THE Griffith RSL meeting rooms almost resemble a secret service headquarters at present.
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A group of dedicated residents have methodically volunteered to identify the WWI servicemen from the Griffith area who are not remembered on the cenotaph due to the fact that Griffith was not officially recognised as a town when war broke out in 1914.
For Terry Walsh, the task hits close to home, a former serviceman himself he said the importance of recognising those who had given their lives for their country could not be emphasised enough. “It’s extremely important, the fact that Griffith wasn’t gazetted until 1916 is really no excuse for not recognising the names of those who made the supreme sacrifice,” Mr Walsh said. “It’s never too late to recognise someone who gave their life for their country. “It’s been a quest, I asked many years ago very strongly about why WWI servicemen weren’t recognised and it was basically shrugged off but I always felt like this was something that must be done.”
The extensive research and legwork of the task for the past year has been the focus of Theo Bollen whose resulting comprehensive database is now a record of all men from the area who fought in the war.
“The research involved quite a bit of work,” Mr Bollen said. “Step one was finding out the names, and we did that with difficulty, the problem is that Griffith was gazetted in 1916 and that’s when enlistments were recorded. Mr Bollen accessed the records of various organisations both locally and in Canberra to carefully search for enlistees from the Griffith area. “The Bagtown honour boards were also a good source,” he said. “But we noticed there were some names missing alphabetically and there was a whole board missing and no one seems to know where it has gone. So all of that was just step one.”
Mr Bollen handed over his database to the Griffith RSL who extracted the records of those killed in action, or by wounds. “We wanted to make certain these people were residents at the time they left here to enlist and Vince Neville and Marg Tucker went through the list to determine that,” Mr Walsh said. “And we are very happy to say we have at least 15 names to go on the cenotaph and possibly more.”