If you were a child of the Sixties, Australian school history was mainly Gallipoli and Lone Pine and perhaps somewhere briefly Tobruk for an essay lesson. You knew men of family friends who'd been to World War 1 and marched on Anzac Days when your mother helped with the scones and tea for the marchers and veterans. You recited Rupert Brooke's war poem.
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If you were a child of the Twenties, that now generation of Y's, you heard of Gallipoli, Hitler and a few references to Sarajevo or Bosnia. Lone Pine didn't ring a bell really. Those French fields of Aussie slaughter you knew next to nothing. Passchendaele, the Somme, and that Wipers, Eeprs, Yipes or Yeeps, place you saw in vision but not in voice, was a mystery. You've learnt to pronounce Villers Bretonneux only because images of the gravestones and huge monument standing vigil over sweeping plains began popping up a couple of years ago.
That history was often a mystery and subjects shrouded in shadow.
Families sometimes spoke out but in many homes, names were not mentioned; women cried sometimes; men were stoic.
It has been the second generation of the young lives lost who have dug around in the past and pulled out the stories.
Their pilgrimage might have begun a few years back, but it was the 2015 centenary of Gallipoli that resurrected many and shone a light on their personal journeys.
Again this week the family tales have been thrown into sharp and sad relief as the centenary commemorations of Australia's first world war experiences have seen more of the poignant and the painful relived.
The bloody horrors of the Western Front - the killing fields - like Flanders poppies, have slowly been reappearing.
When the 50th anniversary of the Western Front battles like Fromelles and Pozieres came around in 1966, Australians were busy going all the way with LBJ and the good, ole US of A and the Vietnam War, another battleground we would fight over long after we fought the enemy. There was little mention in the media.
And there hasn't been, for so many of those of us unafflicted by the family tragedies, until the mass graves and the flight to find long lost loved ones consumed many.
There is something exceedingly beautiful then in the memories and stories of such an horrendous history being laid bare. It's taken us a hundred years to find them: we will remember them.
