Biography | Simon Fraser — Three Days He Carried the Wounded In From This Field

The bronze here shows a man bent under the weight of another, and the man carrying is Simon Fraser.

He was a farmer from Byaduk in the Western District of Victoria, and at about forty he was old for a private soldier when he sailed for the war in 1915.

By July 1916 he was a sergeant in the 57th Battalion of the 5th Australian Division.

On the night of 19 July that division and the British 61st attacked the German line at Fromelles, and by the next morning the attack had failed, leaving hundreds of wounded in the open ground between the trenches.

Over the next three days Fraser and others went out again and again into no man's land to bring them in.

He described it afterward in a letter dated 31 July 1916.

One wounded man was too heavy to lift onto his back — "about 14 stone weight" — so Fraser got him into an old trench to wait for a stretcher.

Then a man lying about thirty yards further out called, "Don't forget me, cobber."

Fraser found volunteers, went back, and brought that man in too.

By his own estimate, his company alone carried in more than 250 wounded over those days.

He was mentioned in despatches, later commissioned second lieutenant, and posted to the 58th Battalion.

He did not survive the war.

On 11 May 1917 he was killed at Bullecourt, aged forty.

He has no known grave, and his name is on the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux.

The sculptor Peter Corlett built this statue from Fraser's letter and called it Cobbers, after the man's cry.

Corlett unveiled it at the Australian Memorial Park on 5 July 1998, on the old German front line, among the broken concrete of the blockhouses.

The man Fraser carries wears the colour patch of the 60th Battalion, and the pair face the field the wounded were brought across.

📸 Cover: the "Cobbers" statue by Peter Corlett (1998) at the Australian Memorial Park, Fromelles, photograph by Pierre André Leclercq, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: a German blockhouse remnant on the former front line in the park, same photographer, CC BY-SA 3.0.