Eric James Cross died a decade ago, but his daughters feel like a piece of their father has finally come home.
A "bizarre" chain of events has led to the three sisters from Queensland's south-east being reunited with their estranged father's war medal, more than half a century after he left his wife and seven children, never to return.
Lynette Wooler said seeing the medal brought back memories of polishing her father's army brass and shoes as a child.
"It's like he wants to be part of our lives; he missed out on so much," Ms Wooler said.
She remembers watching her father leave when she was less than 10 years old.
"My brother Jim and I, we'd come home from school, and he was putting things in the car," she said.
Ms Wooler said her father's absence left a void in the siblings' lives.
"You'd go off to school and people had both parents and we always felt different because we didn't have a dad," she said.
Now part of him is back
Ms Wooler's sister Sandra Gorry, who lives in Ilkley on the Sunshine Coast, still can't believe the circumstances that led to the war medal's return.
"It's like it was trying to get back home somehow; it's unbelievable," Ms Gorry said.
Mr Cross's Korean War medal was found in the back of a rusting old car belonging to Ms Gorry's brother-in-law.
"It's just so many coincidences that it happened to fall into my brother-in-law's hands for 30-something years," she said.
Ms Gorry's brother-in-law, Andrew Gorry, bought the car more than three decades ago and never met Mr Cross.
She only saw her father a handful of times, but the medal has been within metres of her for the past three decades.
"I would've been in that car," she said.
"The only thing we can think of is that maybe he went to an ANZAC Day march, had the coat on, got in that car — maybe his mate owned it or something — and he flung the coat in the back seat and the medal came off."
Craig McLean recently bought the car from Mr Gorry, who lives in Goombungee, and found the medal during restorations.
He said the medal was nearly thrown out because it was concealed within a wasp nest in the back of the old car. The rear passenger seats and floor were "literally littered with wasp nests".
"When I threw it [the wasp nest] into the box, it flipped over, and I could see like a coin or whatever on the bottom of it. I didn't think too much of it," Mr McLean said.
"I picked it off the nest, cleaned it up a little bit with polish in between my fingers and saw it was a Korean War medal, so I decided that maybe I should give it back to the owner of the car.
"Probably the chances that I spotted it will be pretty slim; if it didn't flip over in the box, I would never have spotted it.
"I decided that maybe I should give it back to the owner of the car"
'A million-in-one find'
For the youngest of the Cross children, Wendy Moore, who is genealogy "obsessed", the find was like uncovering buried treasure.
"It's just a million-in-one find," Ms Moore said.
"We knew he went to the Korean War; we knew he got the medals but it's a divorced family, things go missing over the years [but] it's extra special that it came home."
Ms Moore, who lives in the Gympie region, has spent more than a decade "on a mission" to piece her family's history back together.
"Because we never knew him, we have no memory of him, I never even knew his mother's name," she said.
Ms Moore has since discovered her father was Aboriginal and an orphan.
"I went and had my DNA tested in 2015 and over the years I've got two sisters' DNA tested, just to back up more and, yeah, we're Indigenous."
She is hoping her latest find means there is more to come.
"What else is going to happen now? There must be more to the story. Is something else going to miraculously appear?"
