How RSL volunteers ensure no medal, or memory, is left behind.
While working on a kitchen renovation of her home in Langwarrin, a woman came across some medals lying in the back corner of one of the cupboards.
The medals were badly stained and rusted over. Given the condition of the medals, it was not clear if they belonged to the previous owner or someone from decades before.
Conscious the medals may have been of great significance to someone, she handed them in to reception at Frankston RSL Sub-Branch.
Graham Wilson heads up the Memorabilia Committee at Frankston, a team of about five volunteers. The Committee is regularly faced with small mysteries, like these abandoned medals which have no clear owner or history.
“The medals in themselves were not particular significant,” Graham Wilson said. “We recognised them as ordinary service medals from the Second World War, given to everyone who served in Australia.”
At their fortnightly meeting the task of finding the rightful owner of the medals was given to Bruce Buchan, a retired police officer who had only recently joined the group. Bruce is an affiliate member of the RSL with great uncles who had served in the 4th light horse and 39th battalions, the latter on the Kokoda track.
“It is really important for people bringing in medals to give us as much information as possible,” Bruce said.
“In this case all we had was the last name of the veteran and their service number, both of which were engraved on the edge of the medals. The service number started with VX which meant the veteran was from Victoria. The woman who had handed the medal in had not provided her address or any information, other than they had been found in a kitchen cupboard during renovations.”
“Sometimes there is really not enough to go on,” Graham said. “But in this case Bruce was determined to find out who they belonged to.”
“If we wanted to find someone in the police force, we had databases which made it easy to find someone when we needed to,” Bruce said. “But being a civilian now, I needed to rely on things like ancestry.com and even things as basic as a Google Search.”
From the service number, Bruce was able to find and download the veteran’s service file from the National Archives of Australia website.
The soldier was James Joseph Curry, born in Melbourne in October 1917, who had enlisted in the military in February of 1940 in the Australian Army Ordnance Corps. A fitter and turner by trade he worked in the 107th Brigade Infantry Workshop until transferring to the Australian Infantry in 1943 who sent him to Darwin where he worked testing weapons.
Bruce then went to the Supreme Court website and looked through applications for probate, in the hope that someone with the last name Curry, perhaps a son or daughter, might be on their lists.
“An application for probate was listed with someone with the same name and I was fortunate that it mentioned the address of the deceased, not in Langwarrin but in Carrum Downs. Unfortunately, it did not list the name of the executor.”
It wasn’t much to go on, but Bruce looked up the property address on real estate websites and found it had been sold in December 2024.
“I called the real estate agent who had listed the property and told him that I worked for the RSL and was looking to locate the owner of rightful owner of medals that had been handed in to our Sub-Branch.”
The Real Estate agent provided Bruce with the contact details of the executor. Bruce called the executor who told him she was the best friend of the deceased. Through her he was able to confirm the deceased had previously owned a property in Langwarrin and was the son of the man who had been awarded the medals.
The executor was not aware of the existence of the medals and did not know why they had been left behind in the Langwarrin property.
The medals were technically not part of the estate and were not listed under probate as items for the executor to distribute because they had not been in the possession of the deceased when he died.
“Our policy is that the medals should go to the closest living relative of the deceased,” said Frankston Sub-Branch President Kevin Hillier OAM. “So, in this situation they would not be given to the executor. It is up to us to either find the closest living relative or donate them to Shrine of Remembrance or Australian War Memorial.”
The executor came to the RSL in person asking that the medals be given to her. When the reception said this was not possible, lawyers for the executor sent a letter to the Sub-Branch asking for the medals to delivered to the executor.
Kevin Hillier contacted the executor by email and explained that the medals would only be provided to the family of the deceased.
“Once the executor understood our position, and why we had to be satisfied that the medals would go to the right person, she passed on the contact details of the next of kin, who was living in Brisbane,” said Bruce. “Her name is Merril Curry.”
Merril Curry is the granddaughter of James Curry. She had known James well before he passed away in 1993, when she was twelve years old.
“My father and I would visit my Pop regularly. He was living in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, in Hadfield.”
Since her father passed away in December 2024 she had been thinking a lot about her grandfather. On ANZAC Day her four-year-old son went to the local Dawn Service for the first time.
“My son’s first ANZAC Day made me think about when I was a child at my grandfather’s house. I remembered how I used to sit on the floor and play with the medals. So, to be contacted by the RSL and be told they had been found was incredible.”
Merril did not know much about her grandfather’s time in the army during the Second World War.
“My auntie told me that he had been posted to Darwin about the time when she was born. All I knew was that he had been very good at what he did and had worked testing guns and other weapons. It wasn’t something he talked about a lot.”
Merrill does not know why the medals were left behind in the Langwarrin house but is thankful for the work of Bruce Buchan and the Frankston RSL Sub-Branch in tracking her down.
“It means we have something tangible to remember Pop by,” she said. “There is a direction connection between these medals and him. He is part of our family story and it a story that I can tell my son about, so he has a sense of our history and so can his kids one day.”
Merrill plans to have the medals cleaned and restored and then framed with a photo of her Pop.
To Bruce Buchan, the fact that they are standard issue medals given to all Second World War veterans is beside the point.
For him, and the other members of the Memorabilia team at Frankston RSL Sub-Branch, the important thing is that the medals are important to someone.
Their work in tracking down the people who remember the veteran, and who want to ensure that the veteran is never forgotten.
