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Take the journey

This site takes you on a tour of 40 locations closely associated with the battle experience of the AIF or of more general interest. Visit places like: the Menin Gate with over 54 000 names of the 'missing', 6,000 of them Australians, and where nightly the Last Post is sounded; Essex Farm Cemetery near where the poem In Flanders Fields was written; the Windmill Memorial at Pozières around which Australia suffered over 23,000 casualties in six weeks; the statue of the 'Bullecourt Digger'; the cemetery from which Australia's 'Unknown Soldier' was exhumed in November 1993; and the Chateau de Versailles where Australia's first overseas treaty was signed in 1919.

The battlefields where Australians fought

This Australian journey through the Western Front follows a virtual tour across the map from Belgium through France. From this page, in chronlogical order, you can read about the battles in which Australians fought from the first battles of the war, through to the last events of the war in 1918, and the Treaty of Versailles.

Would you like a guide?

Need help finding your way? Throughout this site, you will find map icons that will show you exactly where to go in either Google maps or GeoPortail, France's national online map service. You can get assistance in finding the locations of these battlefields and war cemeteries using other online geographical services available on the web.

I was with the Australians on that day when they swarmed into Bapaume, and they brought out trophies like men at a country fair... I remember an Australian colonel who came riding with a German beer-mug at his saddle... Next day, though shells were still bursting in the ruins, some Australian boys set up some painted scenery which they had found among the rubbish, and chalked up the name of the "Coo-ee Theater."

Now It Can Be Told, Philip Gibbs

A man's destination is not his destiny,
Every country is home to one man
And exile to another. Where a man dies bravely
At one with his destiny, that soil is his.
Let his village remember.

To the Indians Who Died in Africa, T. S. Eliot

All wars end; even this war will some day end, and the ruins will be rebuilt and the field full of death will grow food, and all this frontier of trouble will be forgotten. When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and then these places, from which the driving back of the enemy began, will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps.

The Old Front Line, John Masefield, London, 1917, p.11