Digger
An Australian soldier.
The term was applied during the First World War to Australian and New Zealand soldiers because so much of their time was spent digging trenches.
An earlier Australian sense of digger was ‘a miner digging for gold ’. Billy Hughes, prime minister during the First World War, was known as the Little Digger. First recorded in this sense 1916.
1918 Aussie: 2015 Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 26 January: Australia's special-forces troops .. dominate the military division of the 2015 Australia Day Honours. They include a major who planned an 'unprecedented operation' to capture a rogue Afghan sergeant who murdered three Australian diggers.
Image: Australian soldiers in trenches at Gallipoli, 1915