WHEN Zoe Grayson, 12, stood before the Bright Memorial Clocktower on Anzac Day this year to speak about the Honeychurch family, she moved her audience to tears.

The Bright P-12 College primary school captain had selected the name from the memorial, done her research and put her speech together for the service.

“Honeychurch seemed like a weird name so we chose them,” she says, of her and her mother standing before the list in Mafeking Square and reading the names.

Zoe knew a little about the Great War and its impact on the world but didn’t know how badly it had affected families, including Bright’s Honeychurch family. 

“The part where the mum lost two of her sons and only one came home, I thought that was pretty hard; it would be pretty hard having two sons die,” she says.

Research for the project involved joining the dots between names on the memorial and names in the Bright cemetery and understanding, for Zoe, that those names were meaningful and had their own story.

“I knew there was a plaque with some of the local names from around the area and I saw the Honeychuch name and these people would have been well-known,” she says.

Next month, the Bright RSL will launch a school history project in an effort to connect students like Zoe with local stories of World War I. My Great War Hero Project will encourage students to research an ancestor or to choose a local name from the Bright Memorial Clocktower and uncover their story.

The project is aimed at students from year four to year 10, who will research a war hero and then put together a presentation for a display, ahead of the Anzac centenary next year.

Bright P-12 College, Porepunkah, Harrietville and Wandiligong primary school students will be invited to participate.

Bright RSL sub-branch’s Warren Barnard said RSL members would be available as mentors to help the students with their research. 

The RSL will assess the presentations and offer bursaries as awards in selected categories.

Mr Barnard said he was looking forward to working with the schools and integrating their work into next year’s Anzac Day activities.

“It would be really good if we could get half a dozen or more to put some research into their family and learn the- history of Australia’s Anzac tradition,” he said.

Bright College’s student leadership co-ordinator Graham Gales said the project was about connecting families with history.

“They will be swamped with information (as the Anzac centenary approaches) and will get all that media,” Mr Gales said.

“So the aim is to make it more real for them, to be grounded in that experience.”

Mr Gales said the project was an opportunity to investigate a piece of Australian history in greater depth.

He said history was well done in the secondary curriculum and that year nine students were currently looking at World War II.

But even then he thought history, in the past 30 years, had been neglected in schools compared the depth of study 60 or 70 years ago.

“So this is reconnecting our younger generation with Australian history, and maybe their parents as well,” Mr Gales said.

“As the saying goes, ‘those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it’.”

Bright College is involved in a range of Anzac centenary activities, from the Spirit of Anzac prize to the Gallipoli Oaks project, students selling Legacy badges and speaking at services. 

My Great War Hero Project will be launched on October 15 at 9am, at Bright College.