The ghost town of Annuello lies on the road between Managatang and Robinvale in Victoria's north-west.
It's marked only by a heritage-listed hall, a fire station and some obsolete grain silos beside a railway line.
The last resident left half a century ago, around the same time as the local store and post office closed their doors.
But 100 years ago, it was bustling with boundless but misplaced optimism as soldier settlers allotted farming blocks in "The New Mallee" moved in.
It was part of a grand, but ill-advised, government-run, nation-building scheme to open up land and provide employment to thousands of war veterans.
The tenacious and waterless Mallee scrub proved to be too great an adversary, however.
The small farms failed, and Annuello withered and died.
Reviving memories of a forgotten town
But those with links to the town are determined to ensure it won't be forgotten and a reunion in the red Mallee dust is planned for August.
There are only a handful of original residents still alive.
That's one of the reasons for the reunion.
"We just thought there's probably so much information or photos out there that we're going to lose if we don't do something," local grain farmer Greg Plant says.
He and neighbour Andrew Zanker have tracked down families with links to the town and collated their photos and stories.
Another impetus for the reunion was the chance discovery of a photo album in a Melbourne second-hand shop.
It belonged to Keith McLean, a soldier settler who documented his life there from his arrival in 1919.
Like his comrades, he was faced with thick Mallee scrub that had to be felled and cleared.
Another settler, air ace Arthur Drinkwater, took three days to locate the survey pegs of his block in the featureless country.
He spent the next six years living in a tent, relying on muddy dam water and living on tea and damper while he laboriously cleared the gnarled Mallee trees.
"And he'd start off depending on when he ran out of water, but even it if was four o'clock in the afternoon, he'd start off to get the water. He'd get his water, and he'd get back at two o'clock in the morning. And that went on for five years."
Eventually, the settlers scooped out dams with horse teams and installed rainwater tanks to collect every precious drop of water.
Tough conditions for war veterans
Arthur Drinkwater had survived the hell of the Western Front. He carried shrapnel wounds and the psychological scars of war.
He was a fighter pilot officially credited with downing nine enemy aircraft, though he may have shot down as many as 13.
Though Australian, he served with the nascent Royal Flying Corp alongside British troops.
In one six-month period, Drinkwater saw 86 fellow airmen killed.
Yet, the Mallee held new horrors for him.
His diet was so poor he suffered from scurvy as well as sandy blight, a severe eye disease inflamed by heat and dust.
"One farmer said he would prefer to spend 10 years at the Western Front than one year in the Mallee," Mr Zanker says.
Dust storms and limited food
Eighty-six-year-old Terry Murphy's father ran the Annuello butcher shop, and his mother operated a grocery store and cafe.
By 1939 both businesses were struggling because local farmers had endured a run of bad seasons and poor wheat prices.
Many ran up debts in town they could never pay. When war broke out late that year, Mr Murphy's father jumped at the chance to enlist.
Though nothing remains of the town except a scatter of rusty iron and rotting timber, Mr Murphy can still name every building and its location.
They're now marked by a peg that records the details, work Mr Zanker carried out in readiness for the reunion.
There's the post office and store, grocer, butcher shop, barber, blacksmith and the bush nurse clinic, all with a story of their stoic occupants.
Despite the best endeavours of the soldier settlers, the red soil was too arid, the crops and prices too poor, the hard work, heat and isolation too much.
"There was a family out to the east of Annuello, and they were living on nothing but boiled wheat, now that wouldn't have been uncommon," Andrew Zanker says.
Former resident Jim Taggert recalls choking dust storms and people subsisting on rabbits.
"There was no shortage of rabbits in them days, oh boy, oh boy and bloody warrens everywhere!" he says.
The Plant family is one of the few descending from the original soldier settlers who remain.
Mr Plant runs a huge cereal growing enterprise, a far cry from when his grandfather Sid Plant arrived a century ago with only a horse and cart and a suitcase.
Settlers generous and proud
Despite the adversity, the ex-servicemen were proud of what they achieved on the land and never forgot their fallen comrades.
In 1934, six Annuello ex-servicemen rode almost 500 kilometres to Melbourne for the opening of the Shrine of Remembrance, Victoria's major memorial to the Great War.
The idea came from Annuello's storekeeper, New Zealand-born Barney Gallagher.
"Barney led the convoy of horses, and he led a riderless horse called Bonnie which had a wreath around its neck which was made by Mrs Hitchcock, Barney's mother-in-law," his daughter-in-law Leonie Gallagher says.
The wreath was made of tough Mallee leaves and flowers so it would survive the journey until it was laid down at the Shrine.
Ms Gallagher, now 91, arrived in Annuello in 1953 as a newlywed from Melbourne.
She recalls days of no electricity, intense heat and scant water supplies.
But she also remembers the boundless generosity of her in-laws Barney and Lou Gallagher, who doled out rations to starving families, knowing they would never be reimbursed.
The Gallaghers often paid for the train fare for departing residents as well.
The encroaching Mallee scrub might be erasing the signs of human endeavour at Annuello, but not the memories.
Watch this story on ABC TV's Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday, or on ABC iview.
