This is the story of Private William Punch, an Australian soldier and Aboriginal man whose identity has been posthumously appropriated by the Australian War Memorial to carry a frontier-wars narrative into an institution, even though the defining connection on which that narrative depended, and which the Memorial itself regarded as critical, had no evidentiary basis. Yet, without evidence establishing that claimed massacre and without any known descendants able to speak for him, his name, image and memory were posthumously enlisted by the Australian War Memorial to manufacture a pathway into its developing frontier-wars narrative.