By Liz Hobday

The Australian War Memorial is calling for volunteers to transcribe love letters and diaries from its collection.

Images of hundreds of thousands of handwritten documents have been released on the memorial’s new digital platform Transcribe on Valentine’s Day, among them a love letter by an Australian soldier in the hours before he died in the landing at Gallipoli.

The hope is that an army of volunteers will go online to decipher the material and type it out, making it easier to access for historians and the general public.

“The letters are an intimate insight into the daily life of couples separated by war and we are fortunate to now share them as part of this important project,” said the head of the memorial’s research centre, Robyn van Dyk at the project’s launch in Canberra on Wednesday.

But some of the material is hard to decipher, such as one letter in cursive script that is written over “I love you” repeated in a swirl across the page.

“I tell you this much, if only I could get the necessary money I’d bowl right up to Woolworths and spirit you off to get married now,” wrote the love-struck serviceman.

The national collection includes years of correspondence between prisoners of war and their lovers back in Australia, such as that of Dorothy Keshan and her husband Malcolm “Mac” William Keshan, who was a prisoner of war in Germany from 1941-45 during World War II.

“The only good thing about all this passing time is that each day brings you a little closer, I feel pretty certain that it won’t be much longer sweetheart,” she wrote to him in one of hundreds of letters between the pair.

“All this time passing only makes me miss you so more and more, and – I’m waiting for you Mac.”