"Where are you, George?," Mrs Shoesmith says, as she drags along a wagon filled with painted rocks while studying a map of the cemetery.

Cheryle Shoesmith is the advance party for Kurri Kurri's commemoration of Anzac Day.

"Very busy," she says of her schedule a few days out from April 25 . "Not much housework's getting done. This is more important to me at the moment."

In the cemetery, members of community organisation Towns with Heart and the Coalfields Local History Association are creating a "Field of Honour" for Anzac Day.

On each of the 350 or so known graves of servicemen and servicewomen in the cemetery, a national flag will be erected by the time the sun rises on April 25.

But first those graves have to be located and identified. Which is Mrs Shoesmith's job.

As a member of the history association, she and her fellow members have spent years tracking down and plotting who is buried where, and she has marked the veterans' resting place on her maps.

Then, so the small army of volunteers know where to erect the flags in the pre-dawn hours of April 25, Mrs Shoesmith has been trundling through the cemetery this week with her wagon, placing a painted rock on each relevant grave.

Cheryle Shoemith has hand painted about 400 rocks. Most of them look like a poppy, to identify an Australian's grave, but there are also rocks wearing the Union Jack, for British soldiers, and other pebbles are black with a painted silver fern, for those from New Zealand.

While she is doing this to acknowledge her great uncle, who served in World War I, and her father and uncle who fought in World War II, Cheryle Shoesmith also views these local men and women who served as an extension of her family.

"I feel these are my people," the Kurri-born great-grandmother explains. "Their history is alive. Their history is a part of us. So we should acknowledge it."

The idea of a Field of Honour came to fellow local history association member Bill Holland, when he was on a driving holiday and detoured through the Victorian city of Colac in 2017. He was captivated by the sight of the city's cemetery filled with flags and thought, "What a wonderful idea. Let's try and do this in Kurri." The flags began flying the following year, and it has grown, as more service people's graves have been located.

The Field of Honour tied in with another commemorative project on the Coalfields: The Lost Diggers of Weston.

During renovation work in 2010, builders found hundreds of glass plate negatives under a house in Weston. It was an extraordinary find, documenting Coalfields life more than a century ago.

As each photographic plate was carefully cleaned by volunteers at the history association, what also came to light were the faces of World War I soldiers. So far, 72 portraits of diggers have been revealed.

The portraits were taken by well-known Hunter photographer Alexander Galloway in 1916, capturing these young men before they set off for Europe. So these were Coalfields men who were fighting in mud on the Western Front, so many of them died in the mud, and now their images - and their memory - had been retrieved from the mud, thanks to this chance find.

"We called it the 'lost diggers' because nobody could tell us who they were," says Mr Holland. "We didn't know a single one of those diggers. So we started researching and put them on display."

The exhibition around Anzac Day 2019 attracted thousands of viewers, and gradually, names and stories began to be attached to those faces staring out from a century ago.

"Every day, somebody tells us something new about the 'lost diggers'," Mr Holland says.

Of the 72 portraits, 26 have been identified so far. And based on the research done by the history association's members, Mr Holland says it seems only half of those 26 came home - "thirteen of them were killed".

"I think Galloway's gift to us all is that those photographs of those young men were taken a week before they went off to war," Mr Holland says. "And he gave them a wonderful gift, a gift that none of us will ever enjoy, and that's the gift of immortality. They shall not grow old."

Among those photographed, and the first "lost digger" to be identified, was the "George" Cheryle Shoesmith had been looking for in the cemetery, so she could put a rock on his grave.

George Hodge had fought in major battles on the Western Front and had made it home. But Bill Holland said George Hodge was deeply affected by the war. He died in Morisset Hospital in 1953.

Mr Holland felt George Hodge deserved better official support in life, but, with the rock on his grave and an Australian flag to fly over him, he would be cherished on Anzac Day.

The Anzac Day commemorative campaign has another front in Kurri this year. In homes around the area, 27 women have been crocheting and knitting poppies, one for every local person who has enlisted in the armed services since Federation.

"We were asking for 2066 poppies, and I've got 3000-plus," says Anne James, one of the organisers of the "River of Poppies" project. "Boxes and boxes of them."

During the week, some of those who had done the knitting and crocheting met to sort the piles of poppies, ready to display them in Kurri's Rotary Park as a river, symbolising the flow of life - and of blood.

As they worked, photographs of the Lost Diggers peered from the past and over the women's shoulders. "I don't think they'd believe this is what's happening in remembrance of their contribution," says Mrs Shoesmith, who has created about 380 woollen poppies.

"You feel like you're giving a little bit back, in recognition of their bravery," says fellow volunteer poppy maker Marj Wotherspoon.

After COVID curtailed last year's commemorations, the Kurri Kurri organisers are expecting a big response to their commemorative projects this Anzac Day.

"This is our chance to catch up on lost time," Mr Holland says.

The research to put more names to the "lost diggers" continues, and planning is already underway for next Anzac Day.

"It's our intention to surprise the community every year with another thing that's added," Mr Holland says.

"We want to tell the world that this little town cares about Anzac Day. That this community will never forget."

"It's all worthwhile, very worthwhile," says Cheryle Shoesmith, as she places another painted rock on a grave.

"The acknowledgement that they lived. They had a life."

Read more: Hunter WW2 Spitfire pilots soar into party of the century

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