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heavy minenwerfer [trench mortar] emplacement carried out in accordance with Falkenhayn’s orders – and which may or may not have been completed by 19 July 1916.
    Williams backed up this view with a suggestion that when writing the 21RIR unit history, the author may have confused the German word for grave ‘das Grab’ with the similar word for trench ‘der Graben’. He went on to suggest that if there were remains in the pits at Pheasant Wood they were likely to be those of Portuguese soldiers killed in the area in early 1918.
    Williams then downplayed the overall importance of the Australians’ contribution to the war in the area by claiming the Australian dead would represent little more than 5 per cent of the 20,000 ‘Germans, Britons, Frenchmen, Indians, Anzacs, Canadians and Portuguese killed during the war in fighting around Fromelles’, adding: ‘Only a fraction of those men have known graves’.
    When Lambis gave Chris Bryett a copy of John Williams’ elevenpage report it was like a red rag to a bull.
To say I was disappointed was a massive understatement. He got the names of battalions and sources wrong, basic facts that should never have been wrong. His supposition that the pits had been dug before the battle was without any foundation.
    While Chris was near his boiling point, Lambis remained staunch in his belief that the proper process must be followed and that it would eventually prove his theories correct.

    Fromelles, just after the cessation of hostilities (above) and today (below). The village was home to around 1000 people in 200 houses at the outbreak of the war. It was linked to Lille by railway and electricity had reached it just before the war. The church dated from the late fourteenth century. By war’s end the village had been reduced to little more than a pile of rubble, surrounded by hundreds of concrete blockhouses and kilometres of trenches. Today Fromelles is again a thriving village with around 1000 inhabitants. ( TOP: AWM PHOTO E03723; BOTTOM: PATRICK LINDSAY PHOTO )
Around Anzac Day of 2006, I formed the opinion that the Panel wasn’t ever going to come back with a conclusion that was useful to Lambis. And that the only way we would ever get the Panel to do anything useful or positive or helpful, so far as we would assess it, would be if we got a private dig running.
    Chris started getting serious about putting a team together during May through to July. He created an association he called ROAM (Recovering Overseas Australia’s Missing Inc.). Progress was relatively slow until he started contacting the world archaeological community in July of 2006. He found an expert website where you can seek comment or help on projects. His email explaining the situation at Pheasant Wood brought a dozen responses.
Two of them said, if you don’t pick me, Richard Wright is your boy. I’d never heard of him, didn’t know him from a bar of soap. I saw he was a professor and I thought, professor, that’s going to be a bit hard. But he also responded so I made contact … and mass graves are his bag.
    Richard Vernon Stafford Wright is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, where he had taught since 1961 after returning as an honours graduate from Cambridge. He had extensive experience in mass grave investigations in Bosnia and Croatia and was regarded as a world expert in the field. Wright referred Chris to Jon Sterenberg, a British forensic archaeologist who had extensive experience in mass-grave identification and recovery in Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Iraq and East Timor. Sterenberg was then the Director of Excavations and Examinations for the International Commission on Missing Persons in Bosnia. While searching for the security team member, Chris connected with another British archaeologist, Martin Brown. Brown referred Chris to Rod Scott, who did work for the British Ministry of Defence and the army. Chris then realised how valuable the tour guide