Victor Rupert Laidlaw, Some of the boys, Mena, 1915, State Library Victoria. Gift from Mrs E Barker, 1984.

Soldiers sit in the sand next to a tent at Mena Camp, Cairo. Some of the men wear the Red Cross medical insignia on their shoulders. Mena Camp was an AIF (Australian Imperial Forces) training base before the Gallipoli landing. Private Laidlaw, the photographer, enlisted in the services on 18 August 1914. His diaries and photographs recall his time en route to Alexandria, at Mena Camp, on Lemnos Island, in the Dardanelles at Cape Helles and Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, and in France.