GIRL: This is the Victory Medal.
AMELIA: Polly, Maya and McKenzie
have been learning about their great-great,
sometimes even great-great-great-relatives,
who fought in the Great War.
My great-great-grandpa,
his name was Douglas Guthrie.
Um, he was a private
in World War I.
Um, he enlisted when he was 21.
He got captured as a prisoner of war.
When I first saw this photo, I thought he looked really brave.
For Maya, it was her great-great-great uncle,
who she discovered was Indigenous Australian.
GIRL: His name was Edward Heath, and he was 30 when he enlisted.
I think he felt really, um, brave going to war
'cause he was probably trying to prove
that Aboriginals can do what white people can do,
and that they shouldn't be treated any differently
just 'cause they're a different colour.
These are his dog tags that he wore.
And for McKenzie, it was her great-great-grandpa,
but he was actually British fighting alongside Australians.
My great-great-grandpa was George Thomas Brigendon.
He joined the Royal Garrison Artillery
as a gunner, um, in 1914.
He was 30 when World War I started,
and he said that his scariest experience was, um...
..running new telephone wires to the front trenches
after the old ones had been blown up.
Polly and Maya's relatives are two
of the more than 400,000 Australian men
who enlisted in World War I.
By the time the war ended, around 60,000 of those men had died,
and about 170,000 of them were left wounded or ill.
It wasn't actually until 1919 -
months and months after the war ended -
that troops finally started coming home.
But it wasn't easy for many soldiers and nurses
to forget what they'd lived through.
It would be hard to just get back from the war
and go on with normal life.
'Cause you've got the memories and the wounds and...
..all the injuries and stuff.
While Polly's great-great-grandpa made it home to New South Wales
after being taken prisoner in Germany,
he was left permanently injured.
It was before the war
that this was taken
because after the war, he had those three fingers amputated off.
Australia had to work out some ways to help the survivors,
the wounded, the war widows and their families to recover.
So, the Government decided to offer free medical care, pensions
and places to live to permanently injured
or sick service people.
And carnivals and parades were held to raise money for them.
Whole organisations were even created to defend war veterans' rights
and help them get back to normal life.
You've probably heard of the Returned and Services League,
or RSL, that still exists today.
There were other struggles the country had to face too.
Many Australian industries weren't doing so well,
people didn't have as much money and jobs were way harder to find.
So, programs were created to help returned soldiers learn new skills,
like construction, mechanics or even haircutting.
And farming too.
In fact, state governments offered some soldiers a small piece of land
to farm if they wanted to.
The war touched so many lives in so many different ways
but while it wasn't easy, many of them were able to get through it.
My great-great-grandfather,
he used to live behind a shop when he was a child,
so they went back there and they started it as a shop
and then they had four children, all boys.
And the youngest one was my great-grandfather.
After the war, he would've gone back to England and had a family
and then his grandson, my grandfather, was the first person
in our family to come to Australia.
GIRL: I think it's important to remember them
because they did so much for our country.
And lots of people fought
and didn't survive very long.
And they've helped us go on to have what we have today.