Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Note on money, measurement and terminology
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: journeys into history
- Part I Loss, Memory, Desire
- Part II Family Journeys
- Part III Soldiers' Tales
- Part IV Testament of Youth
- 7 Walking with history: learning about war
- 8 ‘It's like a Mecca, like a pilgrimage’: backpacker journeys
- Conclusion: journey's end
- Epilogue: The ghost of memory
- Notes
- Survey Informants
- Index
8 - ‘It's like a Mecca, like a pilgrimage’: backpacker journeys
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Note on money, measurement and terminology
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: journeys into history
- Part I Loss, Memory, Desire
- Part II Family Journeys
- Part III Soldiers' Tales
- Part IV Testament of Youth
- 7 Walking with history: learning about war
- 8 ‘It's like a Mecca, like a pilgrimage’: backpacker journeys
- Conclusion: journey's end
- Epilogue: The ghost of memory
- Notes
- Survey Informants
- Index
Summary
The day after Anzac Day, weary, worn and not a little hung over, Mike found the time to make a detailed entry in his diary. For this middle-aged man from the Northern Territory, Gallipoli had proved a place of ‘mixed emotions’:
The dawn service was sombre, dignified, and ghostly with the dawn and lights throwing a soft sheen over the gently breaking sea. A morning you would imagine the original Anzacs experienced only with starbursts of shell and rattle roar of machine gun. I [thought] of a quiet expectant death on a lapping shore.
Dawn on the beach was ‘like a funeral’, he thought. It enshrined the ‘sadness [of] friends/family the dead left behind them’. The service at Lone Pine was another matter entirely. Set high on the ridges of the Peninsula, sunbaked and windswept, the site had witnessed the bloodiest fighting of the campaign.
Here men became … animals. [They] throttled, bashed, bayoneted … [It was a struggle] to survive and the Australian ceremony reflected it … [There was] a larrikin din of party homage … There are catcalls, laughter, talk. There's also [an] undeniable recognition of the torture and pain of this little acre. Those below the ground would rise to the sound and party with their great-grandchildren – and they're all young, all boisterous, all full of life.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Return to GallipoliWalking the Battlefields of the Great War, pp. 188 - 209Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006