The Term ‘Digger’
THE TERM ‘DIGGER’, referring to the Australian soldier, came out of World War One. No one knows who coined it, although one theory is that it was applied by New Zealand soldiers at the front because of the Australians’ industrious trench digging. ‘Digger’ came to be used by war correspondents, and was particularly popularised by Charles Bean in his wartime despatches and later books about the war, and by bestselling Australian authors of the era such as poet C. J. Dennis, whose 1918 book about a World War One veteran’s struggle to reassimilate after coming home from the war was entitled Digger Smith.
However, in all the many contemporaneous diaries, letters and accounts written by World War One Australian soldiers that I have consulted in the research for this book, and in the World War One war diaries of the Australian battalions, brigades and divisions of the AIF, I never found the men on the ground describing themselves or their comrades as Diggers. Accordingly, in this work I have refrained from using the term.