Office of Australian War Graves
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Office of Australian War Graves (OAWG) is a branch within the Australian Government Department of Veterans' Affairs. The branch was initially a stand-alone agency, formed 1 January 1975. In 1980, the War Graves Act 1980 (Cth) formalised the position of Director War Graves within the Department of Veterans' Affairs. The OAWG acts as Australian agent for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Responsibilities
The responsibilities of the OAWG generally fall within the following five areas.
Processing of new official commemorations
Maintenance of war cemeteries, plots, individual graves, post-war commemorations and battle exploit memorials
Management of major projects at overseas locations
Provision of research services for commemorative information, and
Issuing permission to use the relevant Service badge.
The OAWG is also responsible for the maintenance of some 20,000 graves of Commonwealth war dead in 76 war cemeteries & plots and in numerous civil cemeteries, as well as Memorials to the Missing listing over 3,000 names throughout Australia, Norfolk Island, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 17, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4476356. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1975 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Office of Australian War Graves” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.