“It all comes back to Senator Williams - Wacka. He has done these tours to Thailand for Anzac Day, for several years,” Peter said.

“I was telling Terry there was one coming up, and he expressed an interest.”

The two attended the Dawn Service and lay a wreath on behalf of the Inverell sub-branch.

Peter was spurred to make his initial trip to learn more about the railway, and in the process became confounded by the atrocities committed during its construction.

“It was pretty horrendous, how any human being could do those things to another human being, confuses me, I just can’t understand it,” he said

“There were poms, there were Dutch, Indians, and a heck of a lot of Asian indentured labourers, that’s what a lot of people don’t realise.

“Thousands of them died. They were treated worse than the servicemen.”

The fallen bodies of emaciated, beaten men were buried as they died along the route of the railway. 

Terry said he was deeply affected when the group visited Hellfire Pass, a cutting through solid rock where the prisoners were were equipped with simple hammers and chisels to create shafts to sink the dynamite.

“It’s very moving to go there to Hellfire Pass, but I think one of the highlights were there was actually two Diggers there who were actually prisoners of war there at the memorial service,” Terry said.

“One was 94, and the other was 99 year old, and one of them gave a speech at the service at Kanchanaburi and sounded still very confident.

“Probably not so much about what they done, but their memories and we were remembering Hellfire Pass because of what they’d done - they didn't want to talk about themselves.”

On their tour, the two men encountered another chance to honour the Diggers.