Letter from an enlisting officer questioning offical status of ancestry for Aboriginal Solider

This is a letter from the Camp Officer at Bendigo Military camp seeking official approval to enlist Benjamin Combo, an Aboriginal man whose ancestry is determined as ‘Non-European’. Because of this his enlistment is cancelled, as having direct European descent is a requisite for joining the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF).

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The Cherbourg Memory is an initiative of the Rationshed Museum and brings together the photos, videos, oral history recordings, documents and other artifacts of our lives on this settlement. It a website, an archive, an educational resource, a recording project, a research data-base, a store of the people’s stories and an interactive space for comments and engagement. We encourage the people of Cherbourg, the Indigenous communities in Australia and others who have experience of our settlement to help us create a living archive of Barambah-Cherbourg. So find out a little more about the Cherbourg Memory, discover how you can Participate, or find out how you can Contribute to the development of the Cherbourg Memory.