Lambis Englezos is a Greek-born, retired Art Teacher from Melbourne, with a “magnificent obsession” to find, recover, and honour Australia’s missing diggers from the Battle of Fromelles – an obsession that grew from meeting many returned diggers as a child growing up in Melbourne.

While visiting the cemetery at Fromelles in 2000, Lambis noticed a large discrepancy between the numbers of AIF soldiers killed and those in marked graves. But where were the missing dead buried?

On studying the battle, Lambis and a small group of supporters came to the realisation that after the slaughter of allied solders under the incompetent command of Lieutenant-General Richard Haking, a proposed amnesty to collect the dead and wounded was refused by the British. The lack of amnesty led to the tragedy of many unreclaimed wounded dying horrific deaths over days in no-man’s-land.

A theory was developed that dead Australian diggers had been reclaimed from the battle field by the victorious Germans in July 1916 and buried elsewhere.

The team was now fired with the enthusiasm to solve this mystery. Efforts at getting official recognition of the issue of misplaced diggers and gaining information were constantly thwarted. But the team persisted. Using contemporary photographs and records they hypothesised that the bodies would be buried in mass graves close to the German light railway in the Fromelles area. They finally gained evidence from a time series of aerial photographs that soon after the battle the Germans had in fact dug eight pits close to the light railway adjacent to Pheasant Wood a short distance away from the front line. Aerial photographs showed that these pits were soon filled in.

With the likely spot located and the logic deemed plausible, the team finally persuaded the powers to carry out non-intrusive surveys with ground penetrating radar and imaging. This found the amount of material buried in the ground was too great to ignore. An archaeological dig was ordered.

In this session we will also be exploring Ballarat’s connections to discovering The last men of Fromelles