Kerri Worthington – Gracia Afonso's grandfather was known as the old man with half an ear. "He kept his hair long, longer than other men I knew in Timor-Leste, to hide his ear and the deep scars on his neck," she said.
But it wasn't until well after his death in 2004 that Ms Afonso learned the story Joaquim da Silva Ku, known as Akiu, had never told his family.
During World War II, Japanese soldiers occupying Portuguese Timor slashed his throat, cut off his ear and left him for dead as retribution for helping Australian soldiers.
He was nine years old.
Ms Afonso discovered an account of Akiu's wartime childhood in a book hidden in a suitcase of her grandfather's things.
"I knew he was some kind of veteran, but I couldn't believe he was involved in the war when he was so young," she said.
The book she found – Commando: From Tidal River to Tarakan – reveals an Australian soldier nursed him back to health.
Akiu then attached himself to the soldier's commanding officer, Captain Arthur Stevenson, as a criado – the name given to boys who helped fetch and carry for Australians.
An unknown number of Timorese teenagers and boys took on the role of criado during the Australian Army's presence in the then-Portuguese colony, which is now the nation of Timor-Leste.
Australian and Dutch troops landed in Dili in late 1941, against the wishes of neutral Portugal and with no significant Japanese presence in the territory.
Historian Brad Horton, a specialist in the Pacific war, said he did not believe Japan planned to invade.
"Australia, along with the Dutch and England, have responsibility for the war starting in East Timor," said Dr Horton, of Akita University in Japan.
He said there might have been an element of Japanese baiting of Australia, including by keeping decommissioned tanks in formerly Dutch-controlled West Timor.
"So they put them there as a threat to Australia to keep the Australians concentrated on Timor so they could do something somewhere else," Dr Horton said.
"'We might invade you now, so you'd better be careful'... I think that that might have been the strategy, as they weren't using the tanks."
But he said once Portugal's neutrality was breached by the arrival of the Australian and Dutch troops, the Japanese would have felt they had to protect the territory in Indonesia they had already seized.
Japanese committed 'abominable massacres' in Timor
Timor-Leste's President Jose Ramos-Horta agreed that staying neutral may have prevented the 1942 invasion and its three-and-a-half-year brutal occupation.
"The reality is, while Japanese forces were in Timor-Leste, [they] perpetrated abominable massacres of the civilian population," he said.
Official Timorese government figures, gathered during and after the war, suggest between 40,000 and 60,000 people – mostly civilians – died in the occupation years to 1945.
They were killed in reprisals by Japanese soldiers, in allied bombardments, or due to famine as farmers struggled to work land destroyed in tactics employed by both sides.
"There were many, many Timorese who sheltered the Australians, saved their lives, fed them," Mr Ramos-Horta said.
"And for this reason [it] created a bond of friendship, a blood relationship starting in WWII."
Mr Ramos-Horta's mother had a powerful connection with Australians during the war.
Villagers in Remexio, north-west of Dili, were sheltering Australian soldiers who conducted commando raids on Japanese forces around the capital.
In May 1942, the Australians got word that Japanese troops were heading to Remexio and the villagers were urged to leave quickly.
"Our grandmother ... refused to leave," Mr Ramos-Horta said.
"She didn't want to leave the house, but she sent two daughters, our mother and a sister, to follow the Australians."
No-one else is believed to have survived the subsequent razing of the village.
Mr Ramos-Horta's mother and aunt travelled for weeks through Timor-Leste's mountainous terrain to the south coast.
There, he said, the women boarded an Australian warship.
They ended up in a refugee camp in Narrabri, New South Wales, until they were taken to Portugal where they had official citizenship.
The pain of separation
The Timorese took great risks to shelter Australians, helping organise ambushes and guiding soldiers through the most difficult landscapes in the country.
Ed Wills's father was among the first soldiers to arrive in Timor in December 1941 and last to leave a year later when the Japanese proved too powerful.
Mr Wills has surveyed Timor-Leste's interior to help him understand the guerilla-style conditions in which his father fought.
"The ruggedness did give them a tactical advantage over the Japanese, as they could hide out and see and hear the enemy coming," he said.
And the criados, the teenagers and boys as young as nine who bonded so strongly with Australian soldiers that many wanted to be repatriated together in 1942, were right among them.
Ms Afonso said her grandfather had rarely spoken of his months with the Australian soldiers, and she attributed his reticence to the Indonesian military occupation of Timor-Leste from 1975 to 1999.
She believed he associated the memory of his traumatic injuries at the hands of Japanese soldiers with the fear of more reprisals from Indonesian military that could extend to his family.
"When someone has a relationship with military people, it could endanger the family," she said.
For the children and grandchildren of the Australians and Timorese involved in WWII, the most important thing that came out of the horrors of war was the genuine friendships between people of such different backgrounds.
"I thought of him as a father and he treated me like a son," one criado said in archival film from a 1960s interview.
Many soldiers speak, in similar interviews, of wanting to bring the boys back to Australia but being unable to due to the White Australia policy.
The last surviving criado, Rufino Alves Correira, told documentary makers that "his" soldier Lieutenant Tom Nisbet's request to bring him aboard the Australian warship taking soldiers back to Australia was denied.
"They said: 'He's black – if he was white we could take him,'" Mr Correira recalled.
Soldiers talk about the debt Australia owed Timor-Leste from the Pacific war era – and of a sense they were leaving the boys to die.
Ralph Coyne, who grew up on a farm in central Victoria, said he considered himself the killer of his criado, a boy called Diki.
In an interview for the Australians at War Film Archive at UNSW, Mr Coyne described the tearful parting as the Australians were evacuated.
"The [criados] were begging us to take them to Australia," he said.
"I gave Diki my army pullover and ... it's on reflection that I realise he'd wear that pullover proudly and he'd be an immediate target for the Japanese."
Dr Horton said it would have been dangerous to take the boys from Timor.
"Their absence would have caught the attention of Japanese military authorities, putting their families at even greater risk," he said.
Akiu had said soldiers approached his mother to ask if they could take him to Australia, but she wouldn't allow it.
"Luckily, she said no or I wouldn't be here," Ms Afonso quipped.
For Akiu and Captain Stevenson, among others who survived the war, their friendships endured for the rest of their lives.
But their parting in 1942 was heartbreaking for both.
In the last words of the memoir Ms Afonso uncovered in her grandfather's belongings, Captain Stevenson boarded his boat and "the little fellow was left on the beach, sobbing his heart out".