A NAME engraved on an Anzac memorial was, until recently, the only link Wangi Wangi woman Marlene Boehmer had to the uncle who died at Gallipoli during the furious first days of fighting on the peninsula.
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But this Saturday, 100 years after Private Robert Stewart landed at Anzac Cove, a poppy will be placed on his grave in Gallipoli's Shell Green Cemetery on Mrs Boehmer's behalf.
It will mark the first such gesture of recognition by a member of her family.
"I knew I had an uncle who was an Anzac, because my father showed me his name on the memorial at Adamstown when I was a girl, but he was quite a bit older than my father and I never knew much about what happened to him," Mrs Boehmer said.
Last year, after reading through stories of Lake Macquarie soldiers in an Anzac Day booklet distributed by Member for Lake Macquarie, Greg Piper, Mrs Boehmer decided it was time to find out about her unsung family hero.
Turning to the website discoveringanzacs.naa.gov.au, she was thrilled to find 44 pages of letters and documents, tracing his path from enlistment as a 20-year-old to his landing on Gallipoli on the first day of the campaign, his tragic death just two days later, and the removal of his remains to a dedicated grave on the peninsula in 1921.
Among the documents were the "missing in action" notice sent to Pte Stewart's father and increasingly anxious letters which followed from the father seeking information on his son's whereabouts. News of the death was confirmed in a succinct notification almost devoid of empathy.
Three years after the end of the war, a more compassionately worded letter arrived to tell the family Pte Stewart's body had been transferred from a mass burial site to the cemetery "with every measure of care and reverence".
"It was such an intimate and emotional experience to read through those papers - it brings you so close to the family to see the words in their handwriting and to imagine what they must have been experiencing," Mrs Boehmer said.
Her first instinct was to make a pilgrimage to Gallipoli to visit the grave personally but, restricted by the use of a wheelchair, Mrs Boehmer decided instead to see if she could find an emissary to place a poppy on Private Stewart's final resting place.
A request by the office of Greg Piper to the NSW branch of the RSL resulted in a representative travelling to Gallipoli for this year's centenary commemoration agreeing to perform the small but significant ceremony.
"I am thrilled," Mrs Boehmer says. "If I had a pair of good legs, I would have done it myself, but at least now I will be able to sit on my balcony on Anzac Day, looking out across the bay, knowing someone on the other side of the world will be putting a poppy on my uncle's grave."
