Message from Cairo: unique audio of original Anzac recorded during first world war speaks across the years

Henry Miller Lanser, a 24-year-old Australian soldier, found himself far from his family in Sydney at Christmas 1914.

His 1st Battalion had arrived in Egypt in early December for training at Mena military camp before deployment in the first months of the Great War.

There, Lanser found a way back home to Chatswood through a “talking-machine shop” in Cairo, where in late December 1914 or early January 1915 he made what is believed to be the oldest surviving recording in the world of an ordinary soldier in wartime.

The three-and-a-half-minute recording was made on a 10-inch shellac disc – a forerunner of vinyl – by the Mechian Company, which had been run by an Armenian businessman, Setrak Mechian, since about 1908.