Silver brooch : Miss Lois Henriksen

Small silver brooch made from the Australian coat of arms emblem cut out from the centre of an Australian florin.

Associated with VX36974 Robert George Towers, of 2/29 Battalion and his sweetheart Miss Lois Fay Henriksen. Towers, from Beech Forest, Victoria, enlisted on 11 July 1940, a few months before his 27th birthday.

Before leaving for overseas service, he gave Miss Henriksen this brooch which he had cut out and made from an Australian florin. He wore the corresponding outer part around his neck with his identity discs. He said to her that when the two parts were joined together the war would be over and he would be home with her forever. Towers was posted to Malaya and was subsequently captured by the Japanese.

Lois Henriksen enlisted in the Australian Army Medical Womens Services in February 1944, two days after her 18th birthday. She was a private with the service number VF514924.

She had heard nothing more of Towers until just after the war when she was working in a ward where ex-POWs were being treated. One of the men had been in a POW camp in Japan with Towers and had been with him when he died of illness on 8 November 1943. He knew of an officer who had brought Towers' effects home with him, and arranged for the effects to be sent to Towers' mother, whose address Miss Henriksen gave him.

She went to see his mother and among the effects was Tower's corresponding pendant to her brooch. In 1946 Henriksen married a returned soldier, Arthur Percival Rourke. They had two children, Arthur Rourke died in 1989 and Lois Rourke died in 2012.

• Silver pendant : Private R G Towers, 2/29 Battalion