This book is a new approach to an old Australian story. It takes up a conversation most Anzac chroniclers have sealed tightly in the archives. Having said that, I acknowledge my great debt to four generations of Gallipoli scholars and the surviving testimony of many Gallipoli veterans. I could not have completed this project without them.
Retracing Bean’s journey back to Anzac I had several able guides. Quite apart from ‘the old man’s’ Gallipoli Mission (Sydney: ABC Books, 1990), and of course the compendious The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 excellent anthologies of Bean’s writings are to be found in Kevin Fewster (ed), Bean’s Gallipoli: The Diaries of Australia’s Official War Correspondent (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2007) and Denis Winter (ed), Making the Legend: The War Writings of C.E.W. Bean (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1992). I am also indebted to Ken Inglis’ incisive biographical entry for Bean in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and his 1969 John Murtagh Lecture, ‘C.E.W. Bean: Australian Historian’, republished in John Lack (ed), Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of K.S. Inglis (Melbourne: The University of Melbourne, 1998). There is a fine pictorial record provided by Jonathan King and Michael Bowers, Gallipoli: Untold stories from war correspondent Charles Bean and front-line Anzacs (Sydney: Random House, 2005). My own research into the Bean papers was guided by Michael Piggott’s Guide to the Personal, Family and Official Papers of C.E.W. Bean (Canberra: Australian War Memorial 1983). Bean’s war diaries, notebooks and folders, some 286 volumes in all, are now available on the Australian War Memorial’s website, <http://www.awm.gov.au/collection/records/awm38/3drl606/description.asp>. There is a useful introduction to these holdings by Anne-Marie Conde and Michael Piggott.
George Lambert was less well served by biography but Amy Lambert’s Thirty Years of an Artist’s Life (Sydney: Society of Artists, 1938) informs this account as does Anne Gray’s thoughtful companion to the National Gallery’s exhibition ( George W. Lambert Retrospective: Heroes and Icons, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007) and Andrew Motion’s study of the Lambert dynasty ( The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit, London: Chatto and Windus, 1986).
Elsie’s story is based on my own research into the lives of Australian nurses who served in the Great War, a labour I shared with my partner Rae Frances. Fragments of Elsie and Maggie’s testimony are to be found in Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). A number of other historians have offered insight into these remarkable women’s lives, most notably Marianne Barker, Nightingales in the Mud: The Digger Sisters of the Great War, 1914–1918 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1989); Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Great War (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992); Katie Holmes, Judith Butler and Melanie Oppenheimer. I owe much to Professor Oppenheimer’s vivid recreation of nurses’ writings, Oceans of Love: Narrelle – An Australian Nurse in World War One (Sydney: ABC Books, 2006), May Tilton’s autobiographical account, The Grey Battalion (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1933) and Carolyn Bock and Helen Hopkin’s evocative drama (directed by Karen Martin), ‘The Girls in Grey’, first performed at La Mama Theatre, Melbourne, in 2010. Technical aspects of military medical services were informed by A.G. Butler, The Australian Army Medical Services in the War of 1914–1918, vol.1, The Gallipoli Campaign (Melbourne: Australian War Memorial, 1930) and Michael Tyquin, Gallipoli: The Medical War (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1993). I found Peter Cochrane’s study of Simpson an inspiration, Simpson and the Donkey (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992).
Gallipoli was never just Australia’s war, however large it looms in our national mythology. I am indebted to Kevin Fewster, Vecihi Basarin and Hatice Basarin for offering a Turkish perspective of the campaign, Gallipoli: The Turkish Story (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003) and, more recently, Tolga Örknek and Feza Toker, Gallipoli: Companion to the Feature Length Documentary (Istanbul: Epik Film Ltd, 2005) and Harvey Broadbent, Gallipoli: The Fatal Shore (Melbourne: Penguin, 2005). I gained much from Kenan Çelik’s guided tours of the peninsula and the published account of Turkish soldiers, most notably, Hansan Basari Danisman (ed), Lone Pine (Bloody Ridge) Diary of Lt. Mehmed Fasih 5th Ottoman Army Gallipoli, 1915 (Istanbul: Denizler Kitabevi, 1997). Kenan Çelik has also assembled a fine collection of international perspectives on the campaign: Kenan Çelik and Cehan Koç (eds), The Gallipoli Campaign: International Perspectives 85 Years On, (Atatürk and Gallipoli Campaign Research Center, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Çanakkale, 2002). The New Zealand perspective on Anzac is admirably served by Chris Pugsley, Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1984). There are a number of exemplary studies centred on the British campaign, most notably Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, Defeat at Gallipoli (London: Macmillan, 1994).
In writing this book, I studied all the histories published on the campaign from the 1920s to today. Some of the most useful were of the genre of micro-histories, close recreations of particular places, campaigns and the ever-growing genre of battalion histories. These include Peter Stanley’s masterful study of the frontline, Quinn’s Post: Anzac, Gallipoli (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2005), James Hurst’s anatomy of trench warfare, Game to the Last: The 11th Infantry Battalion at Gallipoli (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Peter Burness’ chilling account of the August offensive, The Nek: The Tragic Charge of the Light Horse at Gallipoli (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1996). For a blow-by-blow account of the landing readers should consult Denis Winter, 25th April 1915: The Inevitable Tragedy (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994); Peter Williams, The Battle of Anzac Ridge (Canberra: Australian Military History Publications, 2006); David W. Cameron, 25 April 1915: The Day the Anzac Legend was Born (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2007) or Bean’s classic study. Susan Welborne’s Lords of Death (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1982) traced the lives and deaths of West Australian soldiers, as does Wes Olson’s Gallipoli: The Western Australian Story (Perth: UWA Press, 2006). I gained much from Michael McKernan’s excellent anthology, Padre: Australian Chaplains in Gallipoli and France (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986) and his recent short history of Anzac. I am indebted to Tim Travers’ close anatomy of military technology, Gallipoli: 1915 (CharlestonSC: Tempest, 2003), Peter Chasseaud’s and Peter Doyle’s study of the geography of war, Grasping Gallipoli: Terrain, Maps and Failure at the Dardanelles 1915 (London: Spellmont, 2005); Tom Frame’s account of the naval campaign, The Shores of Gallipoli: Naval Aspects of the Anzac Campaign (Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 2000) and John McQuilton’s exemplary study of a country community at war, Rural Australia and the Great War (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001). There is a fine reckoning with the mistakes of the campaign in Ashley Ekins’ ‘A ridge too far: military objectives and the dominance of terrain in the Gallipoli campaign’, in Kenan Çelik and Cehan Koç (eds), The Gallipoli Campaign: International Perspectives 85 Years On (Atatürk and Gallipoli Campaign Research Center, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Çanakkale, 2002). Its many mythologies are laid to rest in Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009).
Alongside these finely textured accounts of the campaign, readers can retrace Gallipoli’s story on a truly monumental scale. Among the classics are Robert Rhodes James’ Gallipoli (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965), Alan Morehead’s Gallipoli (Sydney: McMillan, 1975) and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s Hells Foundations: A Town, its Myths and Gallipoli (London: Sceptre, 1993). For recent efforts to popularise the genre of military history see Les Carlyon, Gallipoli (Sydney: Macmillan, 2001) and John Hamilton, Goodbye Cobber, God Bless You: The Fatal Charge of the Light Horse, Gallipoli, August 7th 1915 (Sydney: Macmillan, 2004). Specialist readers can now follow day-to-day accounts of the Anzac campaign and there is a comprehensive Gallipoli encyclopaedia, Jonathon King, Gallipoli Diaries: The Anzacs’ own story day by day (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 2003); Ron Austin, Gallipoli: The Australian Encyclopaedia of the 1915 Dardanelles Campaign (Rosebud: Slouch Hat Publications, 2005). The Gallipoli story also features in some exceptional biographies, most notably Geoffrey Serle, John Monash: A Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1982) and Ross McMullin, Pompey Elliott (Melbourne: Scribe, 2002). Whilst there is no substitute for walking the peninsula, a number of visual narratives can help reimagine the battlefields such as P.A. Pederson’s Images of Gallipoli: Photographs from the Collection of Ross Bastiaan (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), Richard Reid’s Gallipoli: 1915 (Sydney: ABC Books, 2001) and Steve Newman’s Gallipoli: Then and Now (London: Battle of Britain International, 2000). I am indebted to Dr Reid for his stunning reproduction of Major Leslie Hore’s sketches, North Beach, Gallipoli 1915 (Canberra: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 2001), and I’ve been privileged to view Ellis Silas’ and George Lambert’s work in the Australian War Memorial and, more recently, the National Gallery. The Board of Studies New South Wales and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs have produced a virtual walking tour of Anzac, The Anzac Walk – a Guided Tour of Gallipoli. It owes much to Jennifer Lawless’ remarkable insight into Turkey and the campaign and is available in English and Turkish on <http://www.anzacsite.gov.au>. The site was translated by Sedat Bulgu.
Arguably the most compelling accounts of the campaign were written by soldiers themselves and this project owes much to Bill Gammage’s pioneering effort, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Canberra: ANU Press, 1974), as well as a spate of digger biographies/anthologies. Among the most accessible of these are Albert Facey, A Fortunate Life (Melbourne: Penguin, 1981); Ronald East (ed), The Gallipoli Diary of Sergeant Lawrence of the Australian Engineers–1st AIF 1915 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1981); Harvey Broadbent (ed), The Boys Who Came Home: Recollections of Gallipoli (Sydney: ABC Books, 1990); Greg Kerr, Private War: Personal Records of the Anzacs in the Great War (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), Cecil Malthus, Anzac: A Retrospect (Auckland: Reed, 2002) and Noel Carthew, Voices from the Trenches: Letters to Home (Sydney: New Holland, 2002). Bean’s edited collection, The ANZAC Book, was recently republished and soldiers’ literary accounts can also be found in J.T. Laird, Other Banners: An Anthology of Australian Literature of the First World War (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1971). I surveyed a host of Anzac manuscripts in the course of writing this book, particular the rich holdings in State Library of NSW, the State Library of Victoria, the Imperial War Museum, Leeds University Library and the Australian War Memorial. I thank Peter Dean for providing photocopies of New Zealand sources held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, the Auckland War Memorial and the Kippenberger Military Archive. Writing the account of fighting at Quinn’s, my own grandfather’s diary was kept close at hand. Readers are also directed to the First AIF’s Service Dossiers and Inquiries conducted by the Red Cross Missing and Wounded Bureau, 1915–1925. Both are now available online and it is possible to reconstruct the lives and deaths of individual Anzacs. <http://www.naa.gov.au>, <http://www.awm.gov.au/redcross/>.
For Australians, war has always involved travel. Diaries kept on my own journeys through Egypt, Turkey and Greece informed many of the scenes described in this book as did contemporary travellers’ accounts and a number of historical studies. The most useful of the latter were Suzanne Brugger, Australian and Egypt: 1914–1919 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980), David Kent, From Trench and Troopship: The Experience of the Australian Imperial Force 1914–1919 (Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1990), and Richard White, ‘The Soldier as Tourist: The Australian Experience of the Great War’, in Anna Rutherford and James Wieland (eds), War: Australia’s Creative Response (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997).
At the centre of this project is the issue of unresolved loss, the grief that now shadows five generations of Australians. The way we have remembered war and the poignant history of Anzac pilgrimage is explored in Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006). Research materials in England, France, Belgium, Geneva, Turkey, Egypt, Malta, New Zealand and Australia underpin this study as well as this less conventional historical narrative. I am indebted to Jay Winter’s, Ken Inglis’, and Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau’s and Annette Becker’s pioneering studies of commemorative traditions, Sites of Memory: Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), Understanding the Great War (London: Profile Books, 2002), and note the emergence of a promising new generation of scholars, Tanja Luckins, Gates of Memory: The Australian People’s Experience of Loss and the Great War (Fremantle: Curtin University Press, 2004); Bart Ziino, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (Perth: UWA Press, 2007). Vickers’ suicide is a reference to both biography and fiction, see Jill Ker Conway’s account of her father’s death and Vance Palmer’s poignant tribute to a lost generation, The Road to Coorain (New York: Knopf, 1989); Daybreak (London: Stanley Paul, 1932). Nor was Irwin the only soldier reported to have lost his memory and identity, see Jean-Yves Le Naour’s harrowing account, The Living Unknown Soldier: A Story of Grief and the Great War (London: Arrow, 2006). The case of the unknown soldier committed to an insane asylum is considered by Jen Hawksley, ‘Long time coming home: the “unknown patient” of Callan Park’, Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds), Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of the Great War (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010). The same volume contains my reflections on the recovery of our war dead from Fromelles. On the ongoing meaning of memorials see Bruce Scates, A Place to Remember: A History of the Shrine of Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and my forthcoming chapter in the Cambridge History of the Great War, Cambridge University Press.
The making of Gallipoli’s commemorative landscape is charted in Return to Gallipoli and carefully reconsidered in Bill Gammage’s subsequent study ‘The Anzac Cemetery’, Australian Historical Studies, vol.38, no 129, pp.124–140. For the impact of roadworks on the Gallipoli peninsula see, Senate Committee Report, Matters Relating to the Gallipoli Peninsula, October 2005, and my submission to the same Appendix 1. The provisions of the Treaty of Lausanne can be accessed on the Web <http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1924>.
There are surprisingly few fictional accounts of Gallipoli and none as evocative as David Williamson’s screenplay Gallipoli. For a comparable New Zealand project see Maurice Shadbolt, Once on Chunuk Bair (Auckland: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982).The charge at the Nek is also recreated in Brenda Walker’s haunting study of the South West at war, The Wing of Night (Melbourne: Penguin, 2005); Anthony Hill has recaptured the brief life of Australia’s youngest Gallipoli casualty, Soldier Boy (Melbourne: Penguin, 2001) and John Samuel written a biography of Tasman Millington, the soldier/spy who once worked for the War Graves Commission (Sydney: Harper Collins, 2002). Shirley Walker’s beautifully crafted novel bares the cross-generational character of loss, The Ghost at the Wedding (Melbourne: Viking, 2009). Like most writers who try to imagine the Great War, I acknowledge the powerful precedent of Pat Barker, Sebastian Faulk, David Malouf and Thomas Keneally.
Those who wish to visit the Anzac battlefields would do well to consult Phil Taylor and Pam Cupper, Gallipoli: a Battlefield Guide, (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1989); Ian McGibbon, Gallipoli: A Guide to New Zealand Battlefields and Memorials (Auckland, Reed, 2004); Peter Stanley’s A Stout Pair of Boots (Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 2008) and my own, Return to Gallipoli. A helpful list of websites is included in Tony Wright’s Turn Right at Istanbul: A Walk on the Gallipoli Peninsula (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003). Intending visitors should consult the websites of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (for information concerning commemorative services) and the Department of Foreign Affairs (for travel warnings). The Commonwealth War Graves Commission maintains a website locating all known graves at Gallipoli. George Roy Irwin’s name is carved on panel 22 at Lone Pine; an epitaph was not permitted for the families of ‘the Missing’. He was nineteen years old at the time of his death.