day commemoration in the Jeparit Memorial Hall, organised by the Jeparit RSL, in addition to pupils from the Jeparit Primary School and Hindmarsh Shire councillors, Roger Aitken, Tony Clark and the mayor Ron Ismay.

By Tayyaab Masroor

OAM Pam Cupper was the guest speaker at the Jeparit Anzac day service.

The guest speaker at this year’s commemoration was WWI historian Pam Cupper OAM of Dimboola.

More than 40 years ago, Pam and her husband, Phil Taylor, began cycling around the WWI battlefields in Belgium and France.

This led to a decades-long passion for researching and sharing stories about the War with others, including producing a guidebook on Gallipoli.

Pam has regularly led tours to battlefield sites in France, Belgium and Turkey.

To prepare for her address, Pam researched a number of those whose names are on Jeparit’s WWI monument, including James Blackley, his cousin James Hook, Raymond Baldock and Herbert Bailey.

Pam told the audience that approximately one-third of Australians who died during the First World War - around 18,000 - have no known grave because their bodies were not identified and buried or their graves were lost in subsequent fighting or they were buried at sea.

Of the 23 men killed and named on Jeparit’s World war 1 monument, eight have no known grave.

Many families received the dreaded notification that a family member had been ‘Reported missing’.

More than 100 years ago, it was difficult for the families of any of the 23 local enlistees - and the thousands of others - who had perished to visualise their sons’, brothers’ or fathers’ graves.

In 1915, the number of fallen without known graves led the Australian Red Cross to establish the ‘Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau’.

Vera Deakin, daughter of an earlier Australian Prime Minister, was appointed secretary and devoted the next three years to supporting families seeking their men’s burial locations.

Based initially in Egypt, the Bureau focused on handling thousands of enquiries about those reported missing at Gallipoli.

In 1916, the Bureau moved to London and concentrated on trying to trace Western Front missing.

In just one year, the Bureau received 25,000 requests from Australia for information about ‘the missing’ or the ‘wounded’ or the dead.

Pam described in detail the lengths to which the Bureau went to determine what had happened to many of the missing, including interviewing survivors on the battlefields and in hospitals.

All these years later, DNA testing is being used to identify some of the long-missing.

Pam’s address highlighted Vera Deakin’s tireless commitment to helping families of the missing and commented that, despite her privilege, Vera Deakin had given up the war years in service to others.

“The enquiries remind us that for every Australian serving overseas, a group of family and friends, in one sense, went with them,” she said.

“It is so appropriate, then, to reflect on Jeparit’s Memorial - the figure of a woman watching over the names of those who served.”

Pam was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 2021 for her services to education and the preservation of Australia’s military history.

Pam will lead another tour to Gallipoli and the Western Front later this year.

By Carige Proctor