Digger

Meaning

Noun

• A soldier from Australia or New Zealand.
• One of a group of Protestant English agrarian communists, begun by Gerrard Winstanley as "True Levellers" in 1649.
• One of a degraded tribe of California Native Americans who dug up roots for food.

Origin

• Derived from Australian Colonial goldfields terminology. The term represents the mateship of common interests and activities where most of the population were gold miners, and almost everybody was a mate, a "digger", with a common cause against the troopers, the traps, the mining licence inspectors.