Anzac Day Our Magnificent Defeat
The anniversary of the landing of Australian and New Zealand soldiers at Gallipoli every year challenges us all. The stories of that event, together with the various myths and legends that grew up in the youth of nationhood have meant that Australians have a special place in their hearts for that Turkish Peninsula.
Like many others of a later generation, I wondered what it was all about, and studied the history, read the diaries. I was watching Peter Weir’s film, ‘Gallipoli’ on an aircraft in 1982 when I realised that the Australian soldiers were being shot on wide sweeping sand beaches. I kept thinking, why are they not scraping some sand barricades, some trenches? In the credits, I saw the film was made on the sandy beaches of South Australia.
But Gallipoli is not like that. I knew that from geography lessons. Its beaches are rocky, even flinty, solid stone. It took a lot of effort to dig rock trenches to give them shelter. Every fresh brigade on landing, were mown down by the machine guns up on the cliffs. You can tell, I realised as I looked at a pile of freshly uncovered skulls, which belonged to the allied forces – they all had bullet holes in the tops of their head from the guns firing down upon them. The Turks were fighting to defend their homeland and families from invaders.
So bad was that film, in misrepresenting the hardships our troops faced, that I decided to take our Wesley Film Productions film crew to Gallipoli and film from inside the trenches. I convinced some friends to put up over a million dollars to cover the costs and we set out for Turkey. This was the first time since 1923, when the burial party arrived, that a film was made on the actual site. The trenches cut into the rock are still there. Pieces of bone and metal buckles are uncovered every time the wind blows.
I researched the history, wrote the scripts, raised the money and set off to Gallipoli. I took the same 40-member crew with me as had made all the films of the life of Jesus, the Apostle Paul and the history of the Young Church. There at Gallipoli I made my own pilgrimage to Anzac Cove. Ironically, none of our Turkish guides or the bus drivers then knew how to get to Anzac Cove. What a difference these days, as tens of thousands go to Anzac Day ceremonies on the beach each year.
In the early morning air, I was the only one there. As I walked the beaches, climbed into the trenches, read the tombstones and thought of piles of contorted flesh of young Australian manhood, I realised that here, in a foreign country, 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, President of Turkey, and the man who brought Turkey into the twentieth century. In 1934, Kemal Attaturk spoke of the Australian war dead some of the most moving words I have read:
“You heroes that shed your blood and lost your lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore you rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mahomets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You the mothers, who sent your sons from far away countries, wipe your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom, and they are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.”
As I stood in tears reading those words, and reading the names of the young men fallen, who lie buried in the cemetery known forever as ‘Lone Pine’, I realised that on the west coast of Turkey part of the heart of Australia lies buried. Far greater numbers of Australians would be killed and wounded in later wars, 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.
Long before it was popular, I made the film, ‘Our Magnificent Defeat’. For about 15 years it was screened every Anzac Day across Australia and has been screened by all of the major networks. It played some part in the renewal of interest in people going there ever since. Thousands of copies on video were sold mainly to schools and RSL Clubs.
In my imagination, I thought of all those who 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, ammunition and the weird contortions of death sculptured in Australian flesh.
From the going down of the sun on that first Anzac Day, the chaotic maelstrom of Australia’s blooding, to the desert 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 in Europe, France, Germany, Spain, Crete, Greece, Syria, Korea, Malaya, Africa, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
He was your mate, the kid across the street, the med student at graduation, the mechanic in the corner garage, the baker who brought you 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 for he is every Australian serviceman and woman. He is the Unknown Soldier. He died for a cause he held just in the service of our land that you and yours may say in freedom; I am proud to be Australian.
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn; At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, We will remember them.” – Laurence Binyon.
Rev The Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes, A.C., M.L.C.
