In the middle of the bush in far western Queensland, a lone grave looks starkly out of place in the red dirt and dead grass.
Vera Tighe's grave sits protected by chicken wire and rusty old poles, but two weathered teddy bears and a little green dinosaur adorning the plaque offer clues to the young life it commemorates.
Vera was eight years old when she died 108 years ago.
Her resting place near Cooladdi has led her relatives on a quest to unearth family secrets from a time when society was very different.
This week brought them back to where it all began.
"It's a story of the tough times ordinary people faced, of families fighting hard to stay together in the face of prejudice," Charleville Historic House's Gabrielle Wheeler said.
"It was also a story of people isolated in remote parts of Queensland pulling together to ensure that a tiny child would not be forgotten."
A hard life
Vera was the third child her parents lost in 10 years.
It was March 1914, and the world was four months away from being plunged into war.
As the sun rose on the morning after her death, her father Jack Tighe and his friend Bill King buried Vera close to the family's meagre shanty on the western bank of Quilberry Creek.
Mr Tighe then carved a headstone for his daughter from hand-made concrete.
But over the decades, drought, floods and the hot scorching summer sun slowly wore the headstone down.
A few years ago, workers for an energy company were digging around when they stumbled upon the headstone, which had shattered.
They took it to the Fox Trap Roadhouse in Cooladdi, the only inhabited dwelling in town, where it was displayed in a glass cabinet and later given to family members for safekeeping.
The workers, moved by their discovery, chipped in from their personal savings for a new brass plaque and a teddy for the gravesite.
Family secrets
Wind the clock forward and Vera's great niece, Elizabeth Downes, has uncovered a family story blurred through tragedy and shame.
In June 2020, Ms Downes, now 56, arrived in Australia's smallest town, more than 800 kilometres from Brisbane, desperately looking for any information about her long-lost great aunt.
"I wanted to have that connection with my grandmother's family because of the shame they felt," Ms Downes said.
"They didn't talk about siblings; they didn't talk about anything or anybody — it was all a secret."
By delving into the records and meticulously searching birth, marriage and death certificates, Ms Downes said she learned more about her family's past.
She said things started to become clearer with the aid of DNA testing.
"Jack and Ellen's constant fear of the children being removed had them in fear of their Aboriginality," Ms Downes said.
Records show Mr Tighe was born in 1869 on a station near Coonabarabran in New South Wales and was of Irish, English and Aboriginal heritage.
Ellen Tighe was the daughter of Irish and English immigrants.
It was a time when mixed marriages were not accepted or considered equal.
Ms Downes said the couple left New South Wales and floated around outback Queensland, where Jack worked in shearing sheds, labouring and fencing.
It was a tough and basic existence.
Three years after Vera's death, in 1917, Mrs Tighe had disappeared from the electoral roll.
Ms Downes said the local gossip was the marriage ended and that she had taken their two youngest children with her.
She found some evidence that Mrs Tighe was registered as the licensee of the Bierbank Hotel, in outback Queensland.
Here she was recorded as helping deliver a baby in 1919, but few records exist of her life afterwards.
She was buried in a pauper's grave in Brisbane's Toowong Cemetery in 1940.
Mr Tighe died two years earlier and was buried in the Charleville Cemetery, an hour's drive from Cooladdi.
'Close to her father'
This week, Ms Downes returned to her great aunt's burial site to reconnect with locals who helped her along her path of discovery.
"She will not be forgotten," she said.
The family has also donated Vera's original headstone to the Charleville Historic House.
"As soon as Elizabeth contacted me at Historic House Museum with the offer of the headstone, I knew it was a story waiting to be told," Ms Wheeler said.
She said the Historic House Museum was privileged to be given the responsibility to protect and preserve the headstone, which would go on display soon.
"It seems right to have Vera close to her father," Ms Downes said.
"Vera has come home, where she can be at peace, and there is no shame anymore."
