In 1928 the Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia produced 10,000 copies of a poster asking for help identifying a patient, believed to be a returned soldier, now in Sydney’s Callan Park Mental Hospital.
The response of members of the public hoping that this might be their lost father, brother, or son, was overwhelming.
Miraculously, the family of this unknown Anzac was located, in Taranaki, New Zealand. The resulting, happy blaze of newspaper and radio attention conveyed, obliquely, the continuing existence of widespread unresolved grief, as the final fate and resting place of a third of these nations’ war dead were unknown. And this man, now being taken home by his mother and sister, was no longer the healthy youngster who had sailed to Gallipoli over a decade before.
The story of what happened to George McQuay, of what he suffered and how he survived, speaks of the dehumanising effects of war with unique power.
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