Griffith's Aboriginal Research Fellow Dale Kerwin said the task was a difficult one, and until questions were asked of the Commonwealth Department of Veterans' Affairs and the Australian War Memorial by brisbanetimes.com.au this week, there had been little interest in tracking the trackers. "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack," Dr Kerwin said. "I've written to the Prime Minister and the premier of this state asking for some financial assistance and nothing is coming. "They've wished me all the best and I've applied for grants all over the place but no one is interested in this story." Fought between the British and colonial forces and the Dutch- descended free settlers - or Boers - the Boer war saw extensive use of guerrilla tactics by the settlers and brutal use of force by the British.

The British tried any method to reduce the advantages the Boers had in using guerrilla warfare including officially condoned murder of Boer prisoners by Australian Lieutenant Henry `The Breaker' Morant. In 1902, the head of colonial forces, Lord Kitchener, asked Australia's first Prime Minister Edmund Barton to send indigenous bushmen with knowledge of hunting and tracking to act as scouts to locate Boer fighters. When Australian forces withdrew later that year, the four trackers are thought to have been left behind, forced to live out their days on foreign soil. We were seen as less than human in those days. We were less than the flora and the fauna at the time and government was just waiting for us to die out. Dr Kerwin believes the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 - known as the White Australia Policy and which prevented non-white landing - was to blame. It meant the men would have had to have applied to return home and funded their own passage.

"No one cared," Dr Kerwin said. "We were seen as less than human in those days. We were less than the flora and the fauna at the time and [the Australian Government] were just waiting for us to die out." Dr Kerwin has enlisted the help of a UK researcher to help with the project, scouring war archives across two continents. Indigenous historian and author David Huggonson has also provided some assistance on the valuable role the trackers played in the war effort. In his book The Black Trackers of Bloefontein, Huggonson recounts the story of an Aboriginal man known only as Billy who tracked five British officers across the South African veldt (or open plain) proving the abilities of the trackers by finding all the men and bringing back evidence of their presence.

"The tracker, first stating that the men had chosen their various routes...described how one had got off his horse and had then proceeded to light his pipe, producing the half burnt match to prove it," Huggonson wrote. "One man whom the boy describes as a `silly fellow' because he had gone in his socks, had cut his foot at one point, and gone lame for the rest of the journey; a piece of fluff from a sock was brought back as one proof." So impressive were the bushmen's skills, Australian officers in South Africa at the time had wagered on their abilities to win a bet with the British. Dr Kerwin believes the trackers came from North Queensland and may have been drawn from the Queensland mounted police force due to their required skills in weaponry, horsemanship and military discipline. After being contacted by brisbanetimes.com.au on Friday, Gary Oakley, curator at the Australian War Memorial and head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans and Services Association of Australia, said the memorial was keen to investigate the plight of the lost men.

"The project we are working on at the moment is to try and document all indigenous Australians who ever served in the defence force or worked for the defence force in a capacity such as trackers or auxillaries," he said. "We would be very interested in their story. These people were employed by defence for a specific purpose and basically the Australian Government let them down." Dr Kerwin said he wanted to raise the profile of the contribution of Aboriginal Australians in some of the nation's most historic events. "At school when we do history and presentations to our peers its all about the dominant cultural history and it doesn't give [indigenous Australians] any self esteem from the contribution we've made," he said. "We've made a lot of contributions: these men who went to the Boer War and the capture of Ned Kelly just to name a couple."