Our Other Unknown Soldier
Abstract
Defence policy before the 1960s was to inter Australian troops in the foreign theatres where they fell. Repatriation of the remains of those killed before then was limited to three people: the ‘unknown soldier’, General William Throsby Bridges, and Lieutenant Keith Mackellar. The first two are icons of military honour, the third is the little-known brother of Dorethea Mackellar, who penned the line ‘I love a sunburnt country’. Keith Mackellar, like so many young men, left for war with a heart full of duty and sacrifice; this is his story.
Of the thousands of Australian soldiers killed in action in distant wars before the 1960s, the bodies of only three have come home. Two of these three repatriations were symbolic and official acts, done for reasons of state.
After William Throsby Bridges, first commander of the First Australian Imperial Force, was killed on Gallipoli, his body was returned to Australia for burial because, well, it seemed the right thing to do. Nearly eighty years later, after the unknown soldier in London’s Westminster Abbey was deemed unable to represent Australia’s as well as Britain’s war dead, an unknown Australian soldier killed in Europe was chosen, exhumed, and reburied in the Australian War Memorial. The third repatriation was different. The body of Keith Kinnaird Mackellar, a young Australian who died in the Boer War of 1899–1902, returned without fanfare or ceremony, speeches or editorials, in 1905, simply to ease a family’s grief. The privacy of Keith Mackellar’s return has granted him lasting obscurity. His grave, in Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery, is noticed today only because it also holds the ashes of his sister Dorothea, a poet remembered for the line ‘I love a sunburnt country’.
The rank, unit, ethnicity, class, religion and attitudes of the unknown Australian soldier are, of course, unknown. But if he resembled the stereotypical digger then Keith Mackellar was yin to his yang—an officer rather than a ranker, a cavalryman rather than a foot soldier, of Scots rather than English or Irish descent, pious and patriotic rather than sacrilegious and subversive. And he died wearing a British uniform, not an Australian one. Keith Mackellar is our other unknown soldier, and his obscurity is undeserved.
A Promising Young Officer
Keith Mackellar was born in 1880 in Sydney, the capital of the colony of New South Wales and, at the time, one of the British Empire’s largest cities. His father, Charles, was an influential member of an influential community—the middle-class Scottish migrants over-represented in Australia’s professions and parliaments. Charles Mackellar and his hard-working, devout, and empire-minded cohort sometimes worried that the next generation would turn its back on hard work, frequent prayer, self-denial and rigid morals, and also turn away from protecting and policing the vast British Empire—that they would fail, as Rudyard Kipling would later put it, to take up the white man’s burden. Failure seemed especially probable in Australia, where a stirring of national sentiment joined with a pinch of idealism and a larger serving of narrow-mindedness to promote the view that, outside a major war, the empire could be left in the hands of British soldiers and civil servants. But young Keith did not disappoint his elders. He thought about duty and war and empire. They judged him ‘good-looking, wholesome-minded and honourable’, indeed a ‘noble lad; brave, gentle and upright’, with ‘the faculty of inspiring esteem and affection in every one who knew him.’1
Best of all, Keith Mackellar wanted to be a soldier. He could, in part, satisfy his ambition easily. Communities were then as important as governments in raising and supporting military units, and there was, predictably, a Scottish regiment among Sydney’s Volunteers, those ancestors of today’s Army Reservists. In 1898 he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the New South Wales Scottish Rifles, and began to spend Saturday afternoons and a couple of evenings a week in its doublet, kilt, sporran and cork helmet.2 Into his copy of Company Drill Made Easy he dutifully sketched the likely trajectory of a volley, and the killing range of Martini-Henry rifles.3 He enjoyed his hours in uniform. He may have already suspected, or rather hoped, that soldiering was all he would ever be good at.
But a commission in an unpaid, part-time volunteer regiment confined to defending one comfortable corner of the British Empire was the beginning, not the end, of Keith Mackellar’s ambition. Transfer to the colony’s tiny permanent force of professional artillery and engineers—an ancestor of today’s regular army—would have been a step down for him professionally, not to say socially. Nor would it have brought him closer to active service; all military units in Australia were confined to home service, to watching the empire’s wars from afar, except in the rare event when their members were called on to enlist in special contingents to go overseas and fight in a major war. It was different, of course, for the British Army, always busy policing imperial acquisitions from Belfast to Bechuanaland. In 1899 Mackellar applied for a commission with a battalion of Gordon Highlanders stationed in India. It was an unusual move for an Australian, but not an unthinkable one. The British Army was Australia’s army too, and a century earlier Edward Macarthur and Darcy Wentworth had launched the now-forgotten tradition of young Australians from prominent families taking commissions in the British Army. These commissions could be partly secured by taking an examination in Australia. Mackellar did so and passed the test.4
Then war intervened. By mid-1899 it seemed certain that tension in South Africa between the British Empire and the Boer republics would end in bloodshed, and the Gordons were rushed from India to South Africa. The Boer War broke out in October, and the battalion immediately went into action. It was not the usual colonial war; the enemy was white, the stakes were high, and it seemed a good opportunity for British colonists to practise fighting beside the British Army. Australians began to raise special contingents and send them to the front to do just that. Keith Mackellar did not join them. A month later, though, he asked the commanding officer of the New South Wales Scottish Rifles for permission to join the Gordons in South Africa, the delay possibly explained by having to win an argument with his parents that, although only nineteen years old, he should be allowed to go to war.5
He might have become one of the thousands of Australian men during the Boer War who boarded steamships bound for South Africa, often at subsidised rates, sometimes as grooms caring for horses, and enlisted when they arrived. But early in December the Boers defeated three parts of a divided British Army. The empire was humiliated, and there seemed a chance that France or Germany might back the Boers. In response new contingents were raised to help the army out of its mess, and many men who, until then had far different plans for their lives, found themselves in the ranks. Mackellar became one of five thousand men who formed the new Australian contingents when he was commissioned as a lieutenant in a squadron of the 1st Australian Horse. The London Times, in a brief mention of him, reported that he had decided to go to war with an Australian unit rather than a British one.6 If a stirring of national sentiment had led him to change his military ambitions, the new mood would not last long in him.
Before joining the squadron in camp at Randwick his family met in prayer. They took as their lesson the Old Testament’s twenty-fourth Psalm, which insisted that only those with pure hands and a clean heart would ascend the hill of the Lord.7 The family also gave the young man what practical support they could. Given their income and status, this was considerable. His bank account seems to have bulged. He may have taken a servant to war as well as a couple of horses. And he was placed in the care of the squadron’s commanding officer.8
Not all the hours he had spent poring over Company Drill Made Easy proved useful in camp. Most of the new contingents heading off to war were made up of mounted rifles, whose members expected to spend as much time in the saddle as on foot. Mackellar’s squadron was a cavalry unit and expected to spend even more. Part of its brief training was devoted to learning how to charge, and a reporter commented on hearing the swish of swords coming from the camp.9 The sound echoed an innocence about how the war would be fought, but not about war itself and its cost. Young men of Mackellar’s class and time grew up reading about battle and about great commanders; Horatio Nelson, victor of Copenhagen and Trafalgar, twice horribly wounded and finally killed in action, was the great exemplar. Absence of censorship ensured that everyone knew that death in battle could be squalid and agonising. Sydney’s Town & Country Journal, for example, featured a widely circulated photograph of a torn, legless soldier’s body being loaded into an ambulance.10
The squadron sailed for South Africa in January 1900 on a ship which seems also to have carried a Major Thompson of the British Army who in six months’ time would meet Mackellar again. The voyage was monotonous, full of dreary tasks such as grooming the horses and painting scabbards, stirrups and spurs khaki. Not that the young lieutenant minded. ‘Much as I miss you all’, he wrote to his sister Dorothea, ‘I am enjoying this life above everything I have ever experienced & feel sure that it is what I will do best at’. Though ‘not a Napoleon just yet’, he joked, ‘in [some] future time I may be one’.11 He would not live long enough to find his bridge at Arcole.
A Brief Service
After five weeks at sea the ship docked at Cape Town and the squadron and its horses were railed inland towards the British Army, which had regrouped under a new commander and was about to roll over the Boer republics and scatter their enemies. Mackellar found himself in a ‘great empty treeless country’, a ‘strange & wonderful land with its wide stretches of treeless though fertile “veld” broken only by rugged steep & barren “kopjes” sometimes in ranges sometimes solitary, and its steep banked rivers, unbridged & impossible to cross except at certain “drifts” or fords’.12 The squadron detrained at Modder River, where a British force had been badly beaten a few months earlier, and rode further inland. It joined the army just after Paardeberg, one of the war’s few real battles and a serious setback for the Boers, and was attached to the Royal Scots Greys, one of the oldest and proudest cavalry regiments in the army. The attachment would have pleased a son of a prominent Scottish Australian who had been accepted into the Gordon Highlanders.
Mackellar and the squadron came under fire when the retreating Boers tried and failed to halt the army at Poplar Grove and Dreifontein. It was almost a happy introduction to war, little more than pushing a routed enemy out of the way. Even happier was the entry of the army into Bloemfontein, capital of one of the Boer republics, on 13 March. Any pleasure soon evaporated, though. As Mackellar explained in a letter to Dorothea, the army was stuck in Bloemfontein for seven weeks regrouping, resupplying and fighting off typhoid and dysentery while its mounted troops, including his own squadron, were on outpost duty being sniped at nearly every day. During a skirmish the squadron was shelled and badly shaken. Still, disease proved more lethal than bullets. ‘We have on the whole lost very few men’ in action, he explained to his sister, ‘though the fever has made rather [large] gaps in our ranks.’13
The next move in the campaign—a long ride north in May 1900 to the other Boer capital, Pretoria—came as a relief to the army. Then, a week out, Mackellar’s squadron was caught in open by a Boer police unit—well armed and trained and dressed and disciplined, and good shots too. It began, as one soldier put it, ‘in a business like way to shoot us like dogs’.14 Mackellar was unhurt but, like the rest of the army, he was becoming bone tired and impatient with the enemy’s dogged but supposedly futile resistance. At least, Mackellar thought, the war would end when Pretoria fell.15 The army entered the town on 5 June, almost without a fight, though there was plenty of fighting a week later at Diamond Hill to the east, where the squadron was once again shelled. On 23 June it returned to Pretoria and its members slept under a solid roof for the first time since landing in South Africa. Diamond Hill was taken to be the Boers’ death rattle. Surely they would now admit they were beaten?
Three months of hard living and occasional danger had been enough for the rankers in the squadron to make up their minds about Keith Mackellar. He had not, apparently, flinched under fire.16 He had always treated them courteously.17 And he had shared their anger with the enemy.18 ‘Candidly speaking’, one soldier wrote later, ‘he was one of the whitest & nicest men that I have ever met & it is myself that knows it better than any one else because I was his troop Sergeant.’19 Another soldier described him as ‘a real nice fellow’ and ‘the best officer we had’.20 Perhaps Keith Mackellar was the kind of officer most soldiers of the day respected—gentler than them in manner as well as tougher in a fight, more refined but just as able to live rough, better educated yet never snobbish. At any rate, he was as popular with his soldiers as he had been with his elders back in Sydney.
He kept the imperial mindset of his milieu while in South Africa, writing to Dorothea how he longed to know what was happening in China and on the west coast of Africa. Nor was he among those Australians disappointed when they saw at last British regulars up close. ‘More than once I felt like saying God bless them’, he wrote of the naval artillery serving with the army, ‘as we lay under a heavy rifle fire not daring to sit up & they suddenly sent shell after shell screaming over our heads from a few thousand yards behind & landing fair amongst the Boers & making them run like sheep.’21 Undimmed admiration for the regulars kept his plans alive to wear a red coat full-time. When the army entered Bloemfontein—in other words, at the first real opportunity he had—he applied for a commission with the Scots Greys.22 Presumably the offer from the Gordons was forgotten now he was a cavalry officer. An acceptance arrived, but it turned out to be for the Lancashire Fusiliers—an unprestigious English infantry regiment. So he sent a telegram to his father, now in London with the rest of the family on an extended visit, asking him to lobby on his behalf.23 As the army was about to enter Pretoria, Mackellar was informed that he could soon state his address as ‘7th Dragoon Guards, 4th Cavalry Brigade, South African Field Force via Capetown South Africa’.24 The regiment in which he was now the most junior officer was not a Scottish one; it recruited in England and had its depot in Kent. Still, Mackellar hoped the regiment would return home soon and, presuming he were given leave, he could spend the rest of the summer with his family.25 In London Dorothea collected an illustration of an officer of the regiment in its full dress—red coat and blue breeches, steel helmet with a black and white drooping plume.26 Thus would her brother look when the family were reunited again.
The regiment was wearing dirty, sweat-stained, ragged khaki when Mackellar joined it outside Pretoria early in July.27 He was one of more than two hundred Australians fighting in South Africa who took up offers of commissions in the British Army around this time,28 so it was no surprise to find another young, middle-class Australian with him—Arthur Onslow from Camden, who had come to South Africa in the New South Wales Mounted Rifles. Mackellar’s new commanding officer was the Major Thompson who seems to have shared his voyage from Australia, and who might have been the connection that secured his commission in the regiment. The lieutenant proved as popular with his new command as he had been with his old one, ‘getting on splendidly’, Onslow wrote, and making ‘himself a general favourite’.29
The regiment was stationed about fifteen kilometres north of Pretoria, helping to keep Boer skirmishers out of an approach to the town. ‘The general opinion’, according to an artillery officer, was that the station was too isolated.30 General opinion was probably right. At daybreak on 10 July the regiment sent a squadron and some guns out to an isolated farm at daybreak to round up some Boers. It was not Mackellar’s squadron but, having patrolled there previously, he knew the way and so joined it as a guide. Onslow was present too, escorting the guns. No real trouble was expected, or encountered at first. Then Onslow heard rifle fire off to his right. Soon he could see the squadron flying pell-mell for cover—the Boers had caught it in the open and were shooting the men down. Most of the soldiers made it to one of those dry river beds Mackellar had noticed on arriving in South Africa, and began to return fire.31 Mackellar was among them. He fired more than thirty rounds from his single-shot carbine before, when raising his head to take aim, a bullet blew off the back of his skull.32 It was a week before his twentieth birthday.
After the skirmish, his body was taken to a hospital in Pretoria while a coffin and hearse were obtained and a plot located in the military zone of a cemetery west of the town.33 Next day, his coffin draped in a union flag, Keith Mackellar was lowered into the earth by three men of the 7th Dragoon Guards, three of the 1st Australian Horse, and a Sydney member of a regiment raised in South Africa.34 The customary wooden cross painted white was erected so there would be no mistake when the equally customary but more permanent marble cross was finished by the stonemasons.35 Most or all of his old squadron were at the funeral and ‘very much cut up’ with ‘many wet eyes around’. It seemed ‘awfully hard luck’, his old troop sergeant wrote, ‘that he should have been killed in the first action with his new regiment & just as one might say starting his career & being so young too.’36 The feeling was shared by his new regiment. ‘His loss is felt keenly’, Arthur Onslow reported, ‘and we all feel that he met his death as a gallant and true son of the Empire.’37
The dismay was almost equal when the news reached Sydney. ‘It has cast a deep shadow over our whole circle of acquaintance’, wrote one of the leaders of the Scottish community, ‘and indeed over the whole town: on every side one hears expressions of sympathy and regret.’38 Certainly the newspapers reported the death of ‘a very smart, promising and popular officer’.39 Reports also reached the family in London, at first, perhaps, by the cold means of an official casualty list printed in the Times. Then came letters: from Major Thompson, gently telling how their son had died and enclosing photographs of his grave;40 from soldiers who had served with him; from family members; and other Sydney Scots. Instead of seeing their son in his red coat and steel helmet fresh from beating the Boers, they would now have to make do, as the most eminent Sydney Scot wrote to them, with ‘the recollection of his stainless character, and the knowledge that he met his death on the field of battle with the courage of a true and honourable soldier.’41 As the family was digesting these reassurances the New South Wales Scottish Rifles held a memorial church service in Sydney addressed by the colony’s senior military chaplain.42 Mackellar’s name joined others destined for plaques to the war dead at the city’s Scots Church and at his old school, Sydney Grammar.43 The fifth of nine pieces played at the reopening of Sydney University’s refurbished pipe organ would be dedicated to him.44
Bringing Home the Body
A promising junior officer had been killed in action; his men, his family and his community were grieving; soon his name would appear on a couple of memorial plaques in his home city. So far, so predictable; the same could be written of hundreds of other young men who died in the Boer War. Their families had to be satisfied with photographs of the grave, and the knowledge that a marble headstone marked out where their boy lay from the enormous, empty veld around it. But Keith Mackellar’s family was not satisfied. Perhaps the death of a son so highly regarded by so many people proved unbearable. Perhaps his mother could not cope with her loss; her brother asked early on whether ‘poor Marion’ was ‘bearing up under her sad loss. We men are to be pitied when such blows strike us but the mothers have all the worst of it.’45 Perhaps the family simply had the wealth to do the little that a vast sum of money could do to nibble at the distance between them and the dead. At any rate, over the next few years they paid for two memorials to his memory and, perhaps when these proved inadequate, brought his body home.
The first memorial went up in St James’ in Sydney, the city’s most prestigious Anglican church. Since it was renovating at the time and was keen for donations, the family used the opportunity to pay for a large stained glass window to be installed and dedicated to St George, the patron saint of soldiers, and ‘in loving memory of Keith Kinnaird Mackellar ... killed in action ... in the twentieth year of his age.’ The saint’s face bore the features of their son’s, and the text chosen for the window was from the twenty-fourth Psalm. The window was unveiled on a wet day in 1903 before a congregation comprised partly of soldiers Keith Mackellar had served with.46
The second memorial would have been even more impressive had it ever been constructed. Royal Prince Alfred hospital in the city’s south-west was also renovating, doubling its size by building two new wings. Charles Mackellar donated £1000—what a shop assistant might earn in seven years—towards these wings on condition ‘that a special ward shall be provided for soldiers in need of medical treatment, and that it shall be named in memory of my son.’47 ‘It is a very nice way to perpetuate your poor son’s memory’, wrote Major Thompson from South Africa, ‘for sure no soldier, & your son was one to the tips of his fingers, could wish for a more suitable remembrance.’48 The hospital erected a plaque, now in its casualty admission room, to a man ‘who perished far from here, before his time, but a soldier, and for his native land.’49 This inscription, though in Latin, would have been familiar to most educated Australians—it formed the last lines of English poet Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitae Lampada’, which urged the empire’s privileged young men to give away their comforts and ‘count the life of battle good’. But the plaque apparently exhausted the hospital’s efforts to repay its benefactor. No ward for soldiers seemed to have been named for Keith Mackellar. Perhaps no such ward was ever built.
Then, at the request of his family and at a cost of nearly £900, Keith Mackellar’s body was removed from its grave in Pretoria five years after his death. The marble headstone was pulled up too, and both were railed to South Africa’s east coast.50 There they were loaded in the hold of a steamer, having been labelled ‘curios’, suggesting something between souvenirs and ethnography, to avoid alarming the sailors who would convey it to Sydney. Possibly the deception was also intended to confound customs officers who might not have approved of the passage of a disinterred corpse.51 Meanwhile a new grave was being prepared in the Anglican section of Waverley Cemetery in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.52 The body returned to Australia without arousing attention. It was reburied on 14 November 1905, marked by its old marble headstone.
As Dorothea began to write poetry, echoes of her brother and his death could be heard throughout. Her poem ‘When it comes’, for instance, which asks ‘How should I like to die’, has as its first answer: ‘without a cry, In a hard-fought fight, where blows were dealt, And the death-strokes less than a girl’s kiss felt—So would I like to die.’53 In her scrapbook she transcribed a translation of a thousand-year-old poem by Wang Chien which included the lines, ‘That a young man should ever come home again, Seemed about as likely as that the sky should fall’.54 But by the time she was writing down these words the Great War had killed hundreds of thousands of promising young officers, every one the pride of his community. Half the suburbs and towns in the Western world were mourning the loss of their own Keith Mackellars. Huge new memorials advertised their mass grieving. The memory of Keith Mackellar shrank to his family and the diminishing congregation of St James’ Church. When Dorothea died in 1968, her ashes were scattered on her brother’s grave, prompting the tourists and joggers who pass it to think of her, not to wonder how our other unknown soldier came to lie there.
Endnotes
1 Mitchell Library (Sydney), ML MSS 1959 Mackellar family papers (hereafter ‘Family papers’), box 2, bundle IV/A/v, Scot Skirving to Charles Mackellar, 30 August 1900, and box 1, bundle IV/A/ii, MacLaurin to Charles Mackellar, 16 July 1900.
2 Family papers, box 7, bundle 6, Keith Mackellar’s commissions.
3 Family papers, box 8, bundle 6, Keith Mackellar’s copy of Captain Lascelles Davidson, Company Drill Made Easy, Gale & Polden, London, 1897.
4 Times (London), 29 December 1899, p. 3.
5 Family papers, box 12, bundle VII/A/vii/b, news cuttings, Keith Mackellar to officer commanding 5th Volunteer Regiment, 17 November 1899.
6 Times (London), 29 December 1899, p. 3.
7 Monthly Church Messenger (St James’ Church, Sydney), vol. 9, no. 4, August 1903, no page numbers.
8 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vi, Standard Bank of South Africa, Lombard Street branch to Bank of NSW, Old Bond Street branch, 18 September 1900, and bundle IV/A/vii, Thompson to Charles Mackellar, 29 August 1900; Adrienne Howley, My Heart My Country: The Story of Dorothea Mackellar, Brisbane, 1989, p. 59.
9 Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 1900, p. 7.
10 Town and Country Journal (Sydney), 13 January 1900, p. 21.
11 Family papers, box 8, bundle IV/A/i/b, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 11 February 1900.
12 Family papers, box 8, bundle IV/A/i/b, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, headed 1st Australian Horse, no date, and Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 18 June 1900.
13 Family papers, box 8, bundle IV/A/i/b, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 14 April 1900.
14 Darcey in Neil C. Smith, News from the Veldt: Australians Writing Home from the Boer War 1899–1902, self-published, Melbourne, 1999, p. 32.
15 Family papers, box 8, bundle IV/A/i/b, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 31 May 1900.
16 As, for example, Robert Lenehan of the New South Wales Mounted Rifles was criticised by his men for doing: see Craig Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2002, p. 72.
17 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vii, Woods to Buckland, 13 July 1900.
18 Family papers, box 8, bundle VII/A/i/b, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 18 June 1900.
19 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vii, Woods to Buckland, 13 July 1900.
20 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vi, Pulsford to Charles Mackellar, 20 September 1900.
21 St James’ Church parish archive, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 3 June 1900.
22 Australian War Memorial, AWM1, 4/15, Thompson to officer commanding, 26 April 1900.
23 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vii, Thompson to Charles Mackellar, 29 August 1900; box 8, bundle IV/A/i/b, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 31 May 1900.
24 St James’ Church parish archive, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 3 June 1900.
25 Family papers, box 8, bundle IV/A/i/b, Keith to Dorothea Mackellar, 31 May 1900.
26 Family papers, box 12, bundle VII/A/vii/b, loose in volume of news cuttings.
27 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vii, Woods to Buckland, 13 July 1900.
28 National Archives (London), WO105/40, ff. 163–75; Wilcox, Australia’s Boer War, p. 270.
29 Family papers, box 1, bundle IV/A/ii, Onslow to Charles Mackellar, 14 July 1900.
30 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vi, Lawrence to? Hartrie, 5 September 1900.
31 Family papers, box 1, bundle IV/A/ii, Onslow to Charles Mackellar, 14 July 1900; Thompson to Lyne in Wallace, The Australians at the Boer War, Australian War Memorial and Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1976, p. 220.
32 Family papers, box 1, bundle IV/A/ii, Onslow to Charles Mackellar, 14 July 1900; family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vii, Woods to Buckland, 13 July 1900.
33 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vii, Woods to Buckland, 13 July 1900.
34 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vi, sketch enclosed with Campbell to Charles Mackellar, 13 December 1900; family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vii, Woods to Buckland, 13 July 1900; Thompson to Lyne in Wallace, The Australians at the Boer War, Australian War Memorial and Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1976, p. 220; Australian War Memorial, 3DRL/2507, Harnett to Nip, 29 July 1900.
35 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vi, Thompson to Charles Mackellar, 11 October 1900.
36 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vii, Woods to Buckland, 13 July 1900.
37 Family papers, box 1, bundle IV/A/ii, Onslow to Charles Mackellar, 14 July 1900.
38 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/ii, MacLaurin to Charles Mackellar, 16 July 1900.
39 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/v, unidentified newspaper clipping ‘Fighting in South Africa’.
40 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/vi, Thompson to Charles Mackellar, 11 October 1900.
41 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/ii, MacLaurin to Charles Mackellar, 16 July 1900.
42 Family papers, box 12, bundle VII/vii/b, printed program ‘Church Parade at All Saints Church Woollahra Sunday 5th August 1900...’ loose in volume.
43 Family papers, box 12, bundle VII/vii/b, f. 7, 9, 15, 17.
44 Family papers box, bundle, bundle VII/A/vii/b)
45 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/v, Buckland to Charles Mackellar, 24 July 1900.
46 Monthly Church Messenger (St James’ Church, Sydney), vol. 9, no. 4, August 1903, no page numbers; family papers, box 12, bundle VII/vii/b, f. 45.
47 Family papers, box 12, bundle VII/vii/b, ff. 19, 21.
48 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/viii, Thompson to Mackellar 24 October 1901.
49 Henry Newbolt, Poems Old and New, Murray, London, 1912, p. 77.
50 National Archives and Record Service of South Africa (Pretoria), TPS40, Transvaal Secretary for Public Works to Roos, 16 July 1909; family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/ viii, unknown to Charles Mackellar, 22 September 1905.
51 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/viii, Bicknell to Charles Mackellar, 21 October 1905, and bill of lading, 19 October 1905.
52 Family papers, box 2, bundle IV/A/viii, Parkhill & Son to Charles Mackellar, 3 November 1905.
53 Dorothea Mackellar, The Poems of Dorothea Mackellar, Rigby, Adelaide, 1971, p. 19.
54 Family papers, box 11, bundle VII/A/v/a, f. 223.
