REMEMBERING GALLIPOLI: A VIEW FROM THE NEW CENTURY.

Soon there'll come--the signs are fair-- A death-storm from the distant north. Stink of corpses everywhere, Mass assassins marching forth.

--Alfred Lichtenstein, "Prophecy" (1913)

FOR MOST AUSTRALIANS, Gallipoli is a sacred ground of lost endeavour, or as the film director Peter Weir once put it, a legend we'll always remember and a story we'll never forget". Weir's famous 1981 film Gallipoli, accompanied by the haunting music of Albinoni, Bizet and Paganini, is self-consciously the work of an Australian nationalist. The final freeze frame of the dying Archy is probably the most famous scene in Australian cinema--classical in both its anti-imperial symbolism and in its celebration of the Anzac legend.

Weir uses the doomed charge of the Australian Light Horse at The Nek as a metaphor for the birth of a nation. In the film, the attack at The Nek is portrayed as a kind of Australian Balaclava. For Weir, this incident is a damning indictment of British military leadership--to the extent that Colonel Robertson, the officer who gives the orders for the futile bayonet charges of the 10th Light Horse, is portrayed as British--even though he was Australian.

As Weir and his scriptwriter, the playwright David Williamson, recognised, Gallipoli lends itself to romantic tragedy and legend by virtue of its setting on the Aegean Sea and its proximity to the plains of ancient Troy. For British and Anzac officers educated in the Greek classics and the poetry of Byron, the idea of fighting the Turks at the Hellespont and close to Troy combined legendary romance with an ideal of Christian chivalry. Inspired by parallels with Homer and Byron, Rupert Brooke wrote:

 
   They say Achilles in the darkness stirred ... 
   And Priam and his fifty sons 
   Wake all amazed and hear the guns, 
   And shake for Troy again. 

It was not only Englishmen who were enthused by the idea of being the heirs of Achilles. One of the most formidable of Australia's brigade commanders, Brigadier General H.E. "Pompey" Elliott, thought that the resemblance between Australian diggers and Greek warriors was striking. In 1920, the noted Australian classics scholar H.W. Allen saw nothing unusual in delivering a paper to the Classical Association of Victoria comparing Xenophon's Greeks with Australian diggers.