Meanwhile, who is this boy of about 10 summers in the formal, studio portrait that graces today's column? Want some clues?

Well, he is a working-class English urchin (dolled up in his Sunday best for his studio photograph). The year is about 1902. And, although on this day of the photograph the lad may not even know where to find Australia on a globe of the world he is destined to be famous – even legendary – in Australia. Today he is honoured with a popular statue at the Australian War Memorial.

Yes – too easy. Our lad in his Sunday best is John "Jack" Simpson Kirkpatrick, famous now as the Simpson of "Simpson and his Donkey" legend.

Last Wednesday's column reported the poignant discovery by South Shields' (north-eastern England) local historian Jim Mulholland that as a boy (from 10, at about the age he is in this photograph) Jack worked with donkeys. Donkey rides were a treat for holidaymakers on the sands of a beach at South Shields and Jack was a "donkey boy" looking after the donkeys. And thus we learn that he was already donkey-wise when he arrived on Gallipoli (on April 25, 1915) and went on to do his famous donkey-back rescues, carrying the wounded to safety.

Thanks to Jim Mulholland we now know more of the man we are honouring when we visit the Australian War Memorial's favourite statue, Peter Corlett's rendition of Simpson and of a little donkey burdened with a wounded man.

Jim Mulholland spent nine years researching his local hero's hitherto untold pre-Gallipoli story, drawing upon recollections of the descendants of his family and friends, official government and school records galore and family correspondence.

Mulholland tells us he has discerned a saga full of working-class struggles. For example, Jack's father suffered a stroke in 1905, and Jack, still not 13, became the main bread winner for his big family (there were eight children, only four surviving to adulthood), going to work as a milkman.

And it is a story in which a major skeleton emerged from a closet; the discovery that parents Robert and Sarah were not married, meaning that the children were "illegitimate".

Mulholland advises us that "the shame of being illegitimate in Edwardian England cannot be overstated. An enormous row broke out among family members and the teenage Jack joined the Merchant Navy partly to defuse the situation, but primarily to provide for his mother and kid sister Annie."

"Jack returned home from sea in December 1909, but in the new year he went back to sea. He got a job as a stoker on board the SS Yeddo bound for Australia. In February 1910, Jack left Tyne Dock unaware that he would never return."

After various working-class knockabouts in Australia, sometimes ashore and sometimes in vessels plying the coast, war broke out and Jack promptly enlisted.

Mulholland thinks that his "most startling" discovery about Jack is disclosed in his book's last chapter. It jumps forward in time to the aftermath of Jack's death (on Gallipoli in May 1915) and reveals the grief of his mother and his sister Annie.

"The book explains the real reason behind Jack's decision to enlist in the Australian Army using the name Simpson [instead of Fitzpatrick], at the outbreak of World War I, in August 1914. For 100 years it has been assumed that he jumped ship and joined up under the name Simpson because he feared that a deserter from the merchant marine service wouldn't be accepted into the army.

"But that's not so. The army authorities had no way [anyway] of checking the information provided by thousands of recruits – all that mattered to them was that you passed the medical. The truth of the matter is, Jack enlisted using the name Simpson because he wanted his mother (Sarah Simpson) to be able to draw part of his army pay from his bank account."

"It has been a remarkable journey of discovery," Mulholland muses to us.

"If people say I've rewritten history, I am proud of it. Other authors [may] question my findings but I'm confident that my extensive research will hold up to any scrutiny. After all, unlike me they haven't lived and breathed this story for nine years".

John Simpson Kirkpatrick: The Untold Story of the Gallipoli Hero's Early Life by Jim Mulholland, published by Alkali Publishing, is on sale online via Amazon.co.uk

And so to our up-to-date portrait, this time of a "froggie".

John Bundock, an indispensable font of bird news and fine bird photographs, has been taking delight in a froggie family at Tharwa. He has sent us pictures galore. Of this particular one he explains: "Yesterday the chick was active and curious; while the mother was trying to hide it under her wing it kept popping its head up. The other parent [our portrait] was in a tree opposite [taking] an occasional glance at me. I've not seen this before. As you know, frogmouths usually freeze on someone's approach and peer through a eye slit [so as to be camouflaged as just a piece of dead wood]."