Dr. Ross Bastiaan, former honourary dentist to the Governor-General and one time forensic dentist to the Melborne Coroner and the Homicide Squad, has invested a great deal of his time and money designing and installing plaques commemorating Australians who have served at war.
From South Africa to Gallipoli, Flanders Fields to the Kokoda trail, more than 160 plaques tell the stories of those who did the battle in the Australian forces. There are Bastiaan plaques in London, Canberra, Balikpapan in Borneo, Tobruk and Singapore ... just about everywhere Australians have fought.
   Some of his bronze bas-relief designs mark the bloodist battlegrouds of a century of conflict. All the more curious, then, than his latest series is being created in a scene of tranquil beauty in one of Victoria's foremost tourist destinations.
   The Great Ocean Road was built as a living memorial to Australians who served in World War 1, with funds raised thrugh the Returned Service League and local communities. (It seams the state governament of the day was reluctant to cough up.)
   Diggers from Gallipoli and other battelfields become diggers in a vast peacetime pick-and-shovel operation, with hundereds of returned soldiers slowly forcing a road around the rugged cliffs.
"Poeple from the around the world come here to drive along this road", says Dr. Bastiaan. "I think it would be a crying shame if they didnt know how returned troops buit it."
The plaque at Cinema Point, 6 km of Lorne is the first of eight bronzes that will tell the story of the road and returned heros who built it.
"I've been described as obsessive and a nutter", says Dr. Bastiaan. "That's not the way I see it - I'm just very determined to follow this concept through wherever I think it's appropriate."
   For many Melbournians, his best known work is the design surrounding the city's best loved statue, the larger than life memorial in St.Kilda Road to Sir Edward 'Weary' Dunlop, hero of the Burma-Thailend railway in World War 2.
   Out in Melbourne suburbia, the plaque in Ferntree Gully, on the footsteps of the Dandenong Hills, tells the story of courage and stamina of those who fought the Japanese along the tortuous and torturous Kokoda Trail through the mountains of Papua New Guinea.
   More than two dacades of work and maybe $100,000 of his own money have gone into his labour of love, and his rewards have included the OAM for services to Australian military history, the RSL's Anzac of the Year honour and life membership , the Advance Australia Award and the Commenwealth Centenary.
   But the real reward comes with the knowledge that he has achieved what he set out to do.
   "When you walk through war cementaries and you see thousands and thousands of graves, yu know you're walking on some very imporatant places.
   My real reward is knowing I've contributed to the memory of poeple who did a lot for Australia and and the world. Whatever I've done is all worthwile when I reflect that every day someone somewhere finds one of the plaques.
   They'll read it maybe for only four or five minutes at most but that will focus them on Australia and it will focus on the sacrifices of the generations gone before me."

Compiled from Royal Auto April 2006.