There is a small newspaper clipping in my mother’s possession, fragile and yellowed with the passing of nearly a century. The headline reads simply: 10 Years of Pain. Beneath it, a few short paragraphs describe how an Australian named Price, wounded in the jaw in 1917, had endured twenty-four surgical operations that lessened his suffering only for a time. A Sydney surgeon at Randwick Military Hospital eventually performed a twenty-fifth operation, severing the main sensory nerve where it traced back to the brain. Price, the article concludes, is now free from pain, although one side of his face is numbed.
That Australian was my great-grandfather, John Price. Each Anzac Day, when I stand in the pre-dawn cold and listen to the Last Post, it is his face I see. Anzac Day matters to me because of him. And the more I learn about what he and his generation went through, the deeper my gratitude grows.
Private John Elmhurst Price, service number 5126, embarked from Sydney on July 5, 1916, aboard HMAT Ajana, bound for the Western Front. He was assigned to the 19th Infantry Battalion, part of the 5th Brigade of the 2nd Australian Division. It was the worst possible time to be joining an infantry battalion in France. The AIF had just been bled white at Fromelles and Pozières, and 1917 would prove, in the sober judgement of Australian historians, the most tragic year in our nation’s military history.
The 19th Battalion was in the thick of it. On May 3, 1917, during the Second Battle of Bullecourt, the 5th Brigade advanced across the Hindenburg Line into German machine-gun fire that, in the words of one account, cut them to pieces before they could even cross the barbed wire. Later that year the battalion fought at the Battle of Menin Road in September and at Poelcappelle in October during the Third Battle of Ypres. It was somewhere in this storm of steel, in 1917, that a piece of enemy ordnance found my great-grandfather’s jaw.
He came home unable to work. The wound was the kind of injury that did not kill but did not let go either. Ten years of unbroken pain. Twenty-five operations. A face that no longer felt the touch of his wife or children on one side. He paid a price in 1917 that he was still paying in 1927 and would go on paying for the rest of his life.
He was one of so many. From a population of fewer than five million, more than 416,000 Australians enlisted to serve in the first world war. Around 60,000 never came home. Of the roughly 270,000 who did, some 155,000 had been wounded, many of them more than once. By the time the Australian Imperial Force was fully repatriated in 1920, more than 113,000 returning men and women were officially deemed unfit. They came back to a country that had no real idea how to care for them.
There were no veterans’ hospitals to speak of. No standing system of disability support. No template anywhere in the world for what to do when an entire generation of young men returned with shattered bodies, gas-scarred lungs, missing limbs, and the invisible wounds we now call post-traumatic stress. My great-grandfather was the human evidence of a question the new Commonwealth had never had to answer before: What does a country owe the people it sends to fight on its behalf?
The story of the answer is one of the most quietly remarkable chapters in our national history.
The War Pensions Act 1914 had provided modest payments at the outbreak of war, but the scale of suffering after 1918 demanded something far larger. The Australian Soldiers’ Repatriation Act 1917 created the framework, and in April 1918 the Repatriation Commission and Repatriation Department began their work. By 1920, a consolidated Act expanded provisions to include living allowances, business loans, and war service homes. Senator Edward Millen, the first Minister for Repatriation, described the work as an emanation of the heart worthy of the last shilling.
Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, fresh from the battlefields of France, oversaw the demobilisation of the AIF with the same precision he had brought to the Hundred Days Offensive. Together they built something that had never existed before: a government department whose entire purpose was to honour the implicit promise made when a young man signed his enlistment papers. That department exists today as the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.
None of that was inevitable. It happened because men like John Elmhurst Price suffered visibly and patiently, and because a young nation chose to rise to the occasion.
I am grateful for many things on Anzac Day. I am grateful that my great-grandfather survived the journey home when so many did not. I am grateful that he lived long enough to have children, who had children, who eventually had me. I am grateful that the Sydney surgeon at Randwick eventually got it right on the twenty-fifth attempt. I am grateful for the small mercies of a sensory nerve severed and a life finally returned to him, even at the cost of half a face he could no longer feel.
But more than anything, I am grateful that I was born into a country shaped by the choices made in those years. The Australia I love was built in the trenches of France and the wards of Randwick as much as it was built in any parliament. The Anzac generation gave us not only the freedoms we enjoy but the very idea that a society should care for its own.
This is why Anzac Day cannot be allowed to fade into a long weekend or a sporting fixture. It is the one day of the year when we acknowledge that the comfortable lives most of us lead were paid for by other people. People like my great-grandfather, who came home in pieces and rebuilt what he could of an ordinary life around the scars and the pain.
The world in 2026 feels less stable than it did even a few years ago. War has returned to Europe. The Middle East continues to be at war with itself. Young Australians who have grown up in peace are now hearing language about their nation’s defence posture that previous generations hoped never to hear again. In such a moment, the temptation to look away from the cost of conflict is strong, and the cost of giving in to that temptation has rarely been greater.
Anzac Day pulls us back. It says: remember. Remember Bullecourt and Menin Road. Remember Gallipoli, where over eight thousand Australians died for ground we eventually evacuated. Remember the wives, mothers and children who waited and the ones who never stopped waiting. Remember the men who came home, like John Elmhurst Price, and the unseen war they fought every day for the rest of their lives.
Each Anzac Day I feel my great-grandfathers presence keenly, and I feel an enormous gratitude welling up that I find difficult to put into words.
Gratitude that he answered when his country called. Gratitude that he endured what he endured. Gratitude that out of his suffering, and the suffering of so many others, came an Australia that, despite its flaws, I consider the greatest country in the world to live in. The freedoms I enjoy, the faith I am free to practise, the work I am free to pursue, all rest on shoulders like his.
Lest we forget is not a slogan, but a quiet promise made by each generation to the ones who came before. A promise that we will not let their names slip from memory, that we will not pretend their sacrifice was free, that we will continue to gather in the dark on the April 25 and say thank you.
On Saturday, I will stand at a dawn service in Melbourne with my great-grandfather in my heart. I will think of his ten years of pain, his twenty-five operations, his numbed solution. I will think of the young man who climbed aboard HMAT Ajana in Sydney Harbour on July 5, 1916, and the broken man who eventually came home. I will think of all the John Elmhurst Prices in all the families across this country, the ones whose stories made it into yellowed clippings and the ones whose stories did not.
