About Decode My Digger
Our Story
A manila folder in the filing cabinet. A tin in the back of the wardrobe. A plastic sleeve your mum kept meaning to sort through.
Inside: faded pages covered in handwriting, stamps, and abbreviations that made perfect sense to a clerk in 1942 but mean nothing to you today.
Those are your family's military service records. And they contain a story nobody's been able to read.
This started with one family's records
Every ancestral line in our founder's family served. Not one of them was conscripted. Every single one volunteered.
Her maternal grandfather enlisted three days after the bombing of Darwin. Her great-grandfather was a Lieutenant Colonel in Remounts - the unit that trained the horses shipped to the front. He served across both world wars.
In the First World War, Australia sent over 130,000 horses to war. They carried our soldiers into battle, hauled supplies through mud and wire, and served until there was nothing left to give.
Only one was ever brought home. The rest were never allowed to return.
Her great-grandfather raised five boys. Four joined the Army in the Second World War. The fifth became the first Catholic priest commissioned into the Royal Australian Navy.
Her great-great-uncle landed at Gallipoli. He served in Egypt. He fought at the Somme. He survived all of it - only to be killed in action in Belgium. His family received a telegram. His records sat in an archive for over a century.
The moment it became something more
Our principal consultant spent more than a year trying to decode her grandfather's service record - page by page, abbreviation by abbreviation - and experimenting with ways to make the process work at scale. The idea waited because the technology wasn't ready. The concept was refined long before the first line of code was written.
The day the system returned his complete decoded history, she sat at her desk and read that he'd enlisted three days after the bombing of Darwin.
A piece of the jigsaw puzzle fell into place. That record had been in the family for over 80 years. Nobody had ever been able to read it properly.
She knew then that this couldn't stay on her desktop. Every Australian family with a digger deserves to read their story.
We built Decode My Digger to make that possible.
Why Banjo Paterson's records are on our homepage
If you've looked at our worked example, you'll have seen the full decoded record of Andrew "Banjo" Paterson's Boer War service - 24 pages from the National Archives, turned into a complete narrative and spreadsheet.
We chose Banjo deliberately.
He wrote The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda - words that have been part of Australian life for over a century. But before the poetry, there was service. He shipped out on the SS Kent in October 1899 as a war correspondent attached to the Australian forces in South Africa. His service record is full of the same faded handwriting and military shorthand as your grandfather's.
If Decode My Digger can turn Banjo Paterson's century-old records into a story worth reading, it can do the same for your family's.
Our founder drives over his bridge on the way home to her small country town. His words are among the most treasured in her family. Building this product with his records as the example felt right. We hope he'd approve.
Why it costs $59
We could've charged more. The professional alternative is $500 to $1,000 per record with a genealogist, and weeks of waiting. We know what we've built and we know what it's worth.
But we priced Decode My Digger for families, not institutions.
$59 means you can decode your grandfather's record this weekend. Your sister can do your great-uncle's next month. Your cousin can finally find out what happened to the one who never came home. It's priced so the whole family can participate - not just the one person who can justify the expense.
There's no subscription. No monthly fee. No "credits" that expire. You pay once, you get your decoded record, and it's yours forever.
We'd rather earn your trust once and have you tell your family about us over Sunday lunch.
Who built this
Decode My Digger is built by PM Project Change, a Sydney-based consultancy specialising in AI-powered digital products, data platforms, and enterprise automation.
Our principal consultant holds an MBA and GAICD, with credentials in project management (PMBOK), data governance (DAMA-DMBOK), and vocational education. She's delivered enterprise programs across higher education, government, financial services, and defence for over 15 years - and spent the last year channelling that expertise into products like this one.
The technology behind Decode My Digger processes each record through five layers of AI reconstruction: handwriting extraction, military terminology deciphering, historical research matched to your relative's specific dates and locations, narrative composition, and structured data generation. It's not a simple scan or a glossary lookup. It's a full reconstruction - built by someone who needed it for her own family first.
Your records are handled with care
- ✓Uploaded images permanently deleted after 90 days
- ✓Never used for AI training
- ✓Never shared or sold
- ✓Payment processed securely through Stripe - we never see your card details
Your family's story is yours. Full details in our Privacy Policy.
Their service deserves to be understood.
If you've got records sitting in a drawer, a folder, or a plastic sleeve - or if you've downloaded them from the National Archives and can't make sense of them - this is what we built it for.
Decode a record now$59 AUD. No subscription. Army, Navy, and RAAF. Boer War to Vietnam, 1899 to 1975.
Built in Australia. For Australian families. Using Australian military records.