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.
