But today, 75 years since its completion, the world is now fighting a common and ruthless enemy in the coronavirus.

It's said history has a habit of repeating itself and in 2020 alone the region has seen the rise of a deadly pandemic 100 years since the devastating Spanish Flu, and bushfires to rival those of the Black Friday inferno just over 80 years ago.

Honor Auchinleck, the daughter of former member for Benambra Tom Mitchell, saw firsthand the devastation of the most recent bushfires, with the family's landmark Towong Hill Station homestead a casualty.

Mrs Auchinleck admits she's glad her late father did not witness the devastation of the blaze and has recently found comfort in reading correspondence between him and his mother, Winifred, at the time of VP (Victory in the Pacific) Day.

"When VP Day came they would have been wondering what the new normal would be like, just as we wonder what the new normal will be like," she said.

"VP Day is an important commemoration and time for deep reflection of what the world has experienced, and you might well ask yourself if it brought the peace that my parents' generation thought it would bring."

Mr Mitchell served in World War II and was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942.

He was held for three years in the Changi PoW camp before it was announced the war was over in August, 1945.

In a letter penned to his mother on August 20, 1946, Mr Mitchell reflects on his life one year after returning home to Towong.

"I think that those years in Changi were worth having, particularly in view of the security and comfort and happiness of my early life. The greatest lesson I think I learnt in Changi was of the real things to worry about in life, and really, there are very few.

"I remember taking myself off to a quiet corner where the smell of human filth was not so strong and kind of making up my mind that I wouldn't let the years come to be wasted ones.

"I seemed to have sensed a golden opportunity to enrich my mind and fill up gaps in my education and study and learn things that I would never have had time to learn had I been at Towong... I picked all the brains I could and there was a wealth of talent in that camp, even up until the end.

"Please do not worry about my present happiness, I'm really quite happy. And if things don't go as well as I would like them to, don't forget, you always said a certain amount of fleas are good for a dog.

"It's funny, after just one year of freedom, the little things of daily life still amuse and interest me with a poignancy that they never had before."

A year on, Mr Mitchell's reflections to his mother continued in a letter written on the same date in 1947.

"The actual VP Day in Changi was too puzzling and too unexpected to be really quite as happy as it otherwise might have been... I did not feel safe and sound until the morning when the Union Jack rippled out in the wind from the mast on the jail tower."

Mr Mitchell met his promise to not waste time, being a Victorian MP from 1947-76.

His name still lives on through Wodonga's Thomas Mitchell Drive which was rechristened on April, 20, 1979, after having been known as Tallangatta Road.

Before World War II Mr Mitchell also was an Australian champion skier.

Mrs Auchinleck is convinced her father, and mother Elyne, would have competed in the 1940 Winter Olympics in Sapporo, Japan, had they had gone ahead.

Coincidentally the postponed Olympics in 2020 were also to be hosted by Japan.

Charles Sturt University historian Bruce Pennay said 1945 was a turning point for Border communities and was about both war and the peace to follow.

Dr Pennay said it was a tremendous boost to Albury-Wodonga's economy as the population grew on both sides after the war.

The establishment of the Bandiana barracks was one contributing factor, with the Bonegilla camp becoming an immigration centre.

"All together there was about 11,000 servicemen and women in Albury-Wodonga during the Second World War," Dr Pennay said.

"All of those people had to be fed and looked after and that was an enormous boost to local business people."

He added the former Wodonga Butter Factory was one business in hot demand, making around 265 litres of ice-cream each week to be sent to the army camps.

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The Wodonga Historical Society, with help from the Victorian Veterans Council, is now working on an online exhibition about the impact of war on Wodonga and surrounds.

Social change was also just as prevalent, particularly for women who had taken on jobs in factories and joined the Australian Women's Army Service.

"Women got a freedom during the war, but it was withdrawn a bit after the war," Dr Pennay said.

"Young women had jobs in business and factories that they hadn't had before.

"That meant that after the war they kept looking for those jobs.

"But at the end of the war married women had to go back to the house and back to domestic duties, that was the set up of the time."

In Towong, Elyne Mitchell kept herself busy working the land while also writing extensively while Mr Mitchell was away.

She wrote three books in that time, Australia's Alps, Speak to the Earth and Soil and Civilization.

In Mrs Mitchell's work Towong Hill: Fifty Years on an Upper Murray Cattle Station she recounts: "I worked so hard for those war years it was almost impossible to imagine the way we used to live and for awhile it was impossible to realise that people could play again, in fact still play. That our way of living need not be entirely serious."

Mrs Auchinleck is herself the wife of a retired British soldier, Colonel Mark Auchinleck, who had 37 years in the army.

After living in Germany, Bosnia and Turkey, she returned back home to Towong Hill in 2009.

However, Mrs Auchinleck admits she had a comfort that her mother didn't have in being able to see firsthand the land, conditions and people where her husband was posted.

"She (Elyne) must have been exhausted by the time VJ Day came," she said.

"The war years had been extremely difficult for her.

"She found the loneliness and the work keeping the property going was terribly hard for her."

Mrs Auchinleck has always had a passion for history, and after spending 27 years overseas, she decided it was important to look closer to home at the events that shaped her.

"European history and the First World War and Second World War in Europe became my subject," she said.

"I looked at what happened closer to home and that was dad's story, and in a sense, because he's my father, it's really essentially part of my own story.

"Today's social distance has nothing on the social distance that they experienced."