Revisiting Gallipoli – Janda Gooding

War historian C.E.W. Bean’s correspondence from WWI made him a household name in Australia. In 1919, Bean returned to Gallipoli to fill in the missing pieces of what happened during the campaign, taking with him a team of artists on what he called the Australian Historical Mission. Their aim was to collect battlefield relics and create new artworks to convey the full story of the power, trauma and tragedy of that terrible conflict. Australian War Memorial’s  Dr Janda Gooding retraced the footsteps of Bean and his colleagues and produced Gallipoli Revisited – In The Footsteps of Charles Bean and The Australian Historical Mission. (Hardie Grant 2009). Janda Gooding addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 20 April 2010.

GALLIPOLI REVISITED: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF CHARLES BEAN AND THE AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL MISSION, 1919

JANDA GOODING

Gallipoli Revisited traces the work of the Australian Historical Mission on Gallipoli in 1919. The Historical Mission was very much a group driven by a shared sense of personal responsibility to document and record the landscape and history of Gallipoli for all Australians. My interest is not with the military history of Gallipoli, although we know that is a subject that is immensely interesting and one that remains topical. My interest is with the images produced during the Mission – and in particular the photographs taken by George Hubert Wilkins and the paintings and sketches made by the artist George Lambert. It is this body of work that forms the core of the nation’s official pictorial collection related to Gallipoli.

Central to the work of Lambert and Wilkins was the foresight and drive of Charles Bean, a man who looms large in any discussion about Australia’s involvement in the First World War. Charles Bean was appointed in 1914, to be Australia’s first official war correspondent. Subsequently, he was asked to write the official history of Australia’s part in the war. He therefore has a firm grip on the official story of ANZAC. Bean was also a founder of one of the best-known museums in Australia, the Australian War Memorial, so he is someone I have a great interest in.

Bean’s role as official war correspondent was to cover the contribution of Australian soldiers to the war, to report to the government of the day and to make his press articles available for Australian newspapers. He lived and worked alongside the fighting troops from October 1914 to the Armistice of November 1918. In fact, he was truly an embedded journalist as we know it. He spent nearly the entire campaign on Gallipoli, landing with Australian Headquarters staff about 10 a.m. on 25 April 1915 and evacuating with the troops 8 months later on 19 December. His capacity to make connections with officers, and eventually move with ease among regular soldiers, ensured he had access to the highest commanders as well as regular troops serving in the trenches.

Bean had a unique opportunity to record first hand experiences of ordinary Australians suddenly thrust into a European war and he was well aware that it was a privileged position with great responsibility. While on Gallipoli, Charles Bean spent most of his time  running between headquarters and trenches, interviewing men about the battles in which they had fought and then working until late at night writing up his notes. He took hundreds of photographs and collected objects of personal importance to him: for example, he carried a reminder of a lucky escape – a piece of a shell that had exploded on top of his dugout.

Of course, his urge to document what was going on and to collect things was not unique to him, but, it was during Bean’s time on Gallipoli that he became convinced that Australia should create a great museum that would stand as a tribute to the efforts of the AIF. With so many dying around him, he also considered it his personal duty to build as accurate a record as possible of the events that were happening.

In late 1915, as Bean made his last rounds to the various outposts and the troops prepared to evacuate Gallipoli, he wrote in his diary of watching Australian troops, lovingly tending the graves of their fallen mates. A few days later from the deck of the HMS Grafton Bean kept an all-night vigil as the troops quietly withdrew, noting the time of every sound and movement on the shore, the bombs going off along the ridge lines, and the occasional firing across the lines by the last troops. The night was full of anxiety, but Bean’s account is tinged with melancholy as the familiar posts and ridges were gradually abandoned. As he wrote his last few notes in the dark, he observed that “perhaps the greatest success we have achieved there is quietly giving it to them without their knowing it”.[i]

Explaining Australia’s part in the war was to become Charles Bean’s life’s work, and over the next three years as he tramped across the Western Front following the troops, he worked tirelessly to gather as much information as possible about their experiences. His work, and indeed his influence, went far beyond that of a regular journalist. A very brief summary of some key achievements during the war years hardly does him justice:

• Firstly, he saw the need for Australians to keep their own military records and to do this he established the Australian War Records Section, a unit that systematically gathered war diaries, official correspondence and personal accounts of Australians;

• Secondly, Bean lobbied and argued for Australia to be able to collect the most relevant “war relics” from the battlefields as these would be essential components of the future national war museum that he envisaged;

• And thirdly, Bean helped to establish the Official War Art and War Photography schemes that employed artists such as Arthur Streeton and George Lambert and photographers Frank Hurley and Hubert Wilkins. [This scheme still operates today under the auspices of the Australian War Memorial.]

All this while spending most days moving around the trenches and front lines, dodging bullets and shells and witnessing the most appalling carnage in what he described as “the giant mincing machine” of war.

However, the events at ANZAC were also always at the back of his mind. When Australian forces had abandoned Gallipoli at the end of 1915, many details of the campaign remained unclear. Indeed, some things would prove to be unknowable. Record-keeping had been inadequate and official documents were later described as “scrappy” and insufficient to prepare a detailed military history of the events.[ii] Bean felt compelled to try to resolve many of the questions that remained about the ANZAC campaign. Who had gone farthest inland on the day of the landing? What had really happened when those four lines of Light Horsemen charged across the Nek? And crucially, what had the Turks seen from their positions? These and many other questions had plagued the men during 1915 and still remained to be investigated in late 1918 when, with the end of the war, it became possible to revisit the old ANZAC area.

On 12 November 1918, the day after Germany signed the armistice that ended the war, Charles Bean was in London to seek formal approval to return to Australia via Gallipoli. He asked permission to take an artist and a photographer to help him complete a thorough survey of the site. For him, visual records were going to be critical to help Australians visualise where their troops had fought. With about a third of all Australian dead on Gallipoli having no known grave, pictures would help to symbolically “locate” the missing Australian bodies in an actual landscape.[iii]

Bean called the group he assembled the “Australian Historical Mission”, using a quasi religious term that perhaps indicated an intention to fulfil his obligations to the dead. Certainly, as he said, the return to Gallipoli gave him a chance to “pay homage to the Anzac dead, and to use their faith and fire to inspire his fellow Australians to national greatness”.[iv]

Bean selected highly experienced men to accompany him. As photographer, he chose George Hubert Wilkins, the official war photographer with whom he had worked very closely on the Western Front for the last 18 months. Wilkins had demonstrated to Bean his commitment to making as truthful a photographic record as possible and his personal bravery under the most extreme conditions had been acknowledged by a Military Cross with bar.

The artist chosen was George Washington Lambert, who had already served as an official war artist with the Light Horse in Egypt, Palestine, and the Sinai in early 1918. Lambert had delivered an impressive array of paintings, sketches and pencil portraits when he returned to London and Charles Bean was keen for Lambert to paint at least two large battle paintings for the future war museum.

The group departed from London on 18 January 1919. Bean was travelling with men he knew and trusted, and the photographs and works of art they made during the expedition would form the nucleus of the official national collection related to Gallipoli.[v] After travelling across southern Europe, the Historical Mission reached Gallipoli in early February 1919.

The Australian Historical Mission spent just over three weeks on Gallipoli in early 1919 and it is worth remembering that this was a place that had been abandoned by ANZAC forces three years earlier. There had been few opportunities in 1915 to bury bodies properly due to the rugged terrain and the intensity and closeness of the fighting, and, during the intervening years, the site had been scavenged thoroughly by wild dogs. Human remains were everywhere and it was a mess. An Australian graves unit had arrived only a month before the Historical Mission and was doing its best to locate Australian bodies, identify them and then re-inter them in marked graves. But the work was appalling and the sad and melancholy atmosphere of the place affected everyone.

The Historical Mission spent thedays criss-crossing the battlefields, making sketches, taking notes, drafting maps and taking a large number of photographs. Relics of the fighting were picked up, documented and packed for shipment to Australia.

Wilkins worked alongside Charles Bean, photographing places that Bean noted as important to Australia’s military history. Wilkins used a large camera that took delicate glass plates. It was cumbersome and certainly not very sophisticated by today’s standards, but it produced beautiful and highly detailed images.

The photographic record was intended to document the marks and evidence that remained on the landscape, so it was essential that the images be as accurate as possible. By locating an event or an object in an actual landscape, Wilkins’s photographs provided supporting evidence for Bean’s historical interpretation. Once people could “see” where something happened, they might more easily understand “how” it had happened.

To achieve images that served this purpose, Wilkins made his compositions straightforward, with the focus of attention usually in the centre. This helps to make the photographs easily understandable and this is exactly what Bean wanted for the historical record; images that viewers could trust as reliable documentary records. They would be as Bean said “a sacred record – standing for future generations to see for ever the plain, simple truth”.[vi]

In a photograph of Quinn’s Post, the proximity of the fighting lines is emphasised. The deep gullies and steep ridges that seem to fold into each other are here even more compressed than elsewhere. This is accentuated in the black-and-white image of the extreme northern end of Quinn’s Post, where Turkish trenches adjoined those of the Australians. In 1915 this area had changed hands a number of times, eventually remaining a position from which Turkish snipers covered the Australians. The photograph was taken by Wilkins from the Turkish perspective, looking back across Australian lines, to indicate the clear view a sniper would have had of Australian positions, including the head of Monash Gully, Russell’s Top, Pope’s Hill, and nearby Quinn’s Post.

This viewpoint is replicated in an extraordinary and evocative image of a British sniper’s position on Rhododendron Ridge. Wilkins’s camera was placed where the sniper would have been hiding. The photograph shows the spiky bushes on either side that constricted the view so as to give only a glimpse of the Turkish-held territory across the gully. A shallow depression in the soil marks where the sniper may have lain in wait, and it is easy to imagine him peering across the narrow gap anxiously watching for any movement. Further evidence of the sniper’s trade is clearly visible through the spent .303 cartridge cases scattered around the hollow.

Human bones lying on the surface of the landscape were more tangible markers of trauma and thus became an important motif in Wilkins’s photographs. The brief ceasefire on 24 May 1915 had allowed the bodies of many men from both sides to be buried. But those who had been killed in no man’s land during the rest of the campaign lay where they fell until the Graves Unit started its gruesome work. When the Historical Mission arrived, several hastily filled-in Turkish mass graves had been eroded by recent rains and the bones exposed to the elements and marauding dogs. One of these pits was on the southernmost end of the ANZAC area, near Leane’s Trench, where the Turks had repeatedly tried to break the Australian line. The bleached bones could be seen “a mile away as a broad white streak down the ravine”.[vii]

The photographic record that Hubert Wilkins made on Gallipoli in 1919 was intended to provide visual evidence of the military events of 1915 and to support the historical narrative being developed. Even though nature had started to reclaim the scarred earth and the trenches were being eroded, the signs of battle were everywhere. Wilkins’s Gallipoli photographs stand as an eyewitness account of the traces of battle that remained on the landscape. Importantly, they locate individual objects and stories and the work of the Historical Mission within a specific landscape.

In addition, these photographs were part of the primary resources being gathered for the planned official histories and would be used in a range of related publications produced by the Australian government through the interwar years. The photographs were also available for purchase by the Australian public and they needed to be as Charles Bean highlighted – a “scrupulously accurate photographic record” of the Gallipoli campaign.[viii]

Bean believed that the work of the Australian official photographers should have “proper regard for the great sacrifices, and the sacred memory of the great men to whose bravery these pictures should be a monument”.[ix] In fact, all the material collected by the Historical Mission was intended to serve as a memorial to Australia’s involvement in the First World War.

Apart from later developing and printing up the plates, Wilkins’ work was largely done when he left Gallipoli. For the artist, his work was only just beginning and with the commissions for large studio paintings, it would continue for some years. While on Gallipoli, Lambert needed to capture the light, atmosphere and “feel” of the place. The small oil sketches he produced on the spot served as “memory notes” to remind him of the colour, light and character of the landscape, but they were finished paintings in their own right and not studies for the later large battle paintings.

Lambert sketched and painted directly onto small wood panels often allowing the wood grain to remain as part of his composition. The weather was bleak and cold; there was even a substantial snow fall just as they arrived. Lambert’s hands and fingers were frozen and yet he still produced extraordinary fine work.

One of the first paintings he worked on was The Sphinx from Plugge’s Plateau, the site of intense fighting on the morning of 25 April 1915. Perched high on a precipice in cold and windy weather Lambert painted the razor edges of sandy clay that lead up to the distinctive peak of the Sphinx using the early morning light to help define the sharp features.

A main priority for Lambert was that he should make all elements of his paintings as authentic as possible. He was aware that veterans of Gallipoli would expect the details to be right and to achieve this he would rise early to get the effects of the dawn light, or, if an event had happened in the evening, he would paint as late as possible. With such a determination for “truthfulness” in his pictures, it was a great disappointment to him that the Historical Mission visited Gallipoli in February rather than April.

Painting up at the Nek, a fierce wind forced him to work very quickly and he laid in areas of sky, ground, and churned earth where the trenches remained. This was the place where four successive lines of Australian men had charged across the narrow stretch of no man’s land only to be met with a “perfect sheet of flame”, cut down by Turkish machine gun fire. The melancholy mood is accentuated by a lone soldier looking across the narrow field, and at his feet, a skull and human thigh bone poke out of the earth.

Lambert’s insistence for authenticity was paramount. On 6 March, he rose before dawn so as to synchronise his painting session at Lone Pine with the same time of the charge of the Third Light Horse Brigade at the Nek in August 1915. He had the right light for painting; the difference in 1919 was that the ground was still littered with human bones that stood out white in the early morning light. He commented that “the worst feature of this after battle work is that the silent hills & valleys sit stern, unmoved callous of the human and busy only in growing bush, and sliding earth to hide the scars left by the war disease”.[x]

The same “silent hills & valleys” confronted him when he travelled down the peninsula to Cape Helles where he painted Achi Baba, from Tommy’s Trench. The vegetation was different, the colours dull and mousy grey with sage green undertones. Lambert’s mood was sombre and made more so by the plenitude of bones that provided physical evidence of the huge loss of life in the area; “The dead or rather their bones spoil it of course and the melancholy is ready for him who lets his thoughts wander.”[xi] Finding the place sad yet very beautiful, he wrote to his wife as he was leaving Gallipoli: “I cannot tell you how pleased I am at getting clear of this graveyard beautiful as it is nor can I explain how satisfied I am to have done what work I have done.”[xii]

It was estimated that about eight tons of relics were secured by the Historical Mission for the museum.[xiii] Twenty-six ammunition boxes contained small items collected from the battlefields: strands of barbed wire, busted up mess tins, badges, buttons, colour patches, shell cases, pieces of tunic, and the like. Two large cases contained more substantial objects and a selection of timbers that had been used at Lone Pine. Other items, such as the two abandoned lifeboats, were retrieved at a later date.

Lambert’s field work produced just over 30 small paintings, watercolours, and drawings. The photographic material created during the Historical Mission was comprehensive. Hubert Wilkins took about 200 images and Bean’s own photographs numbered 95, of which 30 were taken while the Historical Mission travelled through Turkey on its way south to Egypt before disbanding. In addition, Bean filled seven notebooks with topographical sketch maps and detailed diary entries, and took extensive shorthand notes of interviews he conducted with veterans of the Gallipoli campaign. Maps made on the spot, and those gathered from other sources and checked against the landscape, added another layer of intricate knowledge of the land across which Australian soldiers fought.

Of course this collection did end up in the war museum that Charles Bean helped found. So I’d just like to spend a few minutes illustrating how this material was put to use in the years immediately after the war. Bean was very particular about how he arranged his working material, and most of it was indexed and cross-referenced. Once back in Australia in late 1919, Charles Bean had Wilkins’s photographs pasted into large albums. He worked on them and with scientific precision; he plotted key geographic features, angles and distances, and the location of specific units and military objectives across the surfaces of the photographs. As he wrote the account of Australians at war, he used these photographs as primary references.[xiv]

Bean knew that his written version of any event must be congruent with the geography of the landscape. Words and images have to match and he never relied solely on one source. As he wrote up the relevant part of his history, he checked eyewitness statements against a photograph. The image provided him with visual evidence to confirm people’s accounts and it served as a framework on which to reconstruct a story. In this case, Bean was assessing how far an Australian party had advanced on the first day.

Bean had always considered art to be a central component of the future museum as it had the capability to unite strong storytelling with powerful symbolism. In 1922, when the fledgling Australian War Memorial put up temporary displays in Melbourne, an important feature was a massive painting by George Lambert of the ANZAC landing on Gallipoli.

This painting had always been imagined as a centrepiece of the Gallipoli displays. With such a broad canvas to work on, Lambert positioned important stages of the story across the painting. Starting in the lower left corner, he showed the Australians landing on the beach in the half light of dawn, the struggle of individuals through the low spiky undergrowth, a young boy dying as others rush past him, and then the scramble up the steeper slopes and the rush across Plugge’s Plateau. Lambert fashioned the painting so that the attention of viewers would be drawn back towards the left-hand side by the bursting artillery shell, and then down the rugged ridge lines, right back to the beach in the lower left.

It was an unconventional diagonal composition that challenged viewers and Lambert also deliberately painted the bodies and the earth in the same tone, making them nearly indistinguishable in the dawn light. From his own experience walking the ground on Gallipoli, he was only too aware that the earth had literally swallowed up many of these men and obliterated their identity.

Lambert’s picture brought together elements of the Gallipoli story in ways that other visual material and objects could not. Its focus on the harsh and difficult terrain rather than on hand-to-hand combat further cemented the idea that the real “enemy” to be overcome was the landscape. The painting was a huge success – it captured the entire sweep of the story and the enormous canvas created a dramatic and emotional experience for veterans and general visitors.

On ANZAC Day 1924, a photograph of it was featured in a Melbourne newspaper. It showed a museum worker explaining the picture to a young boy with the accompanying caption noting how the “imperishable memory” of the deeds of Australian soldiers would be passed on to Australian youth to be maintained in peace “or if need be, in war”.[xv]

Many items collected by the Historical Mission, or created as a result of it, remain central and iconic features of the Australian War Memorial’s displays and are seen by nearly one million visitors each year. Lambert’s paintings produced as part of his commission with the Historical Mission are still featured in the Gallipoli gallery. Alongside them are examples of Wilkins’s photographs taken on the peninsula in 1919. Objects picked up by the Historical Mission as they walked the ground on Gallipoli are also on view. These include logs retrieved from the Turkish trenches at Lone Pine, and one of the salvaged lifeboats that was shipped back to Australia is now in the Memorial’s Orientation Gallery.[xvi] Gathered from the beaches, trenches, ridges, and valleys around the ANZAC area, these are all part of the evidence collected to help answer some of the lingering questions concerning Australia’s part in the Gallipoli campaign. Just as Bean hoped it would, the collection has become a lasting memorial to the tragedy of war as well as to the achievements and sacrifices of the members of the AIF.

Australian attitudes to the Gallipoli campaign and to war in general have changed dramatically since the time of the Australian Historical Mission. Since then, the critical elements of the ANZAC story have constantly been examined and reinterpreted by historians, politicians, and cultural commentators. Yet visitors to the Memorial continue to find relevance and meaning in the Gallipoli displays.

For nearly a century the rich and varied collection of material assembled for the nation by the Historical Mission has been made accessible to public visitors, museum curators, historians, researchers, authors, and publishers. Like all primary-source material, the collection will always be open to interpretation and the construction of fresh meanings. But as Australians’ attitudes to war and, in particular, to the Gallipoli campaign shift with time, the wealth of material collected by the Australian Historical Mission will continue to be reinterpreted for new generations and new times.

ENDNOTES

[i] C.E.W. Bean, diary entry, 20 December 1915, AWM38: 3DRL 606/22

[ii] A.W. Bazley, “Australia’s Official History of World War 1”, Stand To, vol. 6, no. 6, November 1958 – January 1959, p. 23

[iii] C.E.W. Bean, diary entry, 12 November 1918, AWM38: 3DRL 606/117/1,  p. 78

[iv] Bill Gammage, “Foreword”, Gallipoli mission, ABC Enterprises in association with the Australian War Memorial, Sydney, 1990, p. vi

[v] Honorary Captain George Washington Lambert (1873–1930) enlisted 13 December 1917 in London, AIF Administrative Headquarters Unit as official artist; worked in Middle East and on Gallipoli; having completed his work, his appointment as official artist was terminated on 31 March 1920. Captain George Hubert Wilkins MC and Bar (1888–1958) enlisted 1 May 1917, Australian Flying Corps (AFC), 9th Reinforcements; embarked Sydney on HMAT Marathon A74, transferred to AWRS London as official photographer on 21 August 1917; worked on the Western Front until appointment as official photographer was terminated on 7 September 1920 having completed duty; prior to First World War was official correspondent to Balkan War of 1912 and member of Vilhjalmur Stefansson’s Arctic exploration party (1913–16).

[vi] C.E.W. Bean, “Australia’s records. Preserved as sacred things. Pictures, relics, and writings”, The ANZAC Bulletin, no. 40, 10 October 1917, p. 14

[vii] C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli mission, p. 59

[viii] C.E.W. Bean, “Preface to First Edition”, The story of ANZAC,The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, vol. I, 3rd edition, 1934, p. xxvii

[ix] C.E.W. Bean, letter to Defence Secretary T. Trumble, 25 June 1918, AWM16: 4378/1/8

[x] George Lambert, 6 March 1919, ‘War Diary 1919’, Mitchell Library ML MSS 97/4.

[xi] George Lambert, 8 March 1919, ‘War Diary 1919’, Mitchell Library ML MSS 97/4.

[xii] George Lambert, 9 March 1919, ‘War Diary 1919’, Mitchell Library ML MSS 97/4.

[xiii] H.W. Dinning, AWRS Weekly Report, EEF Subsection, Cairo to London, report no. 13, dated 15 April 1919, AWM25: 1013/37

[xiv] This album is AWM38: 3DRL 606/1016

[xv] The Sun – News Pictorial, Melbourne, 25 April 1924, p. 1

[xvi] This is the steel lifeboat from HMT Ascot (A33) used in the landings at Gallipoli by 13 Battalion AIF, RELAWM0586.001.