<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/gallipolilanding.jpg"
Paul Keating has been speaking out again about Australian history:
He said he has never been to Gallipoli and never will because it is nonsense to think the nation was born again or redeemed there.“The truth is that Gallipoli was shocking for us,” he said.
“Dragged into service by the imperial government in an ill-conceived and poorly executed campaign, we were cut to ribbons and dispatched and none of it in the defence of Australia.”
He said the sacrifice of soldiers was simply testament to the nation’s lack of confidence and ambivalence about itself.
“Who were we and what we had become. If our sons suffered and died valiantly in a European war, such sacrifice was testament to the nation’s self worth,” he said.
“In some respects we are still at it; not at the suffering and the dying but still turning up at Gallipoli, the place where Australia was needily redeemed.
“Without seeking to simplify the then bonds of empire and the implicit sense of obligation or to diminish the bravery of our own men, we still go on as though the nation was born again or even, redeemed there. An utter and complete nonsense.”
Good ol’ Keating, always good for a laugh. Completely agree, though.
Keating always depresses me by reminding me how much I hate him (by opening his mouth) and in doing so exposing the over-superannuated dandruff which passes for “politicians” these days (because compared to them, I actually *respect* the loathsome old toothfish).
I s’pose one can manufacture a debate about anything if one chooses to conflate two entirely separate phenomena.
So, just to be clear, let’s remind ourselves that Keating is talking about two separate things in the same breath, which is going to get a lot of people huffing and puffing instead of thinking:
1) There are the facts of Gallipoli — historical objects fixed in time and place.
2) There are the legends of Gallipoli — sociological objects that change over time.
Oh, this will all be too hard for the pundits. Cue the following reactions in 3…2…1…
Gerard Henderson: Po-faced and affronted.
Miranda Devine: Shrill and ranting.
Janet Albrechtsen: Haughty and ranting.
Andrew Bolt: Obtuse and sarcastic.
Dennis Shanahan: Obtuse and smug.
Howard glorified Gallipoli for political purposes (and because his own family was involved). Do you recall Howard having much to say about WW2? Bugger all, except on the usual ceremonial occasions when he pushed the GG aside and hogged the limelight.
Howard mostly ignored our most important military contribution, and our WW2 veterans, many of whom quietly passed away unheralded during his 12 years of history/culture wars on Australia’s collective memory. Keating continues to push back, good on him. My late father, a WW2 veteran, would have agreed with him.
Howard did everything for political purposes, including watching sport on telly in green and gold trakky-daks with cameras invited. Then again, he was a politician. In contrast, Keating is my hero.
Keating tells only half the story. if you read C.E.W Bean’s Gallipoli Diary rather than the Official History or Asmead-Bartlett’s [? not sure if that's his name] newspaper article that started the Anzac bullshit in 1915, you’ll discover, for example, that there were some brave bronzed Anzacs who ran away from the fire. Quite a few I gather, though from memory, I don’t think Bean gives any numbers. Its worth a look at if you really want to know what happened at Gallipoli.As opposed to the lies Howard was feeding us.
Okay PB, back up a bit. You hardly need to “feed” Australians bullshit about Gallipoli. Most of the country is jostling for position in the nest, craning their unfledged necks and gaping their beastly little beaks for more more MORE!!!
Howard, and every Australian leader I’ve ever known, has seen it their parental duty to regurgitate the requisite sludge. Including PK when he ruled the roost, if I may be permitted to stretch the analogy further.
The usual mix of bile and brilliance from Keating.
Australia wasn’t dragged. Only 15 years earlier Australians voted for a constitution that foreswore the existence an Australian foreign policy. Australians saw themselves to be an integral part of the British Empire, and acted accordingly, at least until the Dublisn Easter Uprising of 1916, months after the end of the Dardenelles campaign.
Absolutely correct. Australia has never overcome completely its colonial cringe. This cringe is encouraged by the Gallipoli myth. One current practical effect of this colonial cringe is that Australia has the biggest non-NATO contingent in Afghanistan at present, yet we are utterly unrepresented in any of the deliberative bodies responsible for the conduct of that war.
This is Howard’s work, and it is demeaning and scandalous. Rudd must rectify this absmal state of affairs.
Paul B, it wasn’t only Howard feeding us lies, it goes a lot further back than that — ad so does the resistance. I can remember having to do a rah-rah project on Gallipoli when I was still in primary school in the 1960s and coming up against a brick wall when I asked my grandfather for a personal view. He’d fought in France, was an RSL stalwart and blue-ribbon Liberal voter — and he said pretty much exactly what Keating’s said up there. And then I got into trouble with the teacher for quoting him. Orthodoxy’s a powerful thing.
Keating’s views on Gallipoli may have been quite heavily influenced by Don Watson, who’s an historian by training and who has firm views about it. The funniest thing about Howard’s push for more Australian history in schools is that by far the best and possibly still the only overview of Australian history written for (older) children was written by Watson himself.
I didn’t even know about that book PC. I will buy it for my US-based nephews methinks.
Although… illustrated by Shane McGowan? That could be pretty messy.
Oh yes, my own very first thought. Australian History, as illustrated by the Pogues. Fark.
Lest we forget: Australians voted down two conscription referenda in the midst of all that imperial fervor, jingoism, hoohaa, civil friction, mass grief and loss.
And that’s RESPECT from LE, back at ya, forefathers and foremothers.
And yes, Howard’s neglect of the pacific war, Kokoda, the turn to the US etc etc WOULD be otherwise quite puzzling, until you recall ome improtant detail: the ALP handled all that.
Yes, he WAS that petty. My grandad, Bougainville veteran, died during Howard’s tenure, abut NO – it was all about Howard’s old man and Gallipoli. Again with the Gallipoli. Anyone would think Australia was under threat at that time.
Keating wants to be our nation’s Philosopher-King. So he launches in on all sorts of subjects. Yesterday, the economy; today, our heritage; tomorrow, whatever takes his fancy. It might be the horticultural significance of Sydney’s botanical gardens, or architecture, or literature.
It’s all quite amusing as a distraction to the important issues of the day, and it will give the supreme shits to those people who have never forgiven him for his time as PM, and who just hate the fact that he has never admitted any error, real or imagined. They want him banished forever, but he just bobs up, again and again, like the nightmare that haunts you even after you’ve woken up.
But Keating’s pronouncements should never be taken seriously. He is just a bullshit artist and deep down he probably knows it.
“But Keating’s pronouncements should never be taken seriously. He is just a bullshit artist and deep down he probably knows it.”
Well I call that bullshit, unlike Keating’s version which usually has style, wit and substance.
While I agree Adrian, you’d have to concede per my #7 that he hardly belted this tune out when he was Dear Leader.
Lefty E @ 12.
Ah, Billy Hughes was a Labor Party Prime Minister at the time of the Gallipoli campaign (though he later moved through several different other parties).
I think Howard’s neglect of WW2 is just plain weird. Maybe it was the negative associations with PNG, since his old man and grandad rorted the soldier settlement schemes there after WW1, to act as fronts for big Copra.
Keating as PM spent considerable time drawing the nation’s attention to the efforts expended by our soldiers on other fields. His major contribution to the First World War remembrance was to build the memorial to the Unknown Soldier, who was deliberately chosen from France’s Western Front, where we lost many more than we did at Gallipoli, and where our interventions under Monash were instrumental in victory. The Australia Remembers campaign and the recognition of the Kokoda Trail broadened the nation’s understanding of the breadth and depth of our overseas engagements.
The point being, there is no contradiction between his past commemorations and this speech. He’s right too – Gallipoli was not the moment our nation was forged. (I’d actually argue that came out of a range of events on our home soil, such as colonisation, the labour movement and Federation, but that’s another story.)
Lefty E @ 17
It is far more likely to do with the poltical narrative. “Nationalist” (for want of a better word) Labor Party supporters (such as former PM Keating) have for many years tried to create a myth supporting WWII that matches their own views of Australia’s identity, as well as its foreign and defense policies.
I understand that the “Nationalist” view holds WWII as a more just war for Australia, as we conducted operations in defense of our own territory integrity (i.e. the whole “Battle for Australia” thing).
Whereas, in Howard’s view, a global conception of defense is preferrable (in WWI a United Empire view, or a Western Alliance view now).
Of the global conception, WWI is the better example (i.e. its justication for Australia was supporting a global status quo which was benefical for Australia, similar to that advanced for various modern wars).
It should also be considered that Gallipoli is merely a representive battle for Australia’s wars. We could just as well use a WWII battle, or indeed something like Long Tan. Its just that Gallipoli was Australia’s first major engagement, and therefore it stands for all that follows.
Keating is upholding the old radical-nationalist critique of WW I. Contra Spiros whether you agree or disgree with this it is a long established position that was around before Keating. The funny thing is that the US hard right (and their Oz admirers such as Windshuttle) have a similar dismissal of WW I which they see as a Democrats’ war when the US was dragged into European politics by the British imperialists.
The Great War survivors were generally scathing of the WW2 vets[ though plenty served in both] on the subject of the level of commitment to battle, numbers killed and such. Wouldn,t be surprised if Howard caught a bit of that attitude.
My grandfather was a pacifist and stretcher bearer in WW1 then joined up again for WW2 and my father served in the Pacific. When I came back from Malaya in ’59 an Aunty took great pains to tell me her father was the “real” soldier in the family. Go figure!
Howard may have neglected Kokoda, but everyone forgets the Western Front, because it can’t be spun to serve the purpose of the mythmakers. Or at least the big battles/abbatoirs of 1916/17 can’t. Some hoo hah has been made recently about the small fight at Villers Brettonaux in 1918. But how many Australians have even heard of Passchendaele with its 10,000 Australian dead?
The fact is that the Gallipoli campaign was the first time Australians went into battle on a large scale as a Nation and is therefore historically signifcant.
Whether you think the strategy and tactics were good or bad, whether you think Austrlaia should or shouldn’t have been in WWI or Gallipoli, whether you think the soldiers fougth well or were cowards, whether you think it is some type of neocom conspiracy to romanticise war in order to support ongoing conflicts or justly deserves it place as the focus of ANZAC day commemorations – basically all of the bile spilled above this post – the fact remains that Gallipoli is of National significance for it truly was our first national campaign and it cost us dearly.
PJK is wrong. I congratulate the current PM for putting PJK back in his box.
Lest we forget.
It is of national significance, but it wasn’t a national campaign.
Nice nit picking Katz – OK, it was our first Allied Joint and Combined arms Operation at Corps Level involving all phases of War except the Pursuit. Advance to and in contact, attacks, defense and withdrawl operations all occurred with varying levels of success and failure.
Good enough for you?
If Gallipoli wasn’t a campaign according to your definition – should we be celebrating the Desert mounted Corps’ advance from Eygpt to Syria as our first National Campaign.
You are so full of your own pitiful lefty bile I wouldn’t be suprised if you are on antidepressants.
Scott@19: “It should also be considered that Gallipoli is merely a representive battle for Australia’s wars. We could just as well use a WWII battle…”
What? The big difference between El Alamein (for example) and Gallipoli, Scott, is that Australians won the first and lost the second.
Razor, I don’t think ANZAC day is of National significance. It’s not of national significance in New Zealand, either, and it certainly wasn’t a national campaign. ANZAC was a multinational corps under Imperial command, and the first organised events on April 25th were better understood as surviving soldiers’ commemorations of each other, and events for the memory of their dead comrades.
Which is not to say I particularly agree with Keating on this—it’s the same old radical nationalist argument, as Geoff Robinson points out. There’s nothing in his speech that wasn’t said better by Alan Seymour decades ago.
Although, an argument in favour of Keating’s speech: the fanatics.
“It’s not of national significance in New Zealand, either”
And they lost more soldiers (relative to population).
That’s not the point, Spiros.
Liam@28: ouch. Give me a double-breasted suit any day.
“It’s not of national significance in New Zealand, either”
I think you’ll find it is, Liam. Dawn parades, marches, public holiday, poppies…no wonder PJK never goes there….
I’m not arguing that it’s not an occasion of importance and solemnity, Geoff. I do think it should continue to be so—and on those grounds despair of the oi-oi-oi crowd.
I simply don’t see how the history of ANZAC as a military unit can in any way be interpreted as a uniquely national story, by anyone who knows anything about the history.
ANZAC by definition can’t be a national story, as the letters N and Z stand for?
(Hint: think sheep)
No, Raze.
Gallipoli wasn’t a national campaign because Australian and NZ troops were under Imperial control. National ? imperial, capeche?
As for the anti-depressants issue, thanks for your concern. No, actually I’m extremely chipper, thank you.
The bone-headed inflexibility and ignorance of RWDBs such as your good self is always very cheering.
BAM! Keating on the money yet again.
Modern reactions to Gallipoli are hypocrisy. Keating was right kissing the ground at Kokoda.
Would someone please buy Paul Keating a retirement home about 150 thousand kilometres from a microphone. It’s over dude – SHUT UP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How about you shut up Adrien? Its not all over.
Keating doesn’t utter in a vacuum, Adrien. We get these grabs because all sorts of people ask him to speak at various gigs and all sorts of journalists ask him what he thinks about things, mainly because they know the answers will be not only colourful but also interesting and substantial. They also know that lots of people are interested in what he thinks. The fact that you are not one of them is probably of little concern to anyone but you.
Furthermore, if someone asked you to speak at a conference or shoved a mic under your nose and asked you what you thought about something, I am fairly confident that you would not say ‘No thanks / no comment.’ And you’re not even a former PM.
Umm, who would I rather hear speak – Keating or Adrien? I’ll just quietly ponder…
Razor, I would have thought the efforts of the A.N. & M.E.F. was more historically significant to Australia than Gallipoli.
Okay, theirs wasn’t a battle fought at Corps level — barely more than a battalion embarked for the SW Pacific in 1914 — but the three-week-long war that they fought to our immediate north in August/September 1914 was a victorious one that involved two services (Army and Navy), almost the entire Australian Navy of the day (including the flagship battle-cruiser and both submarines), and resulted in the Battle of the Falklands as well as Australia’s colonial responsibilities in the western Pacific (through League of Nations mandate) for most of the next 60 years.
Oh, and although done at Colonial Office request, it was an expeditionary force that was organized, planned and run from Melbourne — not London.
Keating is right and he is wrong. Australia and New Zealand troops’ involvement in Churchill’s botched Dardenelles campaign was a major stepping stone towards creating a distinct sense of national identity for the two countries, which until then had considered themselves 100% British (Even Simpson was a Geordie). But he is right to criticise this retrospective projection that Australia was ‘born again’ or redeemed at Gallipoli – or Kokoda/Singapore for that matter.
Everything Keating says on these kinds of subjects should be seen through the prism of his Irish ancestry, and consequent bilious Anglophobia. Keating has been an Anglophobic from day one, and never troubled to hide it, even in office.
Well who wouldn’t be an Anglophobe in this situation? We went and fought with the bloody Angles twice in defence of their empire. In the first they used our soldiers as ‘shock troop’ cannon fodder until Monash basically won the war for them. In the second, Churchill sold us out to Japanese imperial ambition for the sake of a futile campaign in Greece that he *knew* would be a military failure at best and yet persisted with it for the political advantage he thought it would give the bloody empire.
Fuck ‘em and the Queen they rode in on.
Irish ancestry or not, I reckon PK has pinned Gallipoli correctly.
It was a complete disaster from start to finish, somehow subsequently transmorgrified into something worth celebrating by a bunch of tossers who were never there.
Those that were and survived, like my Grandfather, couldn’t see much worth celebrating and refused to do so. (He never attended an ANZAC Day march to the day he died).
If this country is still so puerile that it needs to celebtate the shedding of blood, perhaps Kokoda might be a better choice.
We actually won that one. An that victory did, in fact, have some strategic value.
Measuring a country’s ‘maturity’/'coming of age’ by how many of it’s young males got needlessly slaughtered in a place far far way fighting for somebody else is a bloody weird way of measuring ‘maturity’ etc.
But there’s a great – and classical – mythological value in celebrating such a heroic defeat; seeding the Chersonese with spirits of your dead fallen gloriously in battle.
Very Teutonic of you, T Rex.
Perhaps those dead diggers are whooping it-up right now in Valhalla with assorted Johnny Turks, Eric Bloodaxe, Seigfreid and his mates and a few members of The Golden Horde.
Not a likely prospect for my money, though.
I reckon they’re just fertilizer.
Razor,
we also had Aussies dispatched to Sudan (though they didn’t fight) and we fought in the Boer War. Maybe as separate colonies, but in the latter case Australians died on the field of battle.
FDB @7,
There’s no need for me to back it up. Just read C.E.W. Bean’s Gallipoli Diary, (which, I think was never meant to be published.) Its all in there, plus lots more myth-busting stuff.
Evan, it’s not “Teutonic” but … Greek. Straight-up Homer. The Chersonese was the name the Greeks knew for Gallipoli peninsula. And my point is that it’s already a mythological cycle in the national myth – almost a foundational myth. The fact that it’s actively referred to as the ANZAC Legend should alert keen scholars of the mythological of its true nature. Birth of a nation through a Heroic But Doomed Struggle against all odds, fighting an enemy whom we now offer respect and the hand of friendship in joint sacrifice through the Warrior Spirit. Is C.W.Bean our Homer? Who is our Achilleus? Odysseus? Aeneas?
What Scott and Razor said.
One observation on Australia’s role in the World Wars: I never understand why some people make a silly distinction between WW2 (the good war) and WW1 (a bad war, supposedly, though don’t tell the French that).
Lefty E, for example, makes a thing about how Australia was not “under threat” at the time of Gallipoli. Perhaps he would care to explain how Australia was under threat at the time the Australian 9th Division was defending Tobruk in April 1941? Erwin Rommel was renowned for making deep, fast drives into enemy territory, but I don’t think there was much danger of him getting to Perth.
In fact, we were never under direct threat from the Japanese either. As the well respected AWM historian Peter Stanley has pointed out, over and over, the Japanese never had the intention or the capability to mount a continental invasion of Australia.
As Scott put it exactly, in both World Wars Australia was operating on “a global conception of defense”. And our participation in both was the strategically correct and honourable thing to do, even if not all campaigns went exactly as planned. War’s like that.
Katz, when has Australia ever waged a ‘national campaign’, defined in your terms? John Monash is widely considered to have been the best Allied General on the Western Front, but he was under the command of Field Marshal Haig. In WW2, Kokoda was instigated by Douglas MacArthur, and our troops were ultimately under his command as ‘Supreme Allied Commander in the South-West Pacific Area’.
The social and cultural significance of Gallipoli — the factors which lead young people to make the ‘pilgrimage’ there on ANZAC day every year — really have nothing to do with command structures. They simply reflect the large numbers of Australians who fought and died there.
“Perhaps he would care to explain how Australia was under threat at the time the Australian 9th Division was defending Tobruk in April 1941?”
Australia wasn’t under threat on either occasion, so that would be hard to explain. No doubt part of the reason Curtin brought the 9th Div home when the Japanese starting menacing our Northern shores. Including my Grandad, as it happens.
And since PNG was under direct Australian rule at the time (not to mention Darwin and Townsville being bombed, and subs in Sydney harbour), Ive never understood why people assert Australia was ” never under direct threat from the Japanese”.
@Pavlov’s Cat:
I wonder how many of us could resist the temptation to sound off? People asking one’s opinion is oh so very edifying.
Lefty E wrote:
Actually, that’s an easy one. Most of these blockheads had relatives who served in Egypt (i.e. from Victoria and other places) rather than northern NSW or Queensland. Lots of those (primarily rural sourced) divisions from QLD for example ended up fighting alongside the Dutch in joints like Ambon, where we had our bottoms kicked and thousands of our POWs died in horrific circumstances. But since history is written out of Victoria, it just isn’t on the radar.
So, Lefty E, you’re saying that Australia should have contributed absolutely nothing to help defeat Nazism in Europe — since they were no “direct threat” to us? (That is the point of my reference to Tobruk.)
And let me clarify my mention of Japan. They never wanted to occupy Australia, and we could, if necessary, have let them have PNG (which we had no right to anyway as a colonial occupier, hmmm?). So it is hypothetically possible that we could have stayed out of the Pacific War by severing our ties with the British Empire in the 1930s. Would you have supported that?
Australia could (hypothetically) have gone through WW2 like the Republic of Ireland, fighting no one, and, at the end, sending our condolences to Germany over the sad death of Herr Hitler (as Éamon de Valera did in 1945).
That’s where you end up if you take the view that only “direct threat to Australia” justifies military action.
I dont actually take that view, Paulus. I’m of the view that its quite difficult to explain the strategic need to attack the Dardanelles as part of any sensible military theory of any sort – direct threat, global defense, or otherwise.
As opposed to fighting Nazism.
My point precisely, Paulus.
However, there are different levels of Australian dependency. Originally, Australia was not even accorded a seat at the Versailles Conference. Hughes muscled in, much to Lloyd George’s and Wilson’s chagrin. During WWII, even though operationally Australian forces served under the supreme command of MacArthur, still Australia was accorded the status of a full-fledged sovereign power during WWII, and claimed it by several means, including as an original member of the UN.
Thus a clear distinction needs to be made between operational subservience and the eclipse of national sovereignty.
Curtin ratified in 1942 the Statute of Westminster (1931), an act that declared Australian sovereignty in a way that had been anathema to Robert Menzies, even though offered to the Dominions by the British Government itself. Tellingly, Curtin backdated the application of the Act to 3 September 1939, the day Britain declared War on Germany. According to this formulation, the last constitutionally binding thing that the British government did in the name of Australia was to declare war on Germany.
This fact raises some questions:
1. Why was Australia not repreented at the Paris peace talks between the powers that supported South Vietnam and the North Vietnamese? Gorton and McMahon didn’t even know that secret talks were going on despite the fact that Australian troops were fighting and dying in South Vietnam.
2. As I mentioned earlier, why isn’t Australia represented on policy-making bodies for the war in Afghanistan?
3. Doesn’t Australia have vital interests that might be voiced in such forums?
Thus, after a short period during and after WWII when Australia asserted its sovereignty, Australia has reverted to the role of compliant and voiceless suppliers of cannon fodder just like they had at Gallipoli.
This is one of the corrosive elements of the Gallipoli myth because it encourages this subservient behaviour.
Bandaid @42,
From what I was taught (admittedly in passing, and 20 years ago) was that there was a belief at the time that a country had to be “blooded” to be Truly A Nation, thus the projection isn’t merely retrospective myth-making. (People who have studied History may be able to confirm this).
The fact that the campaign was a fiasco from beginning to end adds to its lustre. A thumping great victory only teaches the victors to glorify war; a loss speaks of war’s tragedy and invites reflection. As we’ve seen in this thread, there’s room in the legend for all sorts of morals to be drawn and argued for, even opposing ones.
Well, I don’t know if it isn’t just retrospective myth-making, without seeing some 1915 sources, but it’s certain myth-making. Even the people making some sort of argument that the Keating was wrong in saying what he was saying argue in terms of myth.
E.g. Scott@19
If it “stands for all that follows” well what follows from that it is that it’s a symbol – in fact stronger that that, that’s what the phrase actively states. Gallipoli is a symbol of Australian involvement in wars in general.
In other words, it’s a story that we tell about ourselves in order to define a certain part of who we are as a nation (or people, or ethnic group, or whatever collective identity you wish to place within this framework). It’s creating group identity, the core function of mythology.
It’s the whole reason this argument becomes so contested. For the supporters of the ‘ANZAC Legend is our Sacred Foundational Myth and Leave It Alone’ school, Keating’s words are as if you told a 5th Century B.C.E. Greek that Homer is crap poetry anyway, too many good Greeks died pointlessly, the war against Illium was unjust and contained no honour, it was none of their business who Helen ran off with, and why the bloody hell couldn’t they have just left the poor buggers alone?
Of course, we know that Gallipoli is an actual historical event, and Troy is just a myth that maybe is or isn’t ‘historical’, but the Greeks felt (or at least acted as if) it was historical, so the emotional comparison can be made. And the historicity of the actual fight, and even of particular events, in no way detracts from the mythological nature of the stories that are told about them.
Again, it’s of no surprise that nearly ALL of the ‘history wars’ are fought over grounds that are rich fields for the national myth-making. Colonial foundation, frontier expansion, the conquest of the natives, and wars for the Motherland in Far Off Places. The Greeks and Romans all had exactly those types of myths (especially the Greeks). Remember we were also founded by a country that saw itself, quite deliberately, as the new Roman Empire. If you require confirmation and you are in Sydney just go and look at the Governor Phillip fountain in the south-western corner of the Botanic Garden.
Gallipoli is the one day of the year that the nation endows with spiritual significance for collective remembrance. So of course Keating, that ardent opponent of established tradition, would have to want to tear it down.
At the time, as the designation of the Australian forces (AIF) implies, we thought ourselves part of the Empire, somwhat wayward sons. So the notion that we were fighting someone elses war is idiotic. The UK’s war was our war because we were still part of the UK in most ways, shapes and forms.
Gallipoli is important and became memorialised soon after because it was our first innings and we gave a good account of our selves, notching up a reasonable score on an “away” pitch in a losing side. It showed we could play well as a small national team in the greater team of Empire.
No doubt the game itself (great power war) sucks. But thats not the way people thought at the time. And subsequent behavior of the auld enemy gives substance to that way of thinking.
Within a week or so of the landing Ashmead-Bartlett’s very heroic account was republished in Aussie newspapers after being first published in England. That’s generally accepted as where the myth-making began.As I said before, I’m uncertain if I’ve got the seconf part of the double-barrelled name right as I don’t have sources or books here to check.
A great thing for the dreamers but a shit thing for the doers.