For 50 years Stan Turner has been marching in the Dennington Anzac Day parade in honour of his uncle who was killed in France and his father who fought in both world wars.
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Mr Turner, 81, said he was named after his uncle who was wounded at Gallipoli and later lost his life on the battlefields of France during World War I.
“A few years ago they thought they might have found his remains,” Mr Turner said.
“They tested my DNA but it didn’t match up which is sad.”
Mr Turner said about a decade ago he had been told to send his DNA as quickly as possible to a lab in England, but after he posted it he realised it was so close to Christmas and there might be a delay in its arrival.
He rang the lab but got a recorded message to say they were close for a number of weeks over Christmas, leaving Mr Turner to always wondered if the delay interfered with the test.
Mr Turner’s father, Leslie, was part of the next deployment that was to be sent to Gallipoli, but when that battle came to an end he was instead sent to the battlefields of France, among other places.
“He was under age. I think he had his 17th birthday in the trenches of France,” he said.
Mr Turner was just a young boy when his father went to Papua New Guinea during World War II
His father never spoke much about the war during his lifetime, until the few weeks before he died in 1990.
While Mr Turner has marched at Dennington since he moved there, his father used to travel to Melbourne for the day.
“He wanted to do it on his own. We used to come here and he’d go to Melbourne,” Mr Turner said.
Mr Turner himself spent 10 years stationed in different camps in Australia when he was in the army reserves.
“We used to build bridges and blow bridges up.” he said, referring to the military exercises he used participate in. He never went overseas with the army reserves.
During the Dennington services, Brauer College students dressed as nurses to pay tribute to the south-west nurses who didn’t return from war.
A lone pine seedling, which came from the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, was planted behind the Dennington cenotaph.
There are also plans for another memorial in Dennington to remember those who lived or were born there who fought in World War II and other major conflicts.
The current memorial only lists the names of WWI’s nine fallen soldiers, and returned soldiers.
Dennington Community Association member David Kelson said research had uncovered 80 names of both fallen and returned soldiers, and they hope to have construction complete by next year.
