James Whiteside McCay

James Whiteside McCay was born in Ballynure, County Antrim, Ireland on 21 December 1864, the starting point for a life that would cross oceans and reshape Australian defence. He carried that Irish birth into Victorian politics, federal parliament and the trenches of the Great War, where he commanded troops at Anzac Cove and Fromelles. The distance between a small Irish birthplace and the blood of those battles gives his story its edge: a man shaped in one world was tested in another.