But my joy was short-lived, it was not about Diggers or Digg users as we know them, but rather the New Zealand and Australian military slang term for soldiers from those two countries. The term originated during World War I. Here is the story:

HeraldSun, 170 mass grave Diggers to be buried with honours

THE remains of 170 Diggers in France will be buried with full military honours 92 years after the soldiers lost their lives.

Their remains, and those of British soldiers, will be exhumed from mass graves at Fromelles and honoured with full military burials.

Defence Science and Personnel Minister Warren Snowdon announced the decision yesterday in conjunction with the British Government.

Mr Snowdon said it would be proper tribute to the heroism of those buried there in 1916.

My wife's grandfather was a digger: Albert Edward "Ted" Matthews, the last of the Australians to land at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. Ted worked with us at our jewelry store in Bayonne back in 1980 when he was 84. Both of his daughters had married American servicemen during World War II and one of his daughters had a girl named Ann, now my wife of 33 years, 1 month and 19 days. The entire continent of Australia had a State Funeral when he died at the age of 101:

The World War One Document Archive, The Last ANZACS

The Governor-General of Australia, Sir William Deane delivered this tribute at the State funeral of Ted Matthews, the last of the Australians to land at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915.

Ted Matthews was the last surviving Australian of the approximately 16,000 men of the Australian and New Zealand Armed Corps who landed at what is now Anzac Cove on that fateful day more than 82 years ago.

This is truly a time for reflection about our country's first Anzacs and about what the loss of the last of them means to us all.

The national significance of that loss is difficult to articulate. That is because it's impossible to adequately express all that we mean and feel when we invoke or commemorate the events of that day when the first ANZACs landed at Gallipoli.

It is, as Manning Clark wrote, "something too deep for words". It stretches out to encompass not only the sacrifice of those first Anzacs but of all who have fought in our forces - in the following days and months at Gallipoli or on other battle fields of the First World War, in the Second World War, in Korea, in Vietnam and in other places.

It is about the spirit, the depth, the meaning, the very essence of our nation. And it is about sadness and grief for young lives cut short and dreams left unfulfilled. And horror at the carnage of war.

Throughout his life, Ted Matthews was to say that the main purpose of Anzac Day was to remind us of the evils of war. And in saying that he would recall that he had almost been one of the first casualties: only a thick pocket-book which his mother had given him saved him when he was struck in the chest by a piece of shrapnel.

Ted Matthews would also say that he was not one of the real heroes. He was a signaller and the infantry, he said, had the worst of it.

Yet he was there at Gallipoli, without respite, for the whole duration of the stalemate: through the heat, and the flies, and the stench of death, and disease, and attack, and counter-attack, and the cold as winter drew on. And the bonds which transcended and transcend individual mortality were forged between those men and the soul of our nation.

For Anzac is also about courage, and endurance, and duty, and mateship, and good humour, and the survival of a sense of self-worth: the sum of those human and national values which our pioneers found in the raw bush of a new world and tested in the old world for the first time at Gallipoli.

They were not found wanting, not even in the face of overwhelming odds and the final realisation of the inevitability of failure. The significance of Anzac to our nation was apparent at the time. The official war historian, Charles Bean, observed that for eight months the "most intense feelings" of all Australians and New Zealanders were "tied to those few acres of Turkish hillside".

Indeed, when the first Anzac Day commemoration was held in 1916 - a day of profound solemnity and national sorrow - the news journals wrote that "the price of nationhood must be paid in blood and tears". And so it has been.

But not all was failure. One triumph of initiative and daring of the Gallipoli campaign was the manner in which it ended: 80,000 men were evacuated from Anzac Cove, as later were the British troops from Cape Helles, with a mere handful of casualties. Before the Turkish Army was even aware of it, the forces had gone.

Yet leaving was for many of the Anzacs the greatest tragedy of all since it meant leaving their dead mates buried in an alien land so far from home. One of the departing diggers expressed it well:

Not only muffled is our tread
To cheat the foe,
We fear to rouse our honoured dead
To heal us go.
Sleep sound, old friends - the keenest smart
Which, more than failure, wounds the heart,
Is thus to leave you - thus to part.

Obviously, that young-soldier poet could not have foreseen that, more than 80 years on, thousands of Australians, many of them young Australians carrying backpacks, would each year return to visit with those "honoured dead" and to watch another dawn break over Anzac Cove.

Ted Matthews had been among the last of the Australians to go, leaving on the night of December 19, 1915. He was therefore at Gallipoli from the beginning until the very end, and his passing marks a final break in a living thread that united us Australians with the complete Anzac epic.

But, the legacies of valour and of national identity and sentiment left by him and his companions outlive them and will outlive all of us.

With Ted's death, the first Anzacs have now all gone. Yet "their spirit walks abroad". To inspire and sustain our nation for so long as it exists and listens to the whispers of those things "too deep for words" that are heard by all who have true love of our country and its people in their hearts.

Truly, he was the quintessential Australian. May he rest with God.

My other articles tagged DIGG here.