Australian WW1 Tank

[Mike Cecil]

There were many attempts to replicate a tank for fundraising & recruiting purposes in Australia and as Lang said, the one pictured was one of the better ones.

The National Library's Trove newspaper archive has many newspaper reports on fundraising events in towns that used a replica tank as the central theme after the initial reports of their 'success' on the Western Front in September 1916. Fundraising was still going on into early 1919.

The AWM have a number of images of these replica tanks, but you have to wade through the WW1 tank images to find them.

Many, many thousands of pounds were raised by both the replicas and the one actual MkIV Female that arrived in July 1918 (and is still there, in the collection of the AWM).

Mike