In 1916, the Unknown Patient was admitted to Broughton Hall, a ‘mental facility’ for returned soldiers in Sydney. Some said he’d been found behind the lines in France, wandering aimlessly and wearing a slouch hat. Others said that he’d been taken in by a group of soldiers roaming the streets of London. Everything about this man was a mystery.

Doctors noted their patient was ‘shaky’, ‘nervous’ and ‘disoriented’:

He states that people’s voices, who are unseen, worry him by calling him a coward. His memory is so dull that he cannot enter any question except by answering ‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’1

They attributed his condition to ‘the stress of the campaign’, and, in the rambling conversations recorded in the asylum casebooks, sketched what might have happened to him. ‘Patient had shock’, ‘was buried by sandbags as a result of a shell’, suffers ‘from Hallucinations of hearing’ and frequent ‘distressing dreams’. A doctor looked with clinical interest at the ‘vacuous’, ‘semi-stuporous’ expression on his charge’s face and printed ‘Recommended for discharge as permanently unfit’ on the medical record.2

The Unknown Patient would remain in Sydney’s Callan Park Mental Hospital for over a decade. They called him George Brown, a name so nondescript it might have belonged to anyone. Personal details were circulated to the press in the hope that someone might come forward – aged somewhere in his thirties, straight brown hair, blue eyes, ‘two vaccination scars, one above the other’.3 That – and vague and contradictory reports of a tattoo – wasn’t much to go on.

In the late 1920s, returned soldiers’ associations adopted the case, determined that an unknown comrade be reunited with his loved ones. Hundreds of ‘anxious enquiries’ flooded in, ‘from fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters all over Australia, who fancy he might be the long-lost member of their family’4. Lost quite literally. In the wake of the Great War, tens of thousands of bodies vanished altogether – around a million dead were buried as ‘Unknowns’, never to be identified. Even a decade after the war, families hoped against hope that their missing menfolk might come home to them:

They cannot believe their father or husband or brother is dead – though officially reported killed or missing – because they received none of his personal belongings, not even the identification discs, from the Defence Department.

Thousands of bodies vanished altogether: The grave of an Australian soldier ‘Known unto God’.Over a third of the bodies of Australia’s dead could not be found or identified. For the families of these lost men, the case of George McQuay offered a last fragile hope that the missing might return to them. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

First came the letters: ‘piteous appeals are being received from all parts for a photograph,’ one press report noted. Hundreds stared for hours at an expressionless face, imagining a son or brother aged by war, searching for some feature they might recognise. And then came the visits. ‘A sad procession made their way to Callan Park Asylum,’ an eyewitness reported, ‘mostly parents who had cherished the fading hope that perhaps their boy had been wrongly reported missing.’ They watched a man ‘baulking furiously at the cameras brought in to photograph him’ or standing ‘lamblike’, indifferent to his surroundings. After a while they turned away, thankful – perhaps – that their boy had been spared that, anyway.5

Almost a decade after the end of the war, the Unknown Patient was identified as George Thomas McQuay, a carpenter from Taranaki. McQuay signed up with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in 1914, fought in Gallipoli and France and was posted as a deserter after the battle of Armentières. Perhaps that helped to explain the voice that shouted in his head, ‘calling him a coward’.

In May 1928, George was reunited with his mother. Emma McQuay had crossed the Tasman with a fare raised by returned soldiers, as both the Australian and the New Zealand governments would do nothing to assist her. As Mrs McQuay explained to an eager reporter:

Think of it! Never a word since 1915; never a sign of George since the landing at Gallipoli! Not to know even that he had been killed, no report of him as ‘missing’ – just silence. . . when I have him home again, among the places and people he loved, he’ll ‘come back’. So many years here, with nobody to prompt him, nobody to care. He was only a number.6

He’ll come back: Mrs Emma McQuay and her son, reunited after years of absence. A cameraman captured a mother’s anxious joy in the grounds of Callan Park Mental Hospital. Her hand is resting on George’s shoulder as if reluctant to lose him. Sydney Morning Herald, 2 May 1928 courtesy National Library of Australia.

For all the spin of the press reports, the case of the Unknown Patient did not end happily. On the one hand, there were the hundreds who were turned away disappointed – a mother who wrote to the medical superintendent demanding some ‘assurance they have no record of any other unknown patient’; a man had a vivid dream about his brother, a soldier killed at Pozières who ‘suddenly returned from nowhere’. Another family from Hampton, Melbourne, wrote for a photograph, explaining ‘strange to say, only a few nights ago one member of our family had a dream of her son having reappeared after 10 years. He was killed in the war’. In each case (and there were many), news of a man who had ‘stepped out of the silence’ rekindled hope and prolonged the process of mourning.

Nor was it quite true, as Mrs McQuay had assumed, that her son had ‘come back’ to her. Within weeks of returning to Aotearoa/New Zealand, the now known patient was admitted once again to an asylum where one doctor noted:

Lounges about in a hopelessly untidy condition. Is very childish . . . and cannot converse rationally . . . his table manners are repulsive. . . habits are filthy [he] drinks urine, licks spittoons, spits in cups, eats porridge with his hands.7

Recent work by Jen Hawksley has retraced what remained of George McQuay’s life: two more decades in and out of institutions, sometimes in the care of his family, sometimes locked away, always a burden to others. The Unknown Patient died in 1951, aged 64. He was buried in the soldiers’ cemetery at Kopuatama. Veterans from both world wars attended the funeral and the Last Post was sounded over his grave.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on contemporary newspaper reports; George McQuay’s service dossier R10927130, Archives New Zealand; and the records of Callan Park Mental Hospital. The latter were accessed (with the kind assistance of Belinda Saunders) in 2004. The authors thank NSW Health for permission to view the same and the Australian Research Council for funding. The most detailed treatment of the McQuay case is given by Jen Hawksley, ‘Long Time Coming Home: The Unknown Patient of Callan Park’, in Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds), Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010) and her assistance is gratefully acknowledged. For similar cases based on asylum records see Tanya Luckins, Gates of Memory: Australian Peoples Experience and Memories of Loss and the Great War (Perth: Curtin University Press, 2004); Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: walking the battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009) and Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, new edition, 2013). The authors thank the Friends of Callan Park (in particular Hall Greenland and Roslyn Burge) for their introduction to the important historic site.

1 Callan Park Mental Hospital: 14/9395, Case Papers, no. 1918–81.12449, State Records NSW.

2 George Thomas McQuay, R10927130, Archives New Zealand.

3 Barrier Miner, 22 March 1928.

4 Mercury, 12 March 1928.

5 New Zealand Truth, 5 April 1928; Truth (Sydney), 25 March 1928.

6 Western Mail, 17 May 1928.

7 We owe this quotation to Jen Hawksley, ‘Long Time Coming Home: The Unknown Patient of Callan Park’, in Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds), Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010), pp. 70, 77.