Some months ago, a woman from Croatia whom I had never met contacted me through social media and asked for my help. She was searching for information about the tragic death of her great-grandfather, who could have gone by two names, Stipan or Stojan Dodig, whom she had never met, in Australia in 1942. Her family wished to have a cross bearing his name erected at the Cemetery of Peace on the Bile plateau in Bosnia and Herzegovina, believing that he, too, should be remembered among the victims of the Second World War.

Her request touched me and immediately stirred my curiosity. With little more than the name she had given me, I began searching.

What I discovered shocked me.

Her great-grandfather was among fourteen people killed in what has been described as Australia’s first mass-murder bombing. Twelve of the fourteen victims bore Croatian names.

On 1 February 1942, in the Western Australian mining town of Boulder, near Kalgoorlie and some 600 kilometres east of Perth, miner Pero Raecivich carried out a series of bombings that killed fourteen people and wounded fifteen others. He later took his own life.

More than eight decades later, the tragedy remains remarkably obscure. At a time when governments throughout the world devote enormous resources to understanding and combating terrorism, the story behind Western Australia’s deadliest mass bombing has largely faded from public memory.

The precise motive behind the attack was never publicly established. During the investigation, Coroner T. Ansell reportedly referred to writings discovered in Raecivich’s room that might have shed light on his motives, yet their contents were not publicly disclosed. Kalgoorlie-Boulder historian Tim Moore has suggested that the ethnic background of the victims may have been significant, particularly given that the attack occurred during the Second World War and less than a year after the Axis invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia.

Whatever ultimately drove Raecivich to commit such an atrocity, I cannot separate those fourteen deaths from the violent historical circumstances in which they occurred. To my mind, those killed in Boulder in February 1942 belong among the countless victims whose lives were extinguished during the upheaval of the Second World War. The surviving family in Croatia deserves great credit for seeking, more than eighty years later, to rescue one of those names from obscurity and give it a permanent place of remembrance.

That place is the Cemetery of Peace—Groblje mira—on the Bile plateau in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In August 2013, during commemorations for the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes, an ambitious vision emerged among Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina: to establish an immense memorial cemetery for victims of the Second World War and communist repression. It would become known as the Cemetery of Peace.

Situated on the Bile plateau between Mostar and Široki Brijeg, within the parish of Goranci, the cemetery has developed into one of Herzegovina’s most striking places of remembrance. Its purpose reaches beyond the traditional concept of a burial ground. It seeks to preserve the names of people swallowed by war, political violence, execution, persecution and decades of silence.

Across the plateau, tens of thousands of white stone crosses now stretch in ordered rows. Each bears a name. Each represents a human life.

For many families, that simple inscription carries enormous meaning. Some victims disappeared without graves. Some were executed and buried in unknown places. Others died far from their homeland. For decades, many families had nowhere to place a flower, light a candle or stand before a marker bearing the name of the person they had lost.

At the central ossuary rest the remains of victims, many of whom have never been identified. In the stillness of the mountain landscape, the cemetery offers something that history often denied their families: a place to mourn.

But the Cemetery of Peace is intended to represent more than sorrow. Its very name expresses an aspiration—that remembrance need not perpetuate hatred, and that confronting the tragedies of the past can contribute to reconciliation rather than revenge.

It is often described in words that capture that principle simply: a cemetery for every victim, regardless of nationality.

The initiative for its construction arose among the predominantly Catholic Croat community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, yet the idea embodied in the name Cemetery of Peace reaches beyond one people. It recognises a fundamental truth too often obscured by ideology and competing historical narratives: every innocent victim had a name, a family, a life and someone who mourned them.

The Church of St Joseph the Worker, blessed in 2016, now stands on the plateau as part of the memorial complex. Its restrained yet imposing form rises against the stark Herzegovinian landscape. Bells installed in 2021 call visitors to prayer and reflection, while the Pietà by artist Ilija Skočibušić evokes suffering, grief and the enduring human need for compassion, forgiveness and peace.

And now, perhaps, another cross will stand there.

It will bear the name of a man who left his homeland and died thousands of kilometres away in a Western Australian mining town on 1 February 1942. More than eighty years after his violent death, his family is still searching, still remembering, still insisting that his name must not disappear.

That, perhaps, is one of the deepest purposes of memorials such as the Cemetery of Peace.

History records wars in armies, borders, governments and ideologies. Families remember them differently. They remember a father who never returned, a brother who vanished, an uncle whose grave was never found, a photograph kept in a drawer, or a name passed quietly from one generation to another.

Sometimes remembrance begins with something as simple as a woman contacting a stranger on social media and asking:

Can you help me find out what happened to my great-grandfather?

I am grateful that she asked.

And I am grateful that, more than eighty years after that terrible day in Boulder, someone still believes his name deserves a cross.

Ina Vukic