The annual anniversary of the landing of Australian and New Zealand soldiers at Gallipoli challenges us all. The stories of that event together with various myths and legends that grew in the hearts of the youth of nationhood have meant that Australians have a special place in the heart on that Turkish peninsula. Like many others of the latter generation, I wondered what it was all about. I studied the history, read the diaries, went to the war memorials and I wrote down material.<\/p>\n
But it was while I was watching Peter Weir’s acclaimed film Gallipoli on an aircraft in 1982 that I realised that Australian soldiers were being shot on wide sweeping sand beaches. I remember thinking, “Why are they not digging in? Why are they not making trenches and barricades?” In the film’s credits I saw that this Australian film was made on the wide sandy beaches of South Australia.<\/p>\n
But Gallipoli is not like that. I knew that from my school geography lessons. Its beaches were rocky, even flinty, solid clay and stone: it took a lot of effort to dig rock trenches to give soldiers shelter. Every fresh brigade on landing was mown down by machine guns on the cliff. As I stood in Gallipoli looking at a pile of freshly uncovered skulls, Turkish men who worked in the Commonwealth war grave cemetery identified for me the skulls of Turkish soldiers s and those of Allied soldiers. When I asked how they could tell which one was Turkish and which one was Allied, I was told, “Very simple. ” They pointed to the tops of each skull and said, “All allies have bullet hole top of skull,” because the machine guns fired down upon them from the cliffs as they landed.<\/p>\n
I felt that, so bad was the film in its misrepresentation of the hardships that Australian and other troops faced, a film should be made at Gallipoli. I put together the Wesley Film Productions film crew and went to Gallipoli to film inside the trenches. Incidentally, that was the first time anyone had made a film at Gallipoli since 1923 when C. E. W. Bean arrived with a burial party. I make the point that bodies were not buried before 1922. As Charles Bean came in towards shore, he thought he saw snow on the cliffs, but they were the bleached bones of dead soldiers who had not been buried.<\/p>\n
I convinced some people to put up some money. Some Sydney people put up over a million dollars to cover the costs of the film crew that I led. The trenches, which are still there, were cut into the solid shale, rocks and clay. Everywhere I went in 1982, pieces of bone and metal buckles were uncovered every time the wind blew. I picked up shovels that had the British war insignia on the back of them. I researched the history, wrote the script, raised the money and took the 34-member crew with me to Anzac Cove.<\/p>\n
Ironically, when we visited in 1982 not one of the Turkish guides or the bus drivers knew how to get from Çanakkale to Anzac Cove. The road was almost impassable. What a difference there is these days, since the new road has been cut into the hills and completed, as tens of thousands of people go to Anzac Day commemorations at the beach.<\/p>\n
In the early morning air, at dawn in 1982, I am filmed as the only person on the beach. As I walked the beaches, climbed into the trenches, read the tombstones and thought of the piles of contorted flesh of young Australian manhood, I realised that, in that foreign country, there will always be a part of Australia. Colonel Mustafa Kemal, who led the Turkish resistance so brilliantly in defending his own country, later became Atatürk, the President of Turkey, and the man who brought Turkey into the twentieth century. In 1934, he spoke of the Australian war dead in some of the most moving words I have ever read:<\/p>\n
Those heroes that shed their blood
\nand lost their lives
\nYou are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.
\nTherefore you rest in peace.
\nThere is no difference Between the Johnnies
\nand the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side
\nhere in this country of ours.
\nYou, the mothers,
\nwho sent their sons from far away countries
\nwipe your tears
\nyour sons are now lying in our bosom
\nand they are in peace
\nafter having lost their lives on this land
\nthey have become our sons as well.<\/p>\n
I stood in tears reading those words and reading the names of the young men who had fallen and who lie buried in the cemetery that will be known forever as Lone Pine. I realised that there on the west coast of Turkey, part of the heart of Australia lies buried. In later wars, far greater numbers of Australians would be killed and wounded at Passchendaele and the Somme and other war cemeteries would be built in Europe, the Middle East, South-East Asia, the Pacific Islands, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, Korea, Vietnam—but Gallipoli holds part of the heart of Australia.<\/p>\n
Long before it was popular I made the film, Our Magnificent Defeat, and led Martin Johnston, our producer, and Robert Draper, our cinematographer from New York, as well as an international crew from Australia, the United Kingdom, Europe and America. For 15 years the film that I made was screened every Anzac Day across Australia and it has been screened by all of the major networks in Australia. It has played some part in the renewal of interest in people going to Gallipoli ever since. Thousands of copies on video were sold mainly to schools and RSL<\/span> clubs.<\/p>\n While I was at Gallipoli, in my imagination I thought of all those who had fought in Australia’s name: he who crouched in a shallow trench on that hell of exposed beaches, the steeply rising foothills bare of cover, a landscape pockmarked with war’s inevitable little piles of stores, equipment and ammunition, and the weird contortions of death sculptured in Australian flesh.<\/p>\n From the going down of the sun on that first Anzac Day—the chaotic maelstrom of Australia’s blooding—to the desert and heat of Afghanistan and Iraq, to the frozen mud of the Somme, the blazing destroyer exploding on the North Sea, to those fighting in the desert and the ratholes of Tobruk, to the crashing, flaming wreckage of a fighter in New Guinea and all those who lived with the damned in the places cursed with the name of Burma Railway, Sandakan and Changi, he was there.<\/p>\n He was there in Europe, France, Germany, Spain, Crete, Greece, Syria, Korea, Malaya, Africa, Vietnam Afghanistan and Iraq. He was your mate, the kid across the street, the medical student at graduation, the mechanic from the corner garage, the baker who brought your bread, the gardener who cut your lawn, the nurse, the telephonist, the land-army driver, the clerk in the office. He was an Army private, a Naval commander, an Air Force bombardier. No man knows him. No name marks his tomb because he is every Australian service man and woman. He died for a cause that he held to be in the service of our land so that you and I might say in freedom, “I am proud to be an Australian.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The annual anniversary of the landing of Australian and New Zealand soldiers at Gallipoli challenges us all. The stories of that event together with various myths and legends that grew in the hearts of the youth of nationhood have meant that Australians have a special place in the heart on that Turkish peninsula. Like many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-541417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}