A decade of research, archive work and family correspondence — the story behind this living memorial.
For more than a decade, this archive has gathered the lives of Bunbury's service personnel — the boys who left potato farms in Roelands for the cliffs of Gallipoli, the nursing sisters of two world wars, the prisoners and the pilots, the returned and the never-returned.
Every biography on this site is the product of patient research through service records, family correspondence, regimental diaries and oral history. Where photographs survive, they are presented; where headstones still stand, they are documented.
The work is ongoing. New names are added as families come forward, and existing entries are revised as fresh evidence emerges. This is, in every sense, a living memorial.
Each entry begins with the soldier's service record from the National Archives of Australia, then radiates outward through:
Many of the biographies catalogued here have been adapted as broadcast features on Bunbury Community Radio's Our Wartime Heroes series — bringing each soldier's story to a wider listening audience across the south-west.