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who had been helping him connect with the various experts was, so he asked Mike Kelly to be the team’s logistics manager.
    So Chris Bryett’s ROAM team now had only one missing piece – a sponsor. But in the second half of 2006 George Jones and his wife Penny took a European holiday and decided to visit the Western Front battlefields. George was captivated from the start, overwhelmed by the scale of the losses and the poignancy of the cemeteries dotted throughout the countryside. Over the following three days as they travelled, Mike Kelly told George about ROAM and the story of the missing Diggers of Fromelles. He said they had a world-class team, all of whom were prepared to work without pay. All they needed was a benefactor who could cover the team’s expenses. It would cost around $50,000. George Jones acted immediately.
    With George Jones on board, and spurred on by a 60 Minutes program that reached almost two million Australians, Chris Bryett completed ROAM’s presentation document and developed a plan of action, aimed at mobilising support for an independent non-invasive examination of the Pheasant Wood site, provided the initial investigation showed sufficient evidence of the mass graves. More than fifteen months had dragged by since Lambis and his team had made their presentation to the Panel of Investigation and they had heard nothing of substance in reply. Bryett had formed the firm view that the panel was marking time. He set about doing what old soldiers used to call ‘energising the situation’. He fired his opening shots in a series of emails to Kathy Upton-Mitchell, Deputy Director of the Office of Australian War Graves in mid-October 2006.
    Bryett began by asking whether the Office of Australian War Graves (OAWG) was involved with the recovery and identification of five World War I soldiers whose remains had recently been discovered near Ypres in Belgium. He also asked how the soldiers would be identified and whether people outside OAWG would be involved in the process. Bryett added that ROAM was concerned that, assuming it won the necessary approvals and found Australian remains at Fromelles, the French authority, the Prefect du Nord, would then exhume the bodies and hand them to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which would, in turn, notify OAWG and the Embassy in Paris. Bryett also asked what OAWG would do to identify the remains, bearing in mind that it was his understanding that under Australian Defence Forces protocol forensic testing was at the discretion of the Surgeon General. He hoped the remains would not simply be classified as ‘known unto god’.
    Not surprisingly, perhaps, Upton-Mitchell took almost a week to digest this message and reply, noting that she wanted to ‘consult and consider carefully’.
    On 8 November 2006, Bryett followed up with his main barrage. He started by saying that when the government appointed the panel, it wasn’t aware that an alternative was available, the ROAM plan for a private dig at no cost to the public purse. He challenged what he saw as the ‘gaps’ in the panel’s expertise: the lack of a mass-grave archaeologist and of a World War I trench expert. He questioned whether members, especially the eminent historians, would be able to publish their individual opinions should they differ from the majority. He queried the number of times the panel had met and suggested that an independent panel would have more credibility.
    Bryett didn’t know the impact that his team’s intervention was having behind the scenes in the bureaucracy and the government. From the outside they may have appeared to be, in army vernacular, slowly ‘lining up the ducks’, but under the waterline those ducks were paddling like crazy.
    Then, in November 2006, I was delighted to be able to report back to Lambis, Chris Bryett and Roger Lee and the Australian authorities that another potential hurdle in the journey – approval from the Pheasant Wood landowners – had been