History detective, historian, investigative writer & specialist tour guide

In the course of her research, Lynette occasionally comes across information leading to the location of a previously unknown burial site.  In 1993, she was invited by the British government to  search for the remains of a British sailor, Sub-Lieutenant Grigor Riggs, whose fate had been revealed in 1990 her book The Heroes of Rimau. As part of the official investigation team she travelled to the Indonesian island of Merapas, in the Riau Archipelago, where, after receiving expert advice from a forensic anthropologist in Sydney, she was responsible for overseeing the search. Later that year, a funeral service was held in Singapore for Riggs and for Australian commando Colin Cameron,  another member of the ill-fated Operation Rimau team, whose skull had been found by an islander some years before. For a full  and updated account of the action that led to the deaths of these two men, and of the search for the remains, see Deadly Secrets. More information on Operation Rimau is at Rimau Historic marker.

Lynette oversees the work at Merapas Island

 

Military funeral in Singapore for Riggs and Cameron

In 2010,  following the location of a large number of WW1 remains in France, a special unit, Unrecovered War Casualties, was established  by the Australian Defence Department to investigate  the veracity of reports of unrecovered remains, submitted by members of the public.  This unit draws on the expertise of a number of investigators and historians, including Lynette, who has followed up several reports of allegedly unrecovered remains in West Malaysia, Sabah, Timor, Java,  Papua New Guinea and the islands.  In   March 2011 she was part of a team that spent the more than two weeks excavating a killing field at Parit Sulong, West Malaysia, to determine if Australian and Indian troops, taken prisoner and subsequently massacred there in January 1942, had been buried in a mass grave at the site. For a full account of this investigation, see Parit Sulong, The Search for Remains.

Following up a report in Sabah

 

Laying the ground work at Parit Sulong