He had a firm, deft touch and dealt with most of the minor medical emergencies around their central coast home.

What the long-term Belconnen resident didn't realise was he had honed those skills as a stretcher bearer with the field ambulance during some of the fiercest battles fought at Gallipoli and across France during World War I.

In the years since then she has come to understand just what that meant and is now hoping to attend the Gallipoli centenary on April 25 next year.

''It would mean a lot to me to be able to see where my grandfather served and also to pay tribute to Charles, his only brother and the uncle I never met, who was killed only three days after he landed on the peninsula,'' she said.

Mrs McLean, a youthful 78, is one of the almost 30,000 people who have applied for just 10,000 places at the ceremony next year.

The process has been overseen by KPMG and includes 400 double passes for direct descendants of WWI veterans and 160 passes for widows of WWI veterans.

The Commonwealth is picking up the tab for the widows; other participants are expected to pay their own way.

The ballot is currently being drawn and all successful applicants will be contacted before April 25 this year.

Mrs McLean was George and Elsie Jakeman's first grandchild and her father named her after his sister, who was accidentally killed when she was six.

Mrs McLean, who worked for the Department of Immigration until she married in the mid-1950s, was brought up by the couple along with her younger sister, Joan, who had been born on April 25.

''My mother was young when she married my father, Harold, and the marriage didn't last,'' she said. It was the late 1930s, her grandparents lived nearby and Elsie, who was 49 when Mrs McLean was born, at first tried to keep the two homes going. This was hard, especially in the Depression and war years, and the girls were soon living with their grandparents.

In later years they were joined by a cousin when his family circumstances also changed.

When the couple, by now in their 60s, retired to Point Clare near Gosford in 1945 the two girls, now aged 10 and seven, went as well.

Mrs McLean has fond memories of those days; her grandfather was a keen fisherman and they would spend hours at a time out on Brisbane Water, fishing for flathead and with lines out for crabs.

''We would bring the crabs home and cook them in a big copper,'' she said. ''He supplied all the people around the area and I used to get the job of shelling them [the crabs]; I became very good at it.''

While Mrs McLean grew up against the backdrop of World War II, she never made the connection with the events unfolding around her and what her grandfather had endured two decades before.

''Dad, we didn't call him anything else, never really spoke about it,'' she said.

''We knew he had medals, you would get shown them as a treat, but I didn't know he was a stretcher bearer at Gallipoli.''

And the man himself? ''He was a quiet man, quite short but very strong and able to endure pain and hard physical labour.

''I am now at an age where I realise he and Nanna were special people.

''He did what he did during the war; they had five children of their own and then, later in their lives, took on three more.

''He didn't think there was anything remarkable about what he had done; it was just what people did in those days.''