Service Number: 4303
Rank: Private
Roll title: 24 Infantry Battalion - 9 to 12 Reinforcements (February-April 1916)
Date of embarkation: 07 March 1916
Place of embarkation: Melbourne
Ship embarked on: HMAT Wiltshire A18
Service: Australian Army
Conflict: First World War, 1914-1918
Date of death: 20 September 1917
Place of death: Ypres, Belgium
Cause of death: Killed in action, Battle of the Menin Road.
Age at death: 21
Place of association: Yarrawonga, Australia
Cemetery or memorial details: Perth Cemetery (China Wall), Ypres, Flanders, Belgium
Source: AWM145 Roll of Honour cards, 1914-1918 War, Army
Daniel was an indigeneous Australian; a Yorta Yorta man. Born at Moama, he was educated at the State School, Cummeroogunga Mission Station, New South Wales. A labourer at the time of embarkation, his religion was listed as Church of England.
Daniel was killed with two other men, Pte. Briggs and Corporal Gordon Castle. They were sheltering under a curved iron protection, waiting in a railway cutting to go up to the 1st line, the shelter was hit by a shell. A direct hit, death for all three was instaneous as witnessed by Pte. Hugh Cecil Duncan #6196. All three were buried in the cutting on Sunday, three days after.
Pte. J. Hart and Pte. Lush were in the burial party.
Battle of Menin Road
20 September 1917 - 25 September 1917
The Battle of Menin Road was an offensive operation, part of the Third Battle of Ypres on the Western Front, undertaken by the British Second Army in an attempt to take sections of the curving ridge, east of Ypres, which the Menin Road crossed. This action saw the first involvement of Australian units (1st and 2nd Divisions AIF) in the Third Battle of Ypres. The attack was successful along its entire front, though the advancing troops had to overcome formidable entrenched German defensive positions which included mutually supporting concrete pill-box strongpoints and also resist fierce German counter-attacks. A feature of this battle was the intensity of the opening British artillery support. The two AIF Divisions sustained 5,013 casualties in the action.
sourced from https://www.awm.gov.au/units/event_97.asp
Between the beginning of the war in August 1914 and late 1916, Aborigines were not supposed to enlist at all. From late 1916 until the war ended in November 1918, what were called "half-castes" were allowed to volunteer, provided that one parent was European. This prejudice was not always repeated in practice as by mid-1915 recruiting officers were seeking every possible man to go and fight, and so were prepared to bend the rules to accept willing volunteers or persuade undecided men.
I am a child of the Dreamtime People
Part of this land, like the gnarled gumtree
I am the river, softly singing
Chanting our songs on my way to the sea
My spirit is the dust-devils
Mirages, that dance on the plain
I'm the snow, the wind and the falling rain
I'm part of the rocks and the red desert earth
Red as the blood that flows in my veins
I am eagle, crow and snake that glides
Through the rainforest that clings to the mountainside
I awakened here when the earth was new
There was emu, wombat, kangaroo
No other man of a different hue
I am this land
And this land is me
I am Australia.
~ Auntie Hyllus Maris 1934-1986
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Daniel was the son of
William Cooper, (1861?-1941), an Australian Aboriginal political activist and community leader. The last of his family to be converted to Christianity, William Cooper settled at Maloga in 1884, where he married on 17 June the orphaned Joti-jota 'half-caste' Annie Clarendon Murri; she died in 1889, survived by one of their two children. Six more were born of his second marriage, at the Nathalia Methodist parsonage on 31 March 1893 to Agnes Hamilton (d.1910), a 'quarter-caste' born at Swan Hill and reared at Coranderrk Aboriginal Station near Melbourne.
Their daughter Amy (Mrs Henry Charles) became matron of the first Aboriginal hostel established in Melbourne in 1959;
their son Dan died in World War I; another son Lynch was a champion runner, winner of the 1928 Stawell Gift and the 1929 World Sprint.
On 6 December 1938, several weeks after Kristallnacht in Germany, William Cooper led a delegation of the Australian Aboriginal League to the German Consulate in Melbourne to deliver a petition which condemned the "cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany." The protest has been referred to as "the only private protest against the Germans following Kristallnacht." The German Consulate did not accept the petition.
