The Last Post will have special meaning for a Heywood family on Anzac Day

You need no special gift to detect desperation in the words of a mother from the silence of the Australian bush 100 years back.

If you were to listen carefully on Anzac morning, you might hear the echo of her pain, kept keen by her family, in the sound of an old bugle played by a young bullrider in the little town of Heywood in far south-west Victoria.

On November 20, 1917, Elizabeth Carter wrote a letter from her isolated home in the forested district of Lyons, not far from Heywood, where she had raised single-handed three sons and a daughter.

"Could you give me any information concerning my son, No. 1192, Private E.M. Carter … reported wounded and missing since May," she wrote to the officer in charge of Australian Army records.

Mrs Carter, grasping any straw, confided she had heard a whisper that her boy "is in hospital in London, supposed to have been reported by a soldier in France but I cannot find out his name".

"Do you think it could be correct?" she wrote.

There would be no mercy for Elizabeth Carter.

Her firstborn son had been dead for more than six months, since May 3 or 4, a military court of inquiry would find.

But no grave would be dug for Edward Maurice Carter, a young bullocky who had sailed from Victoria in 1915 to fight through Gallipoli, the Middle East and the trenches of the Western Front of France.

On the morning of May 3, 1917, in the first minutes of a bloodbath known as the second battle of Bullecourt in northern France, he was shot … and then vanished into the ranks of the absent forever.

"I was with Private Carter," a mate, Private H.D. Phipps, reported to the inquiry held to determine what happened to Maurice Carter.

"He was wounded through the right ankle and the left leg, his right ankle being badly shattered. This was a few minutes after zero time and about 100 yards in front of the German front lines.

"Corporal Quade and I dressed his wounds and put him in a comfortable position in a shell hole, with a waterproof sheet over him for warmth. We then went forward. He was too seriously wounded to get out of the shell hole unaided."

Lance Corporal T. Quade gave the same evidence, and added, "I consider it unlikely that he was taken prisoner as the Germans never held the ground where he was".

And this: "The ground was heavily shelled for several days afterwards."

Maurice Carter – he was never called Edward – had, in short, been vaporised.

He was 26 and a member of the 6th Australian Brigade Light Trench Mortar Battery. Her second son, Albert Barrington Carter, a Light Horseman at Gallipoli and across the Middle East, came home alive.

The close-knit Carter clan, like so many families, was left struggling with a hideous absence. Private Edward Maurice Carter became simply a name among 10,885 names of Australians killed in France who, lacking a grave, are memorialised on a stone wall of the Australian National Memorial above Villers-Bretonneux in northern France.

Perhaps Maurice Carter had a premonition about his fate.

In the days before he left Australia, he drew aside his youngest brother, a boy of 12 named Andrew but always known as Snowy for his fair hair, and brokered a deal.

If he did not return, Maurice told Snowy, the bullock team's yours. 

The Carters were known around far western Victoria as teamsters, and Maurice had built up a fine team of bullocks to haul logs from the forest and to carry agricultural produce over rough roads.

With Maurice gone, Snowy, aged 14, became the family's new teamster.

He and the bullocks headed north to Rainbow, in the Victorian Mallee, to earn money for his grieving mother by carting wheat from big farms to the railhead. Snowy Carter became one of the best-known bullockies in western Victoria before investing in mechanised log trucks in the 1930s.

One of his sons, Syd Carter, carried on the bush tradition, logging and hauling and sawmilling for decades.

None of the Carters ever forgot the missing Maurice, and Syd, the absent Maurice's nephew, took to studying the battles of the First World War to try to understand how a man could simply disappear.

Five or six years ago, a man down on his luck came to Syd and offered him – for a price – an old military bugle. It had engraved upon it the words "AIF Battle Honours 1914-1918 Gallipoli, Middle East, Western Front" above the rising sun of the Australian Commonwealth Military Forces.

Syd, an old friend of my family, died, aged 88, a few weeks ago, two days after telling me the story of purchasing the bugle. It was as if, he said, he'd been given the chance to make a link with his missing uncle.

Though the provenance of the bugle could never be established, he bought it and gave it to the Heywood sub-branch of the RSL on a promise that it would be played each Anzac Day.

The bugle, though in the care of the RSL, would always belong to the eldest son of successive Carter generations – starting with Syd's son John, just as Maurice was an eldest son a century ago.

But the little sub-branch had no bugler. The president, Lyall Saunders, cast around and found a young fellow named Joseph Patterson who played trumpet and who lived on a farm not far from where Elizabeth Carter had raised her children at the start of last century.

Joseph agreed to give the old bugle a blow.

He's been playing the Last Post on it for the past five years now.

Joseph is just 19, and – altogether a country boy – he's taken to riding bulls at rodeos all over Australia. But he makes the trip back to Heywood for Anzac Day each April. Last year he drove all night from Wagga, the bugle waiting.

This year he promised not to ride bulls for a few weeks before Anzac Day to ensure he didn't bust ribs, which would prevent him playing.

And so this boy from a new generation blows the old bugle for a long-gone mother heartbroken in the bush, and for her boy, Maurice, who vanished 100 years ago next month, and for a family that can never forget.