Looking across the nation, Queensland researchers have developed a new DNA test in order to help identify the thousands of Australian soldiers whose remains still lie unidentified in battlefields across the Pacific since World War II.
It has been more than 70 years since tens of thousands of Australian soldiers fought the Japanese in the Asia-Pacific and 5000 of those soldiers still don’t have a grave and remains are continually being found on Pacific battlefields, particularly in Papua New Guinea.
Forensic biologist Dr Kirsty Wright says identification is incredibly challenging because “when anthropologists recover bones from the ground after all of these years, they are literally falling apart in their hands. The bones are very, very fragile and in some cases they are like the consistency of Weet-Bix."