His great-grandmother Mary Hutchins had two daughters and nine sons. Seven of the nine boys enlisted in the AIF and only three came home.

Mr Liversidge, a 49-year-old former milk factory worker from Mooroopna, near Shepparton, in Victoria, doesn't know how long he has to tell their tale. He was diagnosed with a rare, and fatal, cancer in August and has been told he could be dead in a year, or less.

Mr Liversidge skipped a chemotherapy appointment on Wednesday so he could present his great-grandmother's seven-star Female Relatives Badge and four-star Mothers and Widows Badge to the Australian War Memorial.

Also on display at the handover were the dog tags worn by his grandfather, Mike (Malcolm) Hutchins, who survived the war.

''I have been wearing his dog tags every day since I was diagnosed [with cancer],'' he said. ''I am drawing strength and inspiration from their courage and sacrifice; it is my turn to fight.''

Mr Liversidge, whose three-year-old daughter is called Matilda in a nod to the Eric Bogle song, wants to see her start school before he dies. ''I'm better than they [the doctors] think,'' he said. ''If I can get another three or four years I'll be happy.''

He is very conscious of what the four brothers who did not return from the war lost, and also of what their deaths cost their family.

''My great-grandmother wore those badges every day until she died,'' he said. ''Ray [one of the two brothers rejected by the army] had gone to enlist on the same day as Eric, Fred and David on July 26, 1941. If he had been accepted he would have ended up in [the prison camp] Ambon and would have died as well.''

Ray, who was too short for the army, became a jockey and horse trainer and trained the 1973 Melbourne Cup winner, Gala Supreme.

''It makes you wonder what Eric, Alan, David and Fred might have achieved if they had lived,'' Mr Liversidge said. ''They died horrible deaths, all as prisoners of the Japanese. They were pawns, sacrificed by generals and politicians in crisis mode trying to please allies.''

David, Fred and Eric were sent to Ambon as part of the ill-fated, poorly trained and ill-equipped Gull Force that was overrun by the Japanese in early 1942. Alan had been sent to Rabaul as part of Lark Force at about the same time.

''Eric was only 17 when he was beheaded by the Japanese [as one of a group of 300 POWs massacred at Laha],'' Mr Liversidge said. ''He and Fred had put their ages up so they could enlist. Fred was bashed to death with an iron fence picket by a Japanese guard.''

Mary Hutchins and her husband, Henry, did not know what had happened to their four missing sons for years. They lived in the hope that by some miracle they might come home. Hope died forever in a single week in February 1946 when four telegrams, each confirming their worst fears, arrived. Three came on the same day.

The Australian War Memorial marked another dark episode in the history of the Pacific War on Wednesday with a wreath-laying ceremony to mark Sandakan Day.

Chief of Army Lieutenant General David Morrison laid a wreath to honour the almost 2000 Australian and British POWs who lost their lives during the Sandakan Death March in Borneo. Only six of the men who started the march survived.