Half the population lived outside the capitals and for six shillings (60 cents) a day the Diggers left their towns and villages to see the world and serve England.

But a century later the memories and sacrifices of war still lie over Bowraville on the NSW mid-north coast like autumn morning mists.

A tenderly cared-for museum honours the town's most famous son, Frank Partridge VC, and in the middle of the main street where bullock teams dragged cedar logs as the Anzacs fought at Gallipoli, a polished trachyte column bears 45 names of men who fell in the Great War.

Four families lost 10 sons: There were two Partridges, three were McKays, two Johnsons and three McGrees.

On October 24, 1924, the Herald reported the unveiling of the Bowraville war memorial, describing how Bridget McGreecut the ribbon and was presented with the scissors inscribed to honour her sons' sacrifice.

Bowraville was then the biggest smoke in the Nambucca Valley with some 2000 settlers and Aborigines living around the rolling hills.

Graham Allen, chairman of the local ANZAC Centenary Committee, believes more than 600 enlisted.

"Reading letters sent by servicemen and women I came across variations of this sentence time and time again: 'I seen a few of the Nambucca boys today'. Not a Macksville boy, not a Taylors Arm boy, but a Nambucca boy," Mr Allen said.

"They were never prepared for what was coming, so many young blokes killed and a lot of them who came back were no good ever again."

But sometimes the sadness was bitter-sweet.

Two brothers, Guy and Perry Manusu died in the 1942 Battle for Euro Creek on the Kokoda Track, the first time Australians saw the Japanese drop their guns and run.

Guy left a girlfriend behind in Bowraville. Tib Downs married another local after the war, but not before asking Guy's father, Frank Manusu, to walk her down the aisle.

A Vietnam RAN veteran, Mr Allen wanted to recreate that sense of close-knit community for the Anzac centenary, and veterans in Macksville, Nambucca Heads, Scotts Head, Taylors Arm and Stuarts Point have agreed to march together through Bowraville next Saturday.

Bowraville used to muster hundreds of men come Anzac Day but only five World War 2 vets remain.

One, Kevin Newman, is unsure how much life is left in his legs.

"I'm 91," he said. "But Saturday may be the biggest ever and I've been marching since the end of the war."

Mr Newman can recall Frank Partridge marching.

He won the Victoria Cross in the dying days of the Pacific war.

Badly wounded, he snatched a Bren gun from a dead gunner and challenged the enemy to come out and fight before storming their bunkers and killing Japanese with grenades and his knife.

He was 21, the youngest and the only militiaman to win the VC.

Lionised, Partridge went to London for the 1946 Victory march and the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, but always returned to his father's dirt-floor farmhouse outside Bowraville where he read the Encyclopaedia Britannica by kerosene lamp and honed his extraordinarily retentive memory.

In 1962 he starred on a television quiz show, Pick-a-Box, compered by Bob Dyer.

Already grey-haired, Partridge's dry somewhat haunted manner strangely counterpointed his know-all quiz show rival Barry Jones. They became awkward early celebrities.

Partridge died two years later in a smash at Bellingen.

Shocked, Australia mourned for a man caught between heroism and celebrity. He left a new bride and a three-month-old son. Lachlan Partridge still refuses to sell the VC of the father he never knew.