Chapter Fourteen

THE NEXT STEPS TOWARDS CIVILISATION

*

If I am going to speak to you about the next steps towards civilisation, perhaps I’d better tell you what I mean by civilisation. Civilisation means to me the steps from barbarism to refinement. It means the weak will have rights as well as the strong and that science will have greater consideration and will produce the benefits that we will use in our progress towards universal culture. In civilisation we can’t expect that the law of force and aggression will lead to progress.

Wilkins’ speech, 19401

In the lead-up to the Battle of Hamel, the Australian prime minister, the pugnacious Billy Hughes, had stood before Australian soldiers and said:

Your deeds, the history of this war, is the basis upon which the future nation of Australia will be brought up. On the day when you landed at Anzac [Cove] the Australian nation was born. Before that we were New South Welshmen, Queenslanders, Victorians … but on that day we became Australians.2

Since the landing at Gallipoli, people in Australia and the soldiers in Europe and Palestine had commemorated the ‘day we became Australians’ — 25 April. But little was known about the small beach, or the hills above it, where the landing had taken place. The Australians had arrived in the dark, left in the dark and, in between, spent eight months with their heads down while, from the cliffs above, a rarely glimpsed enemy shot at them. The Gallipoli Peninsula, which has come to mean so much to Australia, was, at the end of the war, a mystery. How far had the troops, scrambling up the beach on that first Anzac Day, penetrated the enemy defences? What was beyond the ridges that had mocked the men for eight months? Where had the Turks positioned their troops? How far away were the opposing trenches? A big Turkish gun, which the Anzacs had nicknamed Beachy Bill, had seemingly fired from a valley to the right of Anzac Beach. When the AIF or the ships offshore had lobbed shells in the valley, the gun had stopped. But as soon as the shelling ceased, Beachy Bill would open up again. Was it, as one officer supposed, on rails and withdrawn into caves when targeted? Were there many big guns on tracks, which were moved about the trenches? Or was it one gun that was simply well protected? It was one of the many mysteries of Gallipoli.

And the bodies of Anzacs still lay where they had fallen, more than three years earlier. Bean was eager to return to the area while it was still littered with bodies, guns, and artefacts. He wanted to gather information and collect relics for the war museums. He had filled notebooks with stories of Gallipoli by interviewing men who were there but, by the time of the Armistice, many of these men were dead or scattered about Europe and Australia, while their Gallipoli memories were fading. Bean’s plan was to:

Decipher, mainly from marks left for several years on the ground, some of the events of a famous campaign; to trace them from relics which we came upon — sometimes exactly where we expected to find them, sometimes quite unexpectedly — a pierced water bottle in the scrub on this ridge, a line of spent cartridges or clips on that, some hurriedly scratched rifle-pits, barely begun, on a third; at one or two points a length of parapet studded with bullets like a cake with currants; often the poor relics of a line of men on one side or the other, lying where they died.3

He also wanted to photograph Gallipoli thoroughly. He knew there had been no restrictions on cameras in that first campaign. Many men had carried their Soldier’s Kodaks, but the photographs had been close up and cramped — often shots of men huddled in trenches. Bean wanted to photograph the battlefields of Gallipoli and produce the same record he had obtained in France and Belgium. Having been to Turkey during the Balkan War, Wilkins was the obvious choice for such a job.

Displaying the zeal with which he now approached anything to do with the history of Australians in the war, Bean named the planned trip the ‘Gallipoli Mission’. He and Wilkins would be accompanied by artist George Lambert, two assistants, two map makers, and Lieutenant Hedley Howe, who had landed at Gallipoli on Anzac Day and who could retrace the movements of the first men ashore. The eight members of the mission left London on 18 January 1919 and travelled to Turkey. While the rest of the team waited at Chanak, Bean and Wilkins went to Constantinople to buy maps. Perhaps not surprisingly, Wilkins soon met someone he knew from the Balkan War. He recalled:

[Bean and I] walked into the Tokatlion cabaret and took a box. A waiter appeared at once with three bottles of champagne and a large dish of Turkish sweetmeats. I said, ‘We didn’t order that’.

‘It is the manager’s compliments to Captain Wilkins.’

I was surprised that the manager knew me, and asked who the manager was.

‘He will be here in a moment, sir.’

In walked Godfrey [the cowardly dragoman on whom Wilkins had drawn his revolver] in full evening dress — that brave lion from the Balkan War, seven years earlier. ‘Oh, my dear Captain Wilkins, how happy I am to see you again!’

I didn’t know whether to throw him over the balcony or drink his wine. But I decided to drink it and pump him for information. Neither of us mentioned the day I nearly murdered him …4

While in Constantinople, Bean was also introduced to a Turkish major, Zeki Bey, who could assist the mission by describing the battlefields on the Turkish side. A week later, Bean and Wilkins returned to Chanak, while Zeki Bey followed shortly after. The group reached the peninsula on 14 February, and, after spending a night at an old Turkish hospital camp, set out on horses for Anzac Cove. Bean’s ‘heart bounded’ as they reached Gun Ridge and ‘looked down into this valley, and saw for the first time the rear of the Turkish lines that had faced us so closely all along the Second Ridge … The place seemed to have been abandoned only yesterday’.5 Bean inspected the famous hills and plateaus from the Turkish side — 400 Plateau, Lone Pine, and The Nek — and was moved by, ‘the bones and tattered uniforms of men [that] were scattered everywhere’. Lambert and Wilkins were also deeply moved, and Wilkins described it as, ‘the most impressive battlefield I’ve seen’.6

The men continued their solemn ride across the sacred ground that Bean characterised as ‘one great cemetery’, to Anzac Cove, where ‘nothing stirred except the waves gently lapping on the shingle, and a few of the piles of our old piers gently swaying in the swell’.7

They set up camp and began the task of recording the area for future generations of Australians. Wilkins found a ship’s water tank among the Turkish shelters behind Lone Pine Ridge, rolled it down to a flat area, and converted it to a makeshift darkroom and workshop. He had brought 200 glass plate negatives with him. On those negatives he made a record that has since become a national treasure — the deathly quiet beach and hills of Gallipoli, captured while many of the dead still lay where they had fallen. Bean described him during this work:

He was a born leader and, together with [Cyril] Hughes,* who was another, he had been largely responsible for our success. I used to note with amusement that, as we strode and climbed about the hills, the rest of the party unconsciously followed Wilkins’ lead. If he used a certain path, climbed a cliff in a particular way, jumped a trench or even went round left or right of a bush, the rest of us usually did the same.8

[* Hughes was a member of the Graves Registration Unit, whose task it was to identify the remains of soldiers and bury the bodies.]

Wilkins, as always, attacked his work with relentless zeal; sometimes to a point where it affected his health. ‘Wilkins is sick’, Lambert wrote to his wife. ‘But I think he will be all right tomorrow. He works too hard at night in his cold darkroom.’9

Janda Gooding, the former head of the Photographic, Film and Sound section of the AWM, summarised Wilkins’ Gallipoli work when she wrote in 2009:

To achieve [Bean’s] purpose, Wilkins continued to approach his work in the same way he had on the Western Front. His Gallipoli photographs are simply constructed; the compositions are straightforward, with the focus of attention usually in the centre. This all helps to make the photographs easily understandable. It is possible to look at Wilkins’ Gallipoli photographs and instantly recognise the place, the detail or human figure as a literal representation of the subject. This was what Bean wanted for historical record — images that viewers could trust as reliable documentary records. They were as Bean said, ‘a sacred record — standing for future generations to see for ever the plain, simple truth’.10

Gooding went on to note ‘the presence of Australians in early 1919 also symbolically reclaimed the battlefields and helped to establish an enduring Australian connection to Gallipoli’.11

As he worked on the Gallipoli photographs, Wilkins planned his return to the polar regions. Bean later wrote of their time on the Gallipoli Peninsula:

[Lambert and Howe [Lieutenant H.V. Howe]] could always tempt Wilkins into a discussion on the aims and happiness of mankind (in particular of the Eskimos, the simplicity of whose wants, he contended, gave them the highest degree of happiness); on the virtues of all races and the futility of international strife and suspicion … on means of foretelling the weather and so perhaps enabling men to avoid the effects of drought that he had known too well as a child. Both Wilkins and Lambert had, in childhood and since, read what they could in science … Wilkins with the almost passionate desire of applying science to help men everywhere. Once, years later, I heard Wilkins criticised as an adventurer, rather than a scientist; but never was a more superficial judgement. You had not to live with him for a day to discover that the increase of knowledge for the benefit of men was the burning impulse of his life.12

After a month on the peninsula, the mission wrapped up its work. Bean was keen to get back to Australia to begin sorting through the records, which were being shipped there. Wilkins returned to London where, in his absence, Joyce and the other photographers whom he had trained had spent the months since the Armistice photographing battalions before they were repatriated.

In London, Wilkins settled into the AWRS building in Horseferry Road, and turned his work ethic to the enormous task of compiling and writing captions for the official photographs, along with the photographs of Gallipoli. He explained to his mother:

I have been busier than usual lately as I haven’t yet got used to having such a lot of work right in front of me, as I have now. You see, photographing each day brings its own work and one can’t do any more that day, but now I have three months work piled on my desk and I can’t help working away at it as if I was expected to finish it in a week or less. However I suppose I should get used to it.

I keep on with work until the bell goes for meals and then come back and start again. It is really not hard and quite interesting going through all the photographs and arranging them in historical order, etc.13

Wilkins was fully committed to Bean’s vision of a complete, accurate, and detailed record of the Australians in the war. And, like Bean, he believed that no single person should receive credit for the work, especially as so many men had sacrificed their lives on the battlefield. (Bean would later refuse a knighthood for his role in establishing the AWM.) So when Wilkins wrote the caption for each photograph, he did not name the individual photographer. Instead, the description was transcribed from the field notes, then edited or enlarged upon. Often, more up-to-date information was added, such as the fact that a soldier in a photograph had since been killed. In the majority of cases, credit for each photograph was simply attributed to an ‘Unknown Australian Official Photographer’. Hurley still insisted that he owned the photographs he had taken and that his name had to be on them if they were to be published by the AIF.

Wilkins later summarised his work during this period:

During May 1919 I went over the battlefields in France once more, to complete our records. The result of that work is a complete photographic record of Australia’s share in the Great War [with] every detail minutely classified and arranged for reference, each picture with names, date [and] location indicated by a pinprick on a map and complete official data attached.14

Wilkins also compiled, edited, and wrote captions for the book Australian War Photographs. He, along with Staff-Sergeant A.W. Casserly, Staff-Sergeant R.W. Martin, Sergeant C. Jackson, Sergeant W. Joyce, and Sergeant H. Lowe are credited as having taken the photographs in the book; but, again, no individual photographer’s name was assigned to specific photographs. The exception was Hurley, who was credited for three of the 175 pictures.

As he toiled in the AWRS office, Wilkins concentrated on his plan to help rid the world of future wars. He believed that if the weather was the key to food production, then the polar regions were the key to the weather. The first step towards world security, Wilkins reasoned, was to explore those unknown areas at the top and bottom of the globe, so that meteorological stations could be built as close to the poles as possible. He would later write, ‘When we understand the meteorological conditions at the Poles we will be a long way toward understanding the causes of the world’s weather. When we know the causes, we can predict the results.’

Wilkins devised a plan for a series of meteorological stations to encircle the Arctic and the Antarctic. In June 1919, he submitted his plan to the Royal Meteorological Society in London, and explained:

A committee of leading English meteorologists received it and said that it was fantastic. They objected to nothing in the plan itself; as a plan they said it was ideal. But they thought it was too idealistic to be carried out. Almost everyone can devise an ideal plan, but putting it into effect is another matter.15

Wilkins appreciated that there were two obstacles to his plan. One was the sheer magnitude of the idea. It would involve worldwide co-operation, and that seemed unlikely so soon after the war.

The other obstacle was that no one knew if it was possible to establish bases where they were needed. Before the war, Scott and Amundsen had both reached the South Pole, but 95 per cent of Antarctica was still unexplored. In the Arctic, both Frederick Cook and Robert Peary claimed they had reached the North Pole, and both had said they had observed land in the vicinity. Islands near the North Pole would be the ideal location for meteorological stations, Wilkins reasoned. They just needed to be located. The first task — in fact, the first step towards world peace, in Wilkins’ thinking — was that the polar regions needed to be fully explored.

Wilkins’ experience in the Arctic had taught him that the best way to explore was by air. Three years of plodding across shifting ice north of Alaska and Canada, not to mention the loss of the Karluk, had led him to conclude that exploring the Arctic ‘could be done more quickly and more cheaply with aeroplanes and airships than by any means of transportation on the ground’.16

Wilkins approached various people about the possibility of obtaining a captured German airship, but support evaporated when he explained he wanted it for a flight over the North Pole. After numerous rejections, he turned his attention south, believing that, as an Australian, he might find it easier to get sponsors for an expedition to Antarctica.

It was most likely during this period, when he was working on the official photographs and planning weather stations, that Wilkins met an English artist, Lorna Maitland, a woman to whom he would later become engaged. The only known photograph of the pair together shows them sipping tea in what appears to be the garden of an English home. Wilkins is wearing his AIF jacket, with a pair of casual slacks and shoes. His relationship with Maitland would later lead to much of his papers and correspondence from this period being destroyed.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS The Gallipoli Mission, HMAS Australia

Before he went to Gallipoli with Bean, Wilkins travelled to Scotland and photographed HMAS Australia. This photographic series is numbered EN0001 to EN0025.

Many of Wilkins’ Gallipoli photographs can be seen by entering ‘Australian Historical Mission’ into the search facility of the AWM website. This shows thumbnail images of the photographs. Black-and-white photographs of Gallipoli, both in 1915 and 1919, are prefixed with the letter ‘G’. Photographs taken by Wilkins on the Gallipoli Mission are grouped between G01800 and G02200. Members of the mission, along with British soldiers, can be seen at the mission’s camp, behind Lone Pine, in G02039. Bean and Wilkins can be seen with the group in A05258. Wilkins can be seen on a rail car, which the mission used as their living quarters when travelling from Constantinople to Cairo, in G02138. An often-published photograph, showing skeletons of Turkish soldiers, is G01949. [For the complete story on the historical mission to Gallipoli, I recommend Janda Gooding’s Gallipoli Revisited (Hardie Grant, Melbourne 2009).]

D00625 is a photograph showing the classification of the photographs underway at Horseferry Road, London. The photograph was taken during June 1919, when Wilkins was there.