BY JANUARY 1916 the initial surge of patriotic enthusiasm that had attended the outbreak of the First World War 18 months earlier had run its course.
The war had become bogged down, and bloody.
The Western Front was a static slaughterhouse of trench warfare, as it would remain - give or take some meaningless territorial gains and losses - for three more years.
Gallipoli, the scene of the doomed Anzac landing the previous April, had been ignominiously evacuated in December leaving behind the bodies of some 8000 Australians.
At Tooraweenah, a small NSW township nestling at the south-western foot of the Warrumbungle Ranges, the country - as elsewhere across the Central West - was in the grip of drought.
Good news was scarce, and spirits low.
It was against this sombre backdrop some patriotically inclined menfolk from Tooraweenah came together to organise a recruiting march to Bathurst, to muster more volunteers for the war effort.
It was to be called the Kookaburra March and helping to organise it was W.T. "Captain Bill" Hitchen, a businessman and rifle club captain in nearby Gilgandra.
Hitchen had been the inspiration for the famous "Coo-ee March" of 1915, in which 20 Gilgandra men keen to enlist had set off from Gilgandra to march to Sydney, gathering nearly 300 other recruits along the way.
Not to be outdone, 23 Tooraweenah men accompanied by kettle drum and a large Australian flag formed up outside the Tooraweenah hotel on January 16, 1916, arriving nearly a month later in Bathurst, 92 strong.
And today, at the town's annual Anzac Day service, the Kookaburra Marchers will be remembered, as will others of the more-than-130 men and women from the district who answered the call in times of war.
The town of Tooraweenah - today, more correctly a village - came into being to service the settlers who arrived from the early 1860s to take up blocks carved from the former Tooraweenah Run of Andrew Brown.
By 1914 it boasted a school, 15 businesses and a substantial rural workforce, from which was drawn most of the 59 men who enlisted for service in the so-called "war to end all wars".
Of those, 14 failed to return - a casualty rate of 24 per cent, well in excess of the national casualty rate from that war of about 14pc, as is typically the case when casualties from country areas are computed.
A war memorial hall was erected after the First World War to honour those who served.
The hall was destroyed by fire, as was the hall built to replace it, but a third was erected in the 1930s which survives to this day.
Plaques within the hall pay tribute to the 59 who served in the First World War, along with the 73 (about as many as the town's present population) who enlisted in the Second World War, eight of whom lost their lives.
Old-timers remember how the hall used to throb on occasions during that latter war, when dances would be held to farewell local servicemen home on leave - often all-night affairs to the music of Frank Bourke and his famous White Rose Orchestra.
Today the hall will host a more solemn ceremony, when upwards of 100 locals and visitors gather for the annual 11am Anzac Day service, to hear a guest speaker and songs from children at the local school.
From there, veterans (now only two from the Second World War) and relatives of former veterans will march with the school children to a nearby park where wreaths will be laid at the war memorial.
It's a ceremony that has been going for as long as anybody in Tooraweenah can remember, kept alive by each succeeding generation taking up and perpetuating the tradition, but for how much longer?
As in many farming districts, Tooraweenah has seen a drift of younger people off the land, and unlike some other areas closer to major centres, the losses have not been offset by new arrivals of "lifestyle" residents.
Perhaps Tooraweenah needs a Kookaburra March in reverse, bringing a new wave of "recruits" from the overcrowded city to discover a life of rustic contentment in the foothills of the Warrumbungles.