Casualties on the Home Front
LONG before the extensive and frightening casualty lists monopolized the Melbourne papers in the years 1914 – 1918, there were occasional casualties which occurred in a training context. The town of ...
Category Archives: Local History
A new honour for a Bomber Command veteran
LATE in 2014 Keith Stevens, DFM, a long-time resident of the Village Glen at Rosebud, was informed that the President of the Republic of France had awarded him the highest level of chevalier (or knig...
Montague Romeo: rejected four times but paid the supreme sacrifice
MONTAGUE Romeo was born in Hastings to Charles and Katherine (nee Howard) Romeo in 1894. He first enlisted in Hastings on 11th September, 1914 but was discharged on 5th October, 1914 as being “unlike...
The Western Front – where the Bartrams rest
1. BULLECOURT – Arnold Roy Bartram, KIA 13th May, 1917. BULLECOURT was the scene of two costly battles for the AIF, the first beginning in the bitterly cold dawn of 11th April, 1917 when, after a nig...
A tragic year for the Bartrams
Frankston’s Avenue of Honour In her book “Echoes from the Front”, Val Latimer tells how as early as 1917 a committee was formed to honour all those from the Frankston District who served in World War...
Gallipoli – The making of a nation
THE Gallipoli Campaign has long been regarded as being the birth of our nation; the moment the newly Federated Australia proved itself worthy to stand on its own two feet in the dominion of the Brit...
The wreck of the Sierra Nevada
By Cameron McCullough The entrance to Port Phillip is considered to hold some of the most treacherous waters in the world. The Rip, as it is known, has a large tidal flow through a relatively ...
A hermit life less ordinary
ONE of Frankston’s most colourful personalities at the turn of last century was an unlikely celebrity who sought obscurity in a hermit’s existence. According to stories circulating at the time, his e...
Brutal murder at Mt Martha never solved
By Isabel Cassidy HOMICIDE detectives who investigated the murder of 14-year-old Shirley May Collins (pictured), whose battered body was found in September 1953 at Mt Martha, described the murder as...
Four airmen killed in Arthurs Seat crash
Arthurs Seat has been the scene of two RAAF aircraft crashes. The first was an Avro Anson A4 on 10 August 1938, resulting in the loss of four lives and only one survivor. The second was a Bristol Bea...
