Darren Moate has been sweltering in the Turkish heat, hiking dusty trails on the Gallipoli Peninsula where his great uncle fought and died 100 years ago.
The 54-year-old from Sydney has a passion for Australian military history but finds he chokes up when talking about a relative killed in action.
On Thursday he will pay tribute to Private John Brown and other fallen Australians at the 100th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Lone Pine, attended by Governor-General Peter Cosgrove and three of Australia's living VC winners.
Mr Moate's grandmother's brother joined Victoria's 6th Battalion under the alias John Brown and at the age of 23 found himself embroiled in bloody trench warfare at Gallipoli.
An Australian attack launched on August 6, 1915, against well-entrenched Turkish soldiers around Lone Pine was repulsed after days of intense fighting, resulting in more than 2000 Australian casualties.
At the Lone Pine war cemetery memorial wall on Wednesday, Mr Moate placed a poppy against the name of Private Brown, a labourer from Sale in Victoria who disappeared on the battlefield, somewhere around Pine Ridge.
"I talk about military history but when it's somebody you know, it gets a bit difficult to talk about. It's personal I guess," Mr Moate told AAP.
He said his great uncle left behind two children.
"There's was always talk it was a bad marriage and basically he shot through.
"He disappeared into the army and then disappeared in Gallipoli."
Mr Moate is on a military history tour of Gallipoli, sweating his way along dusty tracks in the footsteps of Australian, New Zealand, British and Turkish troops who fought for eight months on the peninsula before allied troops were evacuated.
"There's miles of trenches out there if you're prepared to go walking through the bush, there's still remnants of the soldiers being there 100 years ago," Mr Moate said.
Those remnants include spent bullets, fragments of army issue rum jars, water bottles and even skulls and other bones strewn across the broken country where tens of thousands of men died.
To get a taste of what the diggers had to endure, on Tuesday Mr Moate and his tour group were given a lunch of bully beef, black tea, jam and "hard tack" biscuits.
"You can see why the fellas broke their teeth on them, they were hard, like a small piece of wood maybe," Mr Moate said.
"Just living was hard, and on top of that they were shooting at you."
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