Canberra Cemeteries is to clarify the steps to be followed by relatives wishing to repair the graves of former service men and women buried at Woden Cemetery.
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The ex-services or RSL section at Woden contains the graves of 1032 former servicemen and women dating from World War II until this year.
Only 123 of these are classified as "official commemorations" and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission a Department of Veterans Affairs spokesman said.
A recent walkthrough revealed many of the non-CWGC graves in the RSL section have fallen into disrepair.
In many cases lettering had weathered to the point of illegibility. In others marble headstones had cracked and, in some cases shattered or broken off, by decades of exposure to freezing Territory winters.
Ron Hamilton, a 79-year-old former national service corporal who has two uncles buried in the RSL section, said confusion over who was responsible for the graves and the similarity between "official commemorations" and private, ex-service interments contributed to the lack of care.
He said he had found it difficult to obtain permission to have work done on his uncles' graves because he was not their next-of-kin or the rights holder for the burials.
Hamish Horne, the chief executive of Canberra Cemeteries, said there was no objection to families doing the right thing by their dead.
"It is our policy that families can carry out works on monuments of their relatives even if they are not next of kin," he said. "This is not a strict process but does require the family to show some documentation to verify their bona fides."
Mr Horne encouraged family members wishing to arrange maintenance on any of the RSL graves to contact Canberra Cemeteries.
"Canberra Cemeteries will prepare an information sheet articulating the procedures and make this available on our web page," he said.
Mr Hamilton said although both uncles, along with his father and four other members of the extended family, survived the actual war, they could not survive the peace.
"Clive Southwell, my mother's brother, joined up when the war broke out," he said. "He was a Rat of Tobruk and also fought in New Guinea and the islands. By the time he was discharged his wife had taken off with another bloke and he just went to pieces.
"Clive had very bad memories (of the war). He was pretty depressed when I knew him. It all became too much and in November, 1959, he gassed himself with the exhaust from his car."
Reuben Schelbach, the other of Mr Hamilton's uncles buried in an RSL plot at Woden, was a leading aircraftsman.
A motor mechanic before the war, he was the subject of a police check at the time of his enlistment in February 1941.
It found, in addition to the fact he was not a communist, that LAC Shelbach was "a sober, honest and respectable man".
That last had changed by 1945.
"Reuben drank himself to death," Mr Hamilton said. "He went all through the islands, Borneo and Tarakan. He told me that sometimes they had to use a hose to get the human remains out of planes that came back shot up.
"He saw horrible things and it was too much for him. Today they would call it post traumatic stress disorder. "
Mr Shelbach died in 1963. The best part of him had died two decades before Mr Horne said.
