Trama

Mark Lee uncovers the stories behind the memorials and the names. He pieces together personal histories, traces their descendants, and discovers how Australian families, communities and the nation as a whole was touched by the Great War.

From a population of less than five million, 330,000 Australian men served overseas in WW1. Some 61,700 never came home. Australia suffered the highest casualty rate in the British Empire forces. And every single one of them was a volunteer. There are so many First World War Memorials in this country that it is easy to stop seeing them. They have become so much a part of the landscape that you can walk past them without registering what they are, or stopping to think why they were originally put up. It is only when you start looking out for them that you realize the scale of this act of commemoration. Thousands of memorials to the dead represent a massive and unprecedented outpouring of national grief. These memorials and monuments stand as landmarks to a defining period in Australian history - but one which is slipping away from popular memory and into ancient history. Presenter Mark Lee (best known to audiences as the young lead in the 1981 feature film "Gallipoli") takes the memorials as his starting point, researching individual stories to turn names and statistics into people with faces and personal histories. Tracking down their descendants, he unveils a series of moving portraits, exploring the scale of the loss, the experience of grief, and the motivations which took so many Australians to war on the other side of the world. As WW1 fades into ancient history, this documentary turns the names frozen in time back into remembered lives, however briefly, helping us unlock the experience and the legacy of the Great War on a personal, family, community and national level, and ensuring that 90 years later, these names are not forgotten.—Jane Jeffes