Can you help us identify Peter?

Duncan Peter Cameron was born March 1881, the youngest of seven surviving children of a wealthy Scottish-born pioneer overlander and pastoralist, Alexander Cameron (1810-1881) and his second wife, Ellen (nee Keogh) (1843-1894). Peter was the third ‘Duncan’ son in the family, but his two older namesake brothers had died in infancy. Alexander was also father to nine surviving children in a previous marriage to Margaret MacKillop. At the time of Peter’s birth, the family was living in Moreland Hall, “a substantially built and beautifully situated family residence built of bluestone, consisting of ten apartments, pantry, outhouses, coach-house and stabling, set on four acres” in Coburg, Victoria.

Source -

Alexander Cameron worked as a shepherd in Scotland before arriving in Australia as an assisted migrant in 1839. He died as one of the largest landholders in Victoria. He is known as the ‘King of Penola’, having occupied the land where the South Australian town of Penola now stands, and providing the land for the town. His first wife Margaret (Mackillop) Cameron was an aunt of Mary MacKillop, later canonised as St Mary of the Cross. Mary MacKillop lived with the Cameron family at Penola in 1860 before going on to co-found the Sisters of St Joseph.

After his first wife Margaret’s death in 1863, Alexander left Penola and expanded his landholdings between Dunkeld and Hamilton in Western Victoria and near St Arnaud. He is included in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Peter was only five months old when his 71 year old father died and was just twelve when his mother died in 1894. He was educated at Xavier College, Kew, reflecting the family’s strong Catholic traditions, but little else is now known about his life before enlistment.

In 1901, he and his older full brother Ewen were granted a lease of land at Carapooee, near St Arnaud, probably from his father’s holdings. However, when the lease was renewed the next year, it was only in Ewen’s name. In 1912, Peter was on the electoral roll in Western Australia, listed as a farmer in the wheat belt town of Narrogin. Ewen had been farming there since at least 1906 and had married and started a family. He may have been joined by Peter to jointly run leases. However, from 1911 there was a prolonged drought and in April 1913, notice was given of a mortgagee sale of three leases, two held by Ewen, and one held by Peter.

Peter enlisted in the early days of the war, signing his attestation paper as D. P. Cameron on 26 September 1914. He named Ewen, now living in Geraldton, as his next of kin. Peter was assigned to the 2nd Reinforcements of the 11th Battalion and departed Perth on 22 February 1915 on HMAT A50 Itonus for the camps in Egypt, arriving on 17 March. Peter was not to see much of Egypt. During the voyage he had been diagnosed with gonorrhoea and was admitted to hospital on arrival. His medical notes suggest that was a reappearance of an infection which he had contracted earlier. Having any sexually transmitted disease in Egypt meant immediate transfer to Abbasia Venereal Hospital, and during the early part of the war return to Australia after treatment.

So, on 28 April, the day after Peter was discharged from hospital, he sailed from Suez, arriving in Melbourne on 22 May. It is difficult to be sure of the sequence of events after his return to Australia. It appears that he was sent to Broadmeadows Camp in Melbourne where he was medically examined and determined to be unfit for service. In the meantime, he had been assigned to 7th Reinforcements 6th Battalion and sent for training at Seymour. It took until 2 July for him to be discharged. Almost certainly upset, he immediately filled in a new attestation paper, but the discharge was confirmed.

Curiously, he appears In the Victorian Police Gazette of 19 August 1915, p.628, is a section headed “DESERTERS FROM H.M. SERVICE. The following are charged, on warrants, with deserting from the Australian Imperial Force at Seymour”.

The physical description is taken from his attestation paper. It is difficult to explain this as anything other than a mistake. His file shows that he had been officially discharged, and also that he had attempted to re-enlist after discharge.

Peter was still determined to serve. On 19 July, he was at Keswick Barracks in Adelaide. Given his history, he signed his attestation form as Peter Cameron 16 October, vs D. P. Cameron that he used in his earlier enlistment. He also added two years to his age, said he was born in Hamilton, Victoria (where his father had his main property), and declared that he had never previously been in or been rejected by the military. His brother, Ewen, listed as E. A Cameron, who was now working for International Harvester Company in Perth, was again his next of kin. The ‘new recruit’ passed his medical and was sent to Mitcham Camp to begin his training.

Peter was assigned to A Company of the 32nd Battalion when it was formed at Mitcham, South Australia on 9 August 1915. A and B Companies were made up of recruits from South Australia and C and D Companies came from Western Australia. There was much fanfare about this new battalion in South Australia, with gatherings, community support, Cheer-up Society activities, reviews of the troops by the governor, and parades through the streets of Adelaide. On 16 September, the South Australian members of the Battalion moved to a new camp at Cheltenham Racecourse, where they were joined at the end of September by the West Australians who had begun their training at Blackboy Hill near Perth.

Training continued at Cheltenham until departure. (It will never be known if Peter was recognised by any of the West Australians in the Battalion. There were at least two men from Narrogin in the West Australian contingent, as well as farmers from the surrounding region.)

Most of the Battalion, including Peter, departed for Egypt on 18 November 1915, HMAT A2 Geelong, the transport section had left ten days earlier on HMAT A13 Katuna. As reported in The Adelaide Register:

The 32nd arrived in Suez on 14 December 1915 and moved to El Ferdan just before Christmas. A month later they marched to Ismailia and then to the major camp at Tel-el-Kebir where they stayed for February and most of March. Tel-el-Kebir was about 110 km northeast of Cairo and the 40,000 men in the camp were comprised of Gallipoli veterans and the thousands of reinforcements arriving regularly from Australia. Their next stop was at Duntroon Plateau and then at Ferry Post until the end of May where they trained and guarded the Suez Canal. Their last posting in Egypt was a few weeks at Moascar.

One soldier’s diary complained of being “sick up to the neck of heat and flies”, of the scarcity of water during their long marches through the sand and he described some of the food as “dog biscuits and bully beef”. He did go on to mention good times as well with swims, mail from home, visiting the local sights and the like.

Source - AWM C2081789 Diary of Theodor Milton PFLAUM 1915-16, page 29, page 12

During their time in Egypt the 32nd had the honour of being inspected by H.R.H. Prince of Wales.

After spending six months in Egypt, the call to support the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front came in mid-June. The 32nd left from Alexandria on the ship Transylvania on 17 June 1916, arriving at Marseilles, France on 23 June 1916 and they then immediately entrained for a three-day train trip to Steenbecque. Their route took them to a station just out of Paris, within sight of the Eiffel Tower, through Boulogne and Calais, with a view of the English Channel, before disembarking and marching to their camp at Morbecque, about 30 kilometres from Fleurbaix. Theodor Pflaum (No. 327) and Wesley Choat (No. 68) wrote about the trip:

They were headed to the area of Fleurbaix in northern France which was known as the ‘Nursery Sector’ – a supposedly relatively quiet area where inexperienced Allied troops could learn the harsh realities of Western Front trench warfare against the Germans. But the quiet times did not last long. Training continued with a focus on bayonets and the use of gas masks, assuredly with a greater emphasis, given their position near the front. The 32nd moved to the Front on 14 July and Peter was into the trenches for the first time on 16 July, only three weeks after arriving in France.

On the 17th they were reconnoitring the trenches and cutting passages through the barbed wire, preparing for an attack, but it was delayed due to the weather. D Company’s Lieutenant Sam Mills’ letters home were optimistic for the coming battle:

The overall plan was to use brigades from the Australian Fifth Division to conduct a diversionary assault on the German trenches at Fromelles. The 32nd Battalion’s position was on the extreme left flank, with only 100 metres of No Man’s Land to get the German trenches. As they advanced, they were to link up with the 31st Battalion on their right. However, their position made the job more difficult, as not only did they have to protect themselves while advancing, but they also had to block off the Germans on their left, to stop them from coming around behind them. On the morning of the 18th, A Company and C Company went into the trenches to relieve B and D Companies, who rejoined the next day.

The Zero Hour for advancing from their front-line trenches was to be 5.45 PM, but the Germans knew this attack was coming and were well-prepared. They opened a massive artillery bombardment on the Australians at 5.15 PM, causing chaos and many casualties. The charge over the parapet began at 5.53 PM. Peter’s A company, along with C company were in the first and second waves to go. B & D company were in the third and fourth. They were successful in the initial assaults and by 6.30 PM were in control of the German’s 1st line system (map Trench B), which was described as:

Unfortunately, with the success of their attack, ‘friendly’ artillery fire caused a large number of casualties because the artillery observers were unable to confirm the position of the Australian gains. They were able to take out a German machine gun in their early advances, but were being “seriously enfiladed” from their left flank.

By 8.30 PM their left flank had come under heavy bombardment with high explosives and shrapnel. Return bombardment support was provided and the 32nd were told that “the trenches were to be held at all costs”.

Source - AWM4 23/49/12, 32nd Battalion War Diaries, July 1916, page 12

Fighting continued through the night. The Australians made a further charge at the main German line beyond Trench B, but they were low on grenades, there was machine gun fire from behind them from the emplacement at Delangre Farm and they were so far advanced that they were getting shelled by both sides. In the early morning of the 20th, the Germans began a counterattack from the Australian’s left flank, bombing and advancing into Trench A (map). Given the Australian advances that had been made earlier, the rear Trench E had been left almost empty, which then enabled the Germans to regain that trench and envelop the men of the 32nd. At 5.30 AM the Germans attacked from both flanks in force and with bombing parties. Having only a few grenades left, the only resistance they could offer was with rifles:

What was left of the 32nd had finally withdrawn by 7.30 AM on the 20th. The initial roll call count was devastating – 71 killed, 375 wounded and 219 missing, including Peter. To get some perspective of the battle, when Charles Bean, Australia’s official war historian, attended the battlefield two and half years late, he observed a large quantity of bones, torn uniforms and Australian kit still on the battlefield. The final impact was that 228 soldiers of the 32nd Battalion were killed or died from wounds sustained at the battle and, of this, 166 were unidentified. Lieutenant Sam Mills survived the battle. In his letters home, he recalls the bravery of the men:

Peter Cameron was killed during the Battle of Fromelles. No record or eye-witness account survives to give any indication about what might have happened to him during the battle. On 11 August, notification of Peter’s death was sent to the Military Commandant in Perth. Soon after, a Roman Catholic priest would have arrived at Ewen Cameron’s home in Gloucester St, Perth to inform him, as next of kin, of his brother’s death. His death was publicly notified in the 197th Casualty list on August 22. Late in September, Ewen, now also in the military, inserted his brother’s death notice in Perth newspapers.

In October 1916, Ewen wrote to Base Records asking for any particulars about the death of his brother and that Peter’s kit be forwarded to him.

Base Records could only reply that they had no further information other than that he had been killed and had received no advice about shipment of personal effects. Ewan made several further enquiries about Peter’s kit, but no personal items were returned from France. There is no record that Ewen was ever told that his brother had no known grave. In March 1918, W.S. Keast, a Victorian Member of Parliament, wrote to the Minister of Defence because of an enquiry by Peter’s sister, who he described as the ‘Mother Superior’ at St Evin’s Hospital in Fitzroy, Melbourne. The sister knew accurately the Adelaide enrolment details of her brother and knew that Peter had been on a casualty list as killed on 19 July 1916, but:

Base Records responded by confirming that Peter had been killed and stating that any further details would be communicated to his next of kin. It may be that the family in Melbourne and elsewhere was ‘anxious and worried’, (like many other families), just because of the total lack of any further information since they had been informed of his death. Because Base Records had received no extra information about Peter, they had nothing to tell Ewen as next of kin, and so they did not contact him. All that the family knew was that he had been killed, but nothing more. They were never told where in France he had been killed, the circumstances of his death, or even that he had no known grave. Ewen served as a driver and an air mechanic joined the Air Force in 1917. He spent most of the war at Wendover and arrived in France in 1918, just after the armistice.

‘Peter’ Cameron’s file was eventually combined with the file of the discharged ‘Duncan Peter Cameron’ and he appears on the First World War Nominal Roll and the Australian War Memorial Roll of Honour under Duncan Peter Cameron. His first enlistment on 26 September remained his official enlistment date. But it appears the military’s realisation that they were the same man did not come until several years after the war. In all his communication with the military, Ewen Cameron had referred to his brother by his enlisted name of Peter and even the indirect communication of his sister, the Mother Superior, used this name.

Ewen received Peter’s war medals in 1921 and the Memorial Plaque and Memorial Scroll (both given to the next of kin of men who were killed) were issued in 1921 in Peter Cameron’s name in the same year. A page in Peter’s file refers to medals being issued in Duncan’s name, but they were returned and cancelled in 1925.

Ewen did not return the 1921 Roll of Honour Circular which was sent to next of kin of deceased men and used to assist compilation of the Roll of Honour. Peter’s circular was later ‘Compiled by Official Historian’s Staff’, and it may have been their research which made the connection between the two enlistments – Duncan Peter and Peter. The correct identification was made before February 1925. The list of names for inscription on the panels of the V.C Corner Australian Cemetery Memorial at Fromelles, which commemorates all the Australians killed at Fromelles whose bodies were not recovered after the battle was finalised in February 1925. ‘D.P. Cameron’ is inscribed on Panel 5 of the Memorial.

Peter’s remains were not recovered; he has no known grave. After the battle, the Germans recovered 250 Australian soldiers and placed them in a burial pit at Pheasant Wood. This grave was discovered in 2008 and since then efforts have been underway to identify these soldiers by DNA testing from family members. As of 2024, 180 of the soldiers have been identified, including 41 of the 166 unidentified soldiers from the 32nd Battalion.

We welcome all branches of Peter’s family to come forward to donate DNA to help with his identification. If you know anything of family contacts, please contact the Fromelles Association. We hope that one day Peter will be named and honoured with a known grave.

Please visit Fromelles.info to follow the ongoing identification project and Peter’s story.