In just about every town and city in Australia there are reminders of what the First World War cost the country. More than 60 thousand Aussies died and barely a community was unaffected. Raukkan, here in the South Australian Coorong, is no exception.
JAKE SHAW: I'm guessing it would have been hard for everyone on the community knowing that they might not return but deep down inside that they've fought for their country and even if they did not return knowing that they fought for their country and hopefully seen as equals in everyone's eyes.
Jake Shaw's great, great uncles Rufus and Cyril Rigney were amongst the 21 Ngarrindjeri men who went off to fight in the war. Rufus was the youngest. Because he was only 16, he had to lie about his age to enlist. And because he was Aboriginal he had to get special permission to leave his home.
Indigenous Australians weren't even considered citizens of their own country and yet they have fought in every single war that Australia has ever been involved in. It's thought that up to 800 Indigenous men enlisted in the First World War and in the second thousands signed up to fight. For many it was a chance to see the world and earn a decent salary. And while at home they were often denied basic rights, in the army they were treated the same as their fellow soldiers and some rose to high military positions.
JAKE: In the army they're all treated as one equal and as brothers.
But many didn't make it home. Rufus and his brother both died in Europe and for many years all their relatives had to remember them were photos and names on a plaque. Then, in 2004, a year 12 student called Donna Handke saw the memorial and decided to research the Ngarrindjeri ANZACs for her history project.
DONNA HANDKE (2005): I was in the camp and we found this little church with the 16 names and I was surprised that Indigenous Australians fought in World War One.
She found out that Rufus had a known grave in Belgium and, with her teacher and classmates, saved up for a trip to visit. She poured some Coorong sand on his resting place and took some soil from the grave home to his relatives in Raukkan so they could say goodbye in a traditional way.
But it didn't end there. Two years later, Jake's cousin Victor went to Belgium too, and performed a traditional fire dance for his great uncle Rufus. The trip became a regular pilgrimage called Connecting Spirits. Now every two years Indigenous and non-Indigenous students from around the Meningie region in South Australia travel to Europe to visit the graves of Aussie soldiers whose lives' they've researched. And last year it was Jake's turn.
JAKE: There's thousands of graves and it's just emotional because all the people who went to war and the people on the trip who had family from there it was just yeah a big thing.
He says it doesn't matter where the soldiers came from, or what the colour of their skin was their courage and sacrifice was the same. And it won't be forgotten.