by Bruce Scates
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
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.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Books are made by readers. I thank the many people who read and commented on the manuscript during its long evolution into a book.
I acknowledge a formidable cast of historians: Harvey Broadbent, who captured the voices of Gallipoli veterans; Kevin Fewster, C.E.W. Bean’s pioneering biographer; Nathan Wise, a scholar working very much in the Bean tradition, and that talented curator of Gallipoli imagery, Janda Gooding of the Australian War Memorial. I am grateful to Melanie Oppenheimer for her valuable advice on the experience of Australian nurses and Ken Inglis for his remarkable insight into the commemorative architecture of Gallipoli, then and now. Of course, the memory of Anzac has strayed far from the hands of professional historians. I thank Lambis Engelez with whom I have often debated the unsettling memory of the Great War.
Azer Banu Kemaloğlu of the Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Karina Adil and Mehmet Adil helped me recover the Mehmetçik’s story; Steven Clark (historian of the Royal Returned Services Association) and Denise Hill kept the NZ in Anzac; and I am indebted to Annette Becker, of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, a historian imbued with all the poetry of France.
This book is about journeys, the crossing from history to fiction not the least of them. I thank Chandani Lokuge, who led the Warwick Monash Creative Writers Collaboration; playwrights Carolyn Bock and Helen Hopkins; publicists Emma Morris and Pip McGuinness and the linguist Peter Steiner. This book had benefited from the insight of those prizewinning historians and storytellers Tom Keneally and Grace Karskens and critical comment from that great communicator, Bill Bunbury of the ABC.
Writing about Gallipoli is one challenge, teaching it another. I owe a considerable debt to four inspiring teachers, Nick Hughes, Trish Symons, Mike and Roz Goodwin, and to my colleague (and fellow historian) Jenny Lawless of the NSW Board of Studies. Passages of the book were presented to my own students on the Monash Gallipoli Study Tour. I thank them for all they taught their teacher.
Katherine Armstrong (of the Shrine of Remembrance), Julie Wells, Jo Daniels and Jo Kildea read this book in its infancy; they never lost faith in it. Jen Wise and Rebecca Wheatley showed the skill and dedication necessary to bring it to completion. I am especially grateful to Bec for accessing so many of the book’s most compelling images.
The story of a family stands at the centre of this book. My own family was a tireless source of encouragement and support. Karen McKenzie, Rebecca Dowell, Bob Scates, Michael Scates, Alex Scates Frances and Will Scates Frances were engaged and sympathetic critics. I owe much to my daughter’s playful literary forays and my son’s deep insight into the Islamic faith. Much of the book was written in my brother’s house overlooking the southern oceans; his memory is inscribed forever in these words.
I thank the Australian Research Council and Monash University for supporting the scholarship that underpins this book and the many librarians and archivists who assisted me during all those years of research. I am indebted to Jay Winter, who encourages historians to explore new approaches to the past and Aydin Nurhan, a diplomat and statesman, for wise and generous counsel. I acknowledge all my colleagues at the National Centre for Australian Studies and thank Gareth Knapman, Corrie McKee and Cathy O’Brien for their various contributions to this book. A highly professional team at UWA Publishing brought this complex project to fruition. I owe much to the vision and unflagging confidence of Terri-ann White and am indebted to Linda Martin for her close and patient readings of an ever-changing manuscript. I also thank Jade Knight and Kiri Falls for taking the work of a historian to a much wider audience than it might normally reach and Anna Maley-Fadgyas who designed this book’s striking cover.
Finally, I thank Rae Frances who joined me on this journey as she has many others. She has been my guide as well as my companion. I thank her for all she has shown me.
IMAGE CREDITS
cover A.W. Savage, ‘Evacuation of our troops from the Peninsula, barges conveyed them from transports to the island’, Photographs of the Third Australian General Hospital at Lemnos, Egypt & Brighton (Eng.), 1915–17, PXE698/58b, courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.
George Lambert, Anzac, from Gaba Tepe, oil on wood panel, 27 February 1919, ART02825, courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.
D.H. Wilson, ‘The Eastern Mediterranean traversed by the Expedition showing Alexandretta and Gallipoli’ taken from The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, vol.1, by Dr C.E.W. Bean, 106187, courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.
Phillip F.E. Schuler, ‘Map of Anzac and Suvla Bay’, Pictures of the Battlefields of Anzac, Osboldstone, Melbourne, 1916, FERG/3873, courtesy of the National Library of Australia.
Ellis Silas, ‘Capture of Turkish Trenches’, Crusading at Anzac anno domini 1915, British Australasian, London, 1916, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.
George Lambert, Gallipoli wild flowers, oil on canvas, 28 February and 1 March 1919, ART02838, courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.
The Harbour and Golden Horn at Constantinople, c.1919, silver gelatine photograph acquired by Alfred Searcy, Searcy Collection, PRG280/1/39/266, courtesy of the State Library of South Australia.
Leslie Fraser Standish Hore, ‘The Bacchant tolls the knell of parting day’, World War I Sketches, November 1915, PXE703/12 a1794012, courtesy of the State Library of New South Wales.
Ellis Silas, ‘The Landing’, Crusading at Anzac anno domini 1915, British Australasian, London, 1916, Australian War Memorial, ART90807, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.
Territory ceded to the Empire, detail from ‘Records of Proceedings of the Lausanne Conference on Near Eastern Affairs, 1922–1923’, London, HM Stationary O
ffice 1923, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.
Photograph by George Hubert Wilkins, February/March 1919, G01946, courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.
Dedication of Tilba’s War Memorial, Mitchell Newspaper Cuttings, vol.2, Q940.939N.
George Lambert, The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915, oil on canvas, 1924, ART07965, courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.
Perspective sketch by Edwin Lutyens, on a sheet of his office writing paper, RIBA13067, courtesy of the Royal Institute of British Architects.
The Turkish memorial to the lost at Lone Pine, awaiting its own destruction. Photograph taken by the Australian War Records Section under the direction of C.E.W. Bean of the Australian Historical Mission, February/March, 1919, G01752, courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.
Mr and Mrs Irwin take a rubbing of the inscription of their son’s name from the Memorial to the Missing, Lone Pine, Gallipoli, Sydney Mail, 20 October, 1926, p.8, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.