Today’s City of Darebin encompasses Northcote, Preston, Thornbury, Reservoir, Fairfield and Alphington, the latter two districts added to the original City of Northcote since the Great War.
Extensive research since around 2003-4 has identified around 850 servicemen (add two women) closely associated with Darebin that gave their lives in service of their country during the brutal conflict. The list includes Australia’s first casualty of the Great War, William George Vincent Williams of Beavers Road, Northcote.
A complete Honour Roll acknowledging the sacrifice of each of these individuals is currently being constructed for inclusion in the new Darebin Heritage web site.
In the interim, various documents – an indexed list of casualties from Darebin, the complete Roll, a local history during the war years, and Rolls applicable to a couple of the major schools in the district are available for downloading from:
World War1 downloads : Darebin
Some individual histories are available on-line as downloadable PDF files of around 65k.
Sample histories : World War 1 casualties :
Note that from March, 2014, the Downloads page also includes material for the Shires of Whittlesea/Epping (the old Shire of Epping was amalgamated with Whittlesea in 1915), Eltham and Heidelberg as they existed during the years of the Great War
