When he went to sign up on New Year’s Eve, 1915 he insisted the recruiting officer write the word “Aboriginal” on the space reserved for citizenship.

Punch, then 36, was a well known figure in the city. He had survived a massacre on the Bland River to the north as an infant in 1880 and been brought up by a white family.

According to the Australians at War website, drovers had massacred a small Aboriginal community after some of the natives killed and ate a cow.

John Siggs, who had not been in on the raid, went to the site the next day and discovered a baby boy trying to feed from his dead mother’s breast.

Robert Speer MBE, the author of two articles on Punch in the Goulburn Historical Society’s newsletter in 1992 and 1993, learnt the truth from a woman who was then in her early 90s.

“[She said] Siggs uttered these words “Oh, this is bloody murder, I will have no part of this.”

Siggs took the boy home to Pejat where his father and mother ran the inn.

The story was put out Punch had been brought down from Queensland. Speer said the white lie was meant to dissuade him from searching for his family when he got older.

While Punch’s Aboriginality was never in doubt, contemporary accounts indicate he was brought up as a loved and respected member of the family, sharing the same opportunities for education and music lessons as the other children.

The fact he gave his place of birth on the enlistment form as NSW indicated Punch was aware the Queensland tale was a furphy.

His genial nature and high spirits were remarked upon in a newspaper report on a Boxing Day social at Woodhouselee near Goulburn in 1908.

“Just as some of the guests were departing Punch bounded out the door, no boots on, took a flying leap onto one of the horses behind the rider and the saddle, stuck his heels in the horse’s ribs and gave the company an exhibition of buckjump riding which showed he had not been among horses all his life for nothing.”

Seven years later the world was a much darker place, Punch was in his mid-30s and many of his friends would have already left for the war.

By mid-1916 he was in France serving with the 1st and then the 53rd Battalions.

When Punch was wounded (for the first time) on September 9, 1916, it made the news in his hometown.

“Mr Oswald Gallagher, of Bourke St, Goulburn, on Wednesday received a telegram from Base Records stating that Private Wm. J. Punch had been wounded. Private Punch is aboriginal, and was better known as ‘Siggs’s Punch’, he having been reared by the late Miss Siggs and the late Mr John Siggs of Pejar. Punch was trained in the Goulburn Camp, and was a favourite. He was looked upon as a mascot. He was very adaptable, and was a good rifle shot. He was with the Australian Forces in France.”

In a letter home, written six days before he was wounded, Punch said he had spent nine days in England and was returning to France from where he was expecting to be sent to the front line in Belgium.

Punch was wounded for the second time on April 5, 1917, and sent to England to recuperate at the Mont Dore Hospital in Bournemouth.

He apparently never returned to the front, dying of pneumonia on August 29, 1917.

An article on the Indigenous Histories website, published in 2013 by Philippa Scarlett, described Punch’s story as “tragic”, saying “the community acceptance he did have ultimately did him no service as it facilitated his entry into the AIF which, in turn, led to his premature death”.

Punch, who had been one of 300 soldiers honoured at an early Mass and breakfast in Goulburn on February 27, 1916, before departing for Sydney, and who was buried with full military honours, including a firing party supplied by the New Zealand Engineers, Christchurch, might not have seen it that way.

He had volunteered to serve, despite having an easy out, and was wounded twice fighting alongside his mates.

Wreaths from his Australian friends, his fellow patients from the hospital and from the hospital’s nursing staff, were laid on his grave at East Cemetery, Boscombe, in Bournemouth.

Chaplain Ivan Grant, an Indigenous soldier serving as a staff chaplain with the Australian Army in Canberra, said Punch was a pioneer and an inspiration.

“Defence, in the 13 years I have been with it, has become very proactive in both trying to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and to recruit and engage them.

“There is a desire to tell the untold story of black Diggers, of Aboriginal men and women who have served in the past when they couldn’t even vote.

“Punch’s is an amazing story in that he was even allowed to get through. He would have probably been accompanied by his mates and they would have backed him up.

“Once they got over the barriers of being recruited they (Indigenous servicemen and women) were treated as equals. Now they are not just seen as equals, there is recognition their diverse culture and heritage actually adds something to the defence force.”