If you've landed here looking for a scholarship, there's a fair chance the name of this site raised an eyebrow. Digger Scholarships? Your grandparents probably use the word without thinking, but if you're 17 and filling in application forms, "digger" might be something you've only half-heard at a dawn service or on the news.
So before you dive into the scholarship database, here's the story of the word itself - because it turns out the history of "digger" is a pretty good short course in why scholarships for descendants of Australian service exist at all.
The short answer
A digger is an Australian soldier. More precisely, it's the affectionate slang Australians (and originally New Zealanders) use for their soldiers, especially those who've served on active operations. The word took hold among troops on the Western Front during the First World War, and it's never let go - you'll still hear it used for serving members of the Australian Defence Force today.
But the word is older than the war that made it famous, and that back-story is where its meaning really lives.
It started with gold, not war
In the 1850s, "digger" meant exactly what it sounds like: someone who dug. The Victorian gold rush pulled enormous numbers of hopefuls onto the diggings at Ballarat, Bendigo and goldfields right across the colony, and the miners wore the name proudly. A digger worked with their hands, lived rough, and wasn't much interested in tipping their hat to anyone.
That independent streak got tested in 1854, when diggers at Ballarat took up arms against the colonial government over unjust mining licences. The Eureka Stockade was overrun in minutes, but the rebellion outlived the battle - it became one of the founding stories of Australian democracy. From then on, "digger" carried more than an occupation. It stood for egalitarianism, self-reliance and a flat refusal to be pushed around.
New Zealand had its diggers too - miners on its own goldfields, and the gum diggers who dug for kauri gum, a fossilised resin prized for varnish and jewellery. On both sides of the Tasman, the word was ordinary working vocabulary long before any soldier answered to it.
The Boer War: a hint of what was coming
The first link between digging and soldiering appeared during the Boer War (1899-1902). Plenty of the Australians who volunteered came off the goldfields, and their mining skills travelled with them. At the Battle of Elands River in August 1900, roughly 500 Australians, Rhodesians and Canadians defended a supply depot for twelve days against a far larger Boer force - and the Australians stood out for how quickly they could carve dugout defences into hard ground.
Even so, nobody was yet calling Australian soldiers "diggers" as a matter of course. That took another war, and a much muddier one.
Gallipoli, the Western Front, and a name that stuck
When the Australian Imperial Force sailed in 1914, its members were simply "Australians" - and after the landing of 25 April 1915, part of the corps known by its famous initials. "Digger" as a soldier's name came later.
One popular origin story reaches back to Gallipoli itself. In the days after the landing, General Sir Ian Hamilton sent General William Birdwood, who commanded the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, a message ending: "You've got through the difficult business, now you have only to dig, dig, dig, until you're safe." Historians still argue about whether that line sparked the nickname, but nobody argues with its logic. At Gallipoli, digging kept you alive.
The same was true - times a thousand - when the AIF reached the Western Front in France in March 1916. Trench warfare meant endless digging: trenches cut, deepened, connected and rebuilt after every bombardment, saps pushed forward, tunnels driven beneath enemy lines. The British called their engineers "sappers". The Australians and New Zealanders reached for the word they'd grown up with.
The first recorded use of "digger" meaning a soldier rather than a miner dates to 1916, and by mid-1917 it was how Australian soldiers addressed each other. Private Tudor Roberts, writing home from France, offered his own theory: "The name Digger came from the Tommies, who think we Australians are all miners or cowboys." Charles Bean, Australia's official war historian, recorded that "it was at this stage that Australian soldiers came to be known, together with the New Zealanders, as the Diggers... the term had been occasionally heard before."
What made the word stick was that it meant everything at once. It described the daily reality of trench life. It tied the soldiers back to the goldfields and the Eureka tradition of standing your ground. And crucially, no general or government handed it down - the soldiers picked it for themselves. If you're researching an ancestor from this era, our guide to tracing a WWI service history picks up where this story leaves off.
The Little Digger
By 1918 the word carried enough weight to be a compliment worth giving. Australian troops in France nicknamed Prime Minister Billy Hughes "the Little Digger" - a small man with an outsized temper who'd fought the British government over Australia's interests at the Paris Peace Conference and survived two bitterly divisive conscription referendums at home. Coming from the troops, the name meant acceptance: he was one of them.
Hughes returned to the Cenotaph in Sydney's Martin Place every year to watch the returned servicemen march. After he died in 1952, an empty chair with a slouch hat resting on it was left out in his memory - a tradition for the man the soldiers had claimed as their own.
A word that refused to retire
After 1918 the digger became a national figure, inheriting the qualities Australians had once pinned on the bushman: endurance, courage, ingenuity, dry humour, mateship, and an instinct for cutting the self-important down to size. W.H. Downing's Digger Dialects, published in 1919, catalogued the slang the troops had invented - one of the first dictionaries of a language that was unmistakably Australian.
The word marched straight into the next war. The soldiers of the 2nd AIF were diggers like their fathers in the 1st, and they served alongside a rapidly growing force of women in uniform - the nurses of the Australian Army Nursing Service had already served through Gallipoli and the Western Front, and their service files sit in the National Archives beside everyone else's. The name carried on through Korea, Vietnam and every conflict since, and it's still in everyday use by the Australian Defence Force, journalists and families. If you'd like to see what one of those files actually contains, start with what is a service record and five things you can learn from a war record.
Diggers and Kiwis
Here's a detail that surprises people: during the First World War, New Zealand soldiers were diggers too, and the two forces used the word for each other. The split came largely from outside - British troops took to calling Australians "Diggers" and New Zealanders "Kiwis", and both countries let the labels stand. Today "digger" belongs almost entirely to Australian service, though the shared beginning is still honoured in the commemorative traditions of both nations, including at the Australian War Memorial.
Why "Digger" and not "ANZAC"?
Fair question - ANZAC is the more famous word. The answer is respect, backed by law. ANZAC (always written in full capitals) is legally protected in Australia and can't be used in commercial or organisational names. That protection exists to keep the word from being cheapened, and it's a rule worth honouring rather than working around. "Digger" carries the same history from a different angle - and unlike ANZAC, it was always the soldiers' own word, passed down the way slang is: freely.
So a site built for the descendants of Australian service takes the name the soldiers gave themselves. Every scholarship in our database traces back to someone who was, in the fullest sense, a digger - and many programs, like the Gallipoli Scholarship Fund, ask you to show that connection with real records. If you haven't ordered your ancestor's file yet, our walkthrough on requesting war records from the NAA explains how, and you can search the archives yourself right now on RecordSearch.
Where to next
Now you know what the name means, put it to work. Browse the free scholarship database to find programs for descendants of Australian veterans, and read how to apply for veteran-descendant scholarships before you start drafting. And when you've got your digger's service record in hand and it reads like a wall of abbreviations, you can have it decoded into plain English for $59 AUD - the fastest way to turn the file into a story your application can tell.