News
22 October, 2025
Former journalist reveals fascinating WW1 facts
In celebration of Probus Month 2025, the Moss Vale Men’s Probus Club recently hosted a combined meeting of local Probus clubs at the Mittagong RSL Club.
In celebration of Probus Month 2025, the Moss Vale Men’s Probus Club recently hosted a combined meeting of local Probus clubs at the Mittagong RSL Club.
The local clubs represented were Bargo, Bowral Combined, Crookwell, Moss Vale Combined, Moss Vale Men’s, Goulburn Combined, Goulburn, Nattai and Wingecarribee.
Over 200 members and their guests attended to listen to former Channel 7 journalist and author Ross Coulthart, who was invited by the Moss Vale Men’s Probus Club to the Mittagong RSL Club on October 9 to speak about his book, ‘The Lost Diggers’, a story about his visit to the town of Vignacourt in the Picardy region of France, near where the Battle of the Somme raged during World War 1.
Coulthart mentioned that Vignacourt was a place where many of the soldiers would go to have some ‘rest and recuperation’ in between fighting, due to its proximity to the Western Front and he discovered that a French couple, Louis and Antoinette Thullier, had taken more than 4,000 photos of Australian, British, French, US, and Indian soldiers, as well as Chinese labour corps, and French civilians, one of whom was a Southern Highlands local, Daniel Herbert Anthon.
“There was this amazing image of Mr. Anthon, who was somewhat ‘follically challenged’- like myself – he was slightly balding,” Coulthart joked.
“And someone was putting their hand on his head in the middle of this crowd of cheering people. This was at the very moment of the declaration of the armistice – the end of the 1st World War, on the 11th of November 1918 – and he had that ‘world weary’ look of an ANZAC who’d served with distinction.”
Coulthart described that on returning from the war, Mr. Anthon met and married a local woman called Violet Mary Stacey in the Sydney suburb of Croydon in 1919.
After the war, Mr. Anthon and his family then settled in the Southern Highlands and farmed around the Wildes Meadow and Bowral areas from 1921-1928, and he also worked at the Portland cement plant near Berrima.
“At Portland Cement he became a foreman and later a clerk and also became a Justice of the Peace (JP), served as a church warden and as an Oddfellow in the Freemasons,” Coulthart said.
“He then also went on to serve again in World War 2 in the 2nd and 13th Australian Garrison battalions, and commanded military detention barracks at Holsworthy in 1941 and Orange in 1942/43, and in 1946 was awarded an Australian Efficiency decoration and retired from the military in 1948 with the rank of Major. He sadly died of heart failure on September 4,1951 at his Moss Vale home and was buried in the local Anglican cemetery. If there is a member of the family out there who wants a copy of his photograph, I’m very happy to send it to them.”
His name is also etched on the Honour Roll at the Moss Vale Services Club.
Coulthart also mentioned that 800 of the negatives of the Australian soldiers were donated to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra by Channel 7 Chairman Kerry Stokes AO in 2012.
“I was working for Channel 7 show Sunday Night back in 2011, and we decided to investigate this possible collection of photographs that we suspected must exist somewhere in France because there were a handful of these images that were sent to the Australian War Memorial,” Mr. Coulthart said.
“We knew a few were in private collections, and we figured there must be an individual photographer that nobody had ever heard of, and it turned out that the Thulliers had taken these photos.”
Mr. Coulthart also revealed that the collection had stayed hidden for nearly 100 years.
“We went back to the town and started knocking on doors, and we found the family that owned the house where these photographs were stored in an attic, and the incredible thing about them was that all 4,000 of them were still intact,” he said.
“So we bought them back to Australia after buying them off the family and donated most of the Australian ones to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra – the rest are being stored in Kerry Stoke’s private museum in Western Australia. He paid for them to be digitised, and we then did features on both Channel 7 and the BBC about them and I also wrote two books - ‘The Lost Diggers’ and ‘The Lost Tommies’, about the Australian and British men who were identified using our detective work.”
Read More: Mittagong, Moss Vale, Southern Highlands