The Duke of Sussex, Prince Harry, who as a British military man rose to the rank of Captain over two operational tours of Afghanistan, recently stepped forward through ceremonial smoke and laid a wreath with Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph West down at the For Our Country memorial in Canberra.
The duke, and others, had been received with a Welcome to Country delivered by the memorial's Indigenous liaison officer Michael Bell.
"The For Our Country memorial allows you to focus on commemoration - we don't tell you what to commemorate," Mr Bell said.
"You can enter into it and it's about immersion and understanding.
"It also talks to the duality of Aboriginality and Aboriginality service and the societal split that our First and Second World War and modern veterans have faced."
The Ngunnawal and Gomeroi man also informed those gathered why the memorial was a learning circle and that the uneven rock shape symbolically represents the immense difficulty that First Nations people always have endured around military service through their lifetime.
The duke stood silently, his hands clasped together, listening.
"Country is something that you feel in your heart and it is always with you," Mr Bell added.
Indigenous veteran Garth O'Connell, a fourth-generation military serviceman, who is a curator at the Australian War Memorial, took a lot out of the yarning circle with the royal military officer from 2005 until 2015.
"I wanted to thank him for his interest in supporting all of us veterans, regardless of your background," he told local media.
"He's a veteran himself, so he's got an appreciation for what it's like to be deployed and the stresses it causes on your family and what it's like to come back.
"I'm glad that he's got that lived experience."
The duke was later showed a gallery that was dedicated to the memory of the late Captain Reg Saunders, who in 1945 became the first Indigenous person to be commissioned as an officer in the Australian Army.
The story was most fitting ahead of the reinterpretation on the legal constraints over the scope of the Australian War Memorial.
The Australian Frontier Wars between Indigenous Australians and that of mostly British settlers throughout the 19th century is set to be included for the first time as part of a gallery planned to open in 2028.
At least 30,000 Indigenous Australians were killed in the ongoing conflict against an estimated 2,500 deaths of soldiers allied to the colonies of the British empire.
The heritage of many First Nations servicemen has historically been overlooked, as the Defence Act of 1903 prohibited individuals of non-European descent from joining the Australian Defence Force.
Lieutenant-Colonel West, a Murrarawi man and a key figure driving the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans and Services Association, always shares the story of his great uncle, Private Harold West, decidedly noted in the well-known poem The Coloured Digger, which highlighted the stark disparity between Australia's democratic ideals and the reality faced by Indigenous soldiers.
War memorial officials had previously argued that frontier fighting in Australia was outside its charter, as it did not involve Australian military forces.
Such a position has received criticism from historians, who debated that such fighting should be commemorated at the Canberra memorial as it involved large numbers of Indigenous Australians and settler paramilitary or government-backed colonial forces.
Brendan Nelson, the memorial's outgoing chairman, had announced in 2022 a proposal in the works towards portraying "a broader, much deeper depiction and presentation of the violence committed against Indigenous people".
