Gallipoli: Through the Soldier’s Lens

Launch speech for Gallipoli: An Exhibition of Photographs by Charles Snodgrass Ryan Manning Clark House, 6 April 2014

Pearls and Irritations, 2019

I am talking with Turkish filmmaker Köken Ergun at the Rotterdam International Film Festival about a documentary that all Australian and New Zealand audiences should see. Heroes, commissioned by the Australian War Museum, is about the mythologizing of trauma, of the First World War campaign on the Gallipoli Peninsula (or Çanakkale). Ergun includes interviews at the monuments with the April 25 pilgrims and tourists that reveal shared moments and differences. He follows the tour coaches where tour guides deliver their spiel. One side has John Simpson and his donkey, the other Corporal Seyit that turned back the British Fleet. A spectrum of emotions are played out here, from Nationalism to familial loss. The ANZAC fallen are respected as brothers, while other locals ruminate on why these tourist intruders are here; let them go back to where they came from. These opinions have an uncannily familiar ring to those that follow contemporary immigration debates in Australia.

ANZAC Battlefield A Gallipoli Landscape of War and Memory, 2016

Anzac Battlefield explores the transformation of Gallipoli's landscape in antiquity, during the famed battles of the First World War, and in the present day. Drawing on archival, archaeological and cartographic material, this book unearths the deep history of the Gallipoli peninsula and sets the Gallipoli campaign in a broader cultural and historical context. The opening chapters explore the physical landscape of the Gallipoli peninsula and the history of the Dardanelles waterway. This is followed by an examination of trench warfare, military engineering and what remains of the Anzac battlefield. The book presents the results of an original archaeological survey, the research for which was supported by the Australian, New Zealand and Turkish governments. The survey examines materials from both sides of the battlefield, and sheds new light on the environment in which Anzac and Turkish soldiers endured the conflict. The closing chapters trace the transition of Anzac from battlefield to cemetery and connect past and present through accounts of the evolution of Turkish and Anzac commemoration. Richly illustrated with both Ottoman and Anzac archival images and maps, as well as original maps and photographs of the landscape and archaeological findings, Anzac Battlefield is an important contribution to our understanding of Gallipoli and its landscape of war and memory.

Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 57, No. 3 (2011), 434-442.

The American Historical Review, 1996

This book covers the long history of the Gallipoli peninsula and surrounding landscape. It examines the peninsula as a locus of conflict for over three thousand years and positions the 1915 First World War Anzac Campaign within a much greater mythical, historical, political and cultural context.

2019

Anzac, with its overriding emphasis on the foundational Gallipoli campaign of 1915, has been a cornerstone of Australian collective memory over the past century. Screen cultures have functioned as a key transmitter of the Anzac Legend from the propaganda film, The Hero of the Dardanelles (1915), used during the First World War to boost enlistment, through to Kiwi-Australian Russell Crowe’s controversial feature The Water Diviner (2014), a film that explicitly set out to present the Gallipoli campaign from an alternative perspective. Gallipoli is arguably more central to the national identity of Australia than any other combatant nation despite the multiplicity of colonial and national forces present on both sides of the conflict. This is reflected in the outpouring of Australian screen texts on the campaign at particular historical moments, namely, during the First World War, in the 1980s and in the lead up to the centenary of Anzac in 2015. While Anzac elements have dominated British and Irish commemoration of Gallipoli and screen representations from the UK have been infrequent, any examination of Australian screen texts on the campaign cannot be divorced from the essential British elements of the Anzac Legend. Indeed, residual British characteristics lingered in screen representations for decades after the war. Britishness also functioned as a vital counterpoint for Australian nationalism in Peter Weir’s watershed 1981 feature film Gallipoli, which overwrote earlier understandings and in the process reoriented the Legend. By the same token, Anzac was a joint enterprise with New Zealand contributing key consonants to the command structure acronym coined during the campaign. Although New Zealand patterns of commemoration around Anzac have followed a similar trajectory to Australia, few screen representations have emerged. In order to situate Anzac in its broadest context these examples will be considered together with major documentary texts – Revealing Gallipoli (2005), Gallipoli: The Frontline Experience (2005), and Why Anzac? (2015; screened on Maori TV as Anzac: Tides of Blood) that underscore the trend towards transnational filmmaking in the early 21st century. These documentaries chart a critical turning point in the screen treatment of Anzac: from mythmaking, nationalistic accounts that flatten out the ambiguity and complexity of war to nuanced approaches that present multiple perspectives and challenge the popular memory of war.

The paper examines selected official photographic material commissioned by the Australian Department of Information during the short-lived campaign in Greek mainland, from March to May 1941.The dual role of these photographs was to inform and persuade positively the Australian public about the Greek campaign but also to record a part of Australian history. The paper argues that these propaganda photographs from the collections of the Australian War Memorial offer an important insight into a neglected part of the photographic record of the Second World War, as they throw light on what was considered newsworthy in Australia and discuss how tensions within the government and the institutional bodies that produced them, affected the construction of the image of Greece and Greeks during their brief encounter with the Australian soldiers in mainland Greece .

The First World War was an unprecedented catastrophe, killing millions and setting Europe on the path to further conflict. The eight month battle for the Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915 provides an outstanding example of the entrenched conflicts over strategic patches of land during the ‘Great War.’ However, in spite of the large-scale loss and destruction, the conflict at Gallipoli helped provide the national foundation of three young nations: Turkey, Australia and New Zealand. Almost 100 years since the battle, a team of historians and archaeologists have returned to the Peninsula to examine the archaeological record of the battlefields and unite this new material evidence with the history of the campaign. The Joint Historical and Archaeological Survey (JHAS) of the Gallipoli peninsula is a tri-nation project between Turkey, Australia and New Zealand that operates within the Anzac Area demarcated by boundaries imposed in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). It is a multinational, interdisciplinary research project, working in a landscape of international cultural significance that has been closed to archaeologists for almost a century. Midford, S. and Birkett-Rees, J. (2013), 'The Archaeology of Conflict and Remembrance at Gallipoli', ASOR: The Ancient Near East Today, No.8.

An event organized by the NZ-UK Link Foundation in collaboration with the Institute of Historical Research and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. The event is part of the Being Human Festival (12-22 November 2015). The lecture was delivered on 16 November 2015 in Senate House, Malet Street, London. A copy of the lecture has been uploaded here on academia.edu, and also on the University of Hull's digital repository: https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:12434