If you were to pull up and hunt around, you might find tree number 64. It is dedicated to a soft-eyed boy who never grew out of his teens.

His name was Jack Peoples.

If you continue down the avenue of honour, which is the purpose of this handsome, melancholy boulevard, you will find his name inscribed on Mortlake's war memorial, a monument in granite topped with the figure of a soldier sculpted from white marble.

Jack Peoples was no one unusual: a station hand from out on the volcanic plains of western Victoria who signed up at the age of 18 and sailed away to World War I.

Like tens of thousands of other young Australians who did the same sort of thing, he never came home. His is just one of 42 names of the World War I dead on that single monument in that one little town.

Aged 19, he was blown to oblivion almost exactly 100 years ago, on November 24, 1916. The only trace to be found of him was an identification disc.

What is unusual about Jack Peoples is that a nephew who never knew him became haunted by the story of his vanishing and dedicated himself to finding the essence of this short life.

Kevin Peoples, a retired teacher with a fine spare story-telling style, has written a book tracing his search for young Jack.

It is called From the Top of the Hill, inspired by the fragment of a story told to him as a child by his father, Jack's brother.

Kevin's father was only 11 when in August, 1915, his older brother, Jack, set out to sign up, walking the 10 miles to Mortlake from the sheep and cattle station on which his family lived and worked, a big squatting property called Wooriwyrite. Jack was 18 and had never travelled more than 10 miles from home.

He asked his little brother to walk with him to the top of the nearest hill, and there the boys parted, the younger brother watching Jack until he was out of sight. The story of that last walk became a sort of soundtrack to Kevin Peoples' childhood. "Tell us about the day Jack went to war, Dad," he and his brother and sister would ask of their father as they snuggled before the fireplace in the evenings.

"We would wait and eventually dad would begin, but the result was always the same," Kevin writes. "The story made its way to the top of the hill and simply faded away and I was always left in the centre of something I could not understand."

And so he sets out a near-lifelong quest to "find" Private Jack Peoples, 58th Battalion, No 4288, whose disappearance had forever cast a shadow over his father's life.

Kevin Peoples' quest for Jack's spirit finds him visited by something else lurking in the deeper gloom of Australia's history, too. He travels to the old family home, long demolished, and feels himself brushed by "a cold shadow, a presence of sorts...warning me off".

"Perhaps the ghosts are of another people, here long before my own people," he writes.

In fact, he was close to the place of another violent Australian vanishing; 35 or more Indigenous Djargurd Wurrung people were consigned to oblivion in 1839 barely more than a mile from the home where Jack Peoples was raised. No avenue of honour nor memorial for these victims of massacre, though. Just a place name whispered. Murdering Gully on Mount Emu Creek, Glenormiston.

His search takes him to a lecture at Melbourne University in 1969 where he witnesses the senior lecturer in Australian history, Lloyd Robson, falling silent, his shoulders shaking, unable to continue his story of his recent field trip to the Western Front of France. Robson is weeping for the men whose blood and bones lay in the fields of Pozieres, Kevin Peoples writes, but "I have never wept for Jack". The lecturer understood something about the war that Peoples did not.

Two decades later, Kevin, by then an Australian history teacher himself at Canberra TAFE, teaching a course on the Great War, had learned so much he was shocked to find himself weeping before his own students.

It is the raw honesty of Peoples' telling of his story, his hatred of the war, his disdain for nationalistic flag-waving and his findings about his lost uncle and his own country that set his little book apart from many war histories. Those of us who have travelled to old battlefields know how unexpectedly a weeping jag might descend, but a lot of us conceal it.

When eventually he finds the field in which he believes Jack Peoples, aged 19, was blown to smithereens by an artillery shell outside the French hamlet of Gueudecourt, he simply kneels, takes a handful of the chocolate French soil and allows the silence to embrace him.

"For a moment I hold Jack in my hand," he writes. "Then I place him gently back with his mates along with those who might have killed him."

One hundred years since the slaughter of 1916, here is an Australian story for the ages.

From the Top of the Hill: Finding Private Jack Peoples, by Kevin Peoples www.bookstore.bookpod.com.au

This story first appeared on The Age.