Rock and Hard Places (26 page)

When an Australian journalist called Jonathan King went in search of Gallipoli veterans in 1997, he found only seven still alive, aged between 99 and 104. These amazing old men all told life stories that made the Indiana Jones films look like “Five Go To The Seaside.” One, Len Hall, had not only served at Gallipoli, but charged in history’s last successful cavalry action with the Light Horse at Beersheeba, ridden into Damascus with Lawrence and then returned home and married the stranger to whom he’d given the emu feather plume from his hat when he’d embarked five years previously. However, these survivors are not half so individually revered in life as their less fortunate comrades are revered collectively in death.

There’s not even consensus on the symbolic value of Gallipoli. There are some who claim that the fiasco was “the birth of the nation,” that the blood spilt was a belated consecration of Australia’s federation in 1901; those who push this line are generally the sort of people who are perfectly happy that Australia’s head of state is decided by an accident of birth in a foreign castle owned by the most dysfunctional family on earth not called Jackson, and that a quarter of our flag is taken up by somebody else’s. Gallipoli has also been used as a cornerstone of the Australian republican position—as a signifier of the trouble blind loyalty to some other mug’s empire can get you into, it’s difficult to beat.

For whatever reason, Gallipoli is hallowed ground—Anglo-Saxon Australia’s only sacred site. It occurs to me, as the ferry draws up to the peninsula, and buses and people start puttering and stumbling ashore in the dark, that those back home who continue to strew obstacles in the path of land rights for Australia’s indigenous people could do worse than to ponder how they’d feel if a Turkish government told us we couldn’t come to Gallipoli anymore and, furthermore, that they were going to dig the place up to look for uranium.

 

NOT THAT TURKEY is likely to do anything quite so crass.

“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives,” begins the dedication, “you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country, therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in
peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”

These generous words are embossed on a sort of stone billboard near the Anzac landing position at Ari Burnu. They were spoken in 1934 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first President of modern Turkey. As a 34-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel serving in the peninsula’s defences in 1915, Atatürk led from the front in halting the Anzac advance. His exploits won him a popularity which, after the war, he exploited and expanded to allow himself to reinvent Turkey in his own image. His zest for modernisation gave Turks a roman alphabet, a semblance of secular democracy, a largely western outlook and surnames—Atatürk, the name he chose for himself, means “Father Turk.” His attention to detail was as admirable as his fashion sense: he passed laws abolishing baggy trousers and fezzes because he thought they looked silly.

Turks venerate Gallipoli with concrete reason: if Atatürk’s gold pocketwatch had not, in true Boys’ Own Adventure style, stopped the fragment of British shrapnel that struck him in the chest near Chunuk Bair, Turkey today would be an utterly different place, and Turks need only look over their borders to Syria, Iran and Iraq to see how different. Atatürk’s portrait hangs in every public building in Turkey. His statue stands in every empty space, and he smirks raffishly from the 100,000 lire note, looking undeniably like Peter Cushing after a few sherries.

There must be more Australians and Kiwis on the beach this morning than there were in 1915—seven or eight thousand at least, I reckon. The Anzac Day dawn service is conducted from a temporary platform mounted just above the beach. It includes some stomping and shouting by a Maori warrior, a speech by the Governor-General of New Zealand and another speech by an Australian minister for something. These are followed by the spoken lament that starts “They shall not grow old,” and ends with “Lest we forget,” a one-minute silence and a communal mumbling of our national anthems.

As the day progresses, more ceremonies take place at the other cemeteries on the peninsula. There’s a memorial for the Turkish 57th regiment, wiped out on the first day of the campaign. Those who have travelled from New Zealand mourn their dead at Chunuk Bair. A few—very few—attend ceremonies at the British and French graveyards. The Australian service takes place at Lone Pine.

The terrible thing about Lone Pine is how small it is. The entire battlefield is perhaps the size of three football pitches. In two days in August 1915, 2,200 Australians and 5,000 Turks died here. Here, there are more speeches, more silence and another hopelessly indecisive stab at “Advance Australia Fair.” It’s a common assumption, though a debatable one, that Australians aren’t much use at expressing emotion on a personal level. It is indisputable fact that when it comes to expressing emotion in a group, we’re completely bloody hopeless—though, this morning, some inventive souls do find an appropriate vent for their feelings.

On the carefully manicured lawn behind the Lone Pine cenotaph, in what is clearly a well-rehearsed rite, three young men remove their windcheaters to reveal Australian Rules Football jumpers—the navy blue of Carlton, the black and white of Collingwood, the gold and brown of Hawthorn. As a lifelong Geelong man, I initially find the spectacle rather distressing, but what follows is, in its way, lovely. The bloke in the Carlton jumper produces a weatherbeaten red Australian Rules ball from his backpack. To general approval from onlookers, a solemn kickabout ensues.

The last official ceremony takes place at the Turkish memorial at Morto Bay, towards the tip of the peninsula. The road to this giant grey brick henge is lined by Turkish solidiers, all nervously polishing and buffing hidden nooks of their kits while they await the limousine carrying their President. Eight flagpoles stand at the front of the Turkish memorial, on which the banners of Gallipoli’s Australian, New Zealander, French, Canadian, Indian and British invaders are flown just as high as those of its Turkish and German defenders.

A comically inept Turkish army bugler honks mercilessly through all eight anthems, making “Advance Australia Fair” sound indistinguishable from “La Marsellaise,” and “God Save The Queen” indistinguishable from “Cum On Feel The Noize.” Another thing Australians aren’t good at is stifling giggles. If the bloke with the trumpet wanted a ten-year posting to an isolated sentry post out in the militarised Kurdish badlands of the southeast, surely he only had to ask.

The service is conducted in Turkish and English, and concluded with a massed rifle volley that scatters the hundreds of starlings nesting in the top of the memorial, an instant constellation of tiny black stars.

THE REST OF Anzac Day is given over to aimless wandering around the battlefields. There’s a desultory museum of the campaign at Gaba Tepe, but there’s little in it that can’t be found with minimal effort in the trenches that still scar Gallipoli’s hills. The smallest amount of scratching in the dirt will disinter rusted splinters of tin can, congealed knots of melted shrapnel or a few of the countless millions of bullets that were expended. For decades, Turkish authorities tried to cultivate an atmosphere of serenity on the peninsula by planting pine forests, but they all burnt down a few years ago in a fire widely blamed on Kurdish terrorists. It’s better this way, though. It looks like a battlefield, bleak and barren and lonely.

I never really understood what Australians were doing here in 1915—how many of them had even heard of Turkey?—and I still don’t know what any of us are doing here now. Sometimes, as I wander through the overgrown trenches and across the immaculate graveyards, I think, on the whole, that our veneration of Gallipoli and the men who died here is a good thing, that the demonstrated sense of history and the concurrent lack of any kind of nationalistic bitterness is admirable. Then I notice that the Australia represented here today isn’t an Australia I recognise: there is barely a trace, among the pilgrims, of Asian, or Mediterranean, or Baltic, or Middle Eastern ancestry. And I wonder if there isn’t, somewhere at the depths of the Gallipoli myth—which inspires more and more people to come here every year—something unhealthy, reactionary and frightened.

Then I think that I’m trying too hard. Still, it’s my job. I guess more than anything it’s a nagging, subliminal sense of loss. Even if we don’t realise it or won’t admit to it, we come here in a quest for clues of what might have been, had a country only 14 years old, with a population of less than five million, not buried 8,702 remarkable young men here—to say nothing of the 52,000 more who perished on other World War I battlefields—along with everything they might have gone on to achieve, build, discover, create or solve.

On Baby 700, the forlorn hillock with a name like a bad mid-80s pop group, I stop by the grave of Captain Joseph Patrick Lalor, the officer who’d led his men as far as The Nek in those three unimaginable hours on April 25, 1915. Lalor didn’t survive the first Anzac Day. He was killed here during the frenetic fighting for this dismal little lump of land, which changed hands five times on that afternoon.

Lalor’s name was already famous when he arrived on Gallipoli. His grandfather, Peter Lalor, lost an arm leading the 1854 Eureka Stockade miners’ rebellion on the Ballarat goldfields, before going on to become a distinguished parliamentarian. Captain Lalor’s own CV was scarcely less picturesque. Before wading onto the beach at Anzac Cove that morning, clutching his cutlass and whiskey flask, Joseph Lalor had joined and deserted the British Navy, served with the French Foreign Legion and fought in a South American revolution. He was 30 years old.

Joseph Lalor might have become any combination of brilliant, inspirational, eccentric or dangerous. A man like that, you can imagine, might have ended up figuring, on the scale of great Australians, anywhere between Errol Flynn and Ned Kelly, and I’d like to have found out. So would we all.

 

 

 

I
DON’T GO TO festivals anymore. It would be neatly piquant to be able to report here that the unmitigated calamity that was Woodstock II was the last festival I attended, but it wasn’t; one or two further straws still needed to flutter down atop the hefty log dropped, that dreadful weekend in 1994, upon the camel of my enthusiasm for outdoor rock’n’roll. The precise moment at which I understood that my days as a festival-goer were over was, in fact, the opening night of the 1996 Reading Festival. I was, that evening, in a position which, I am certain, would have been envied by most of the tens of thousands in attendance: I was backstage, festooned with the wristbands, stickers and laminated access passes which can serve to make the better-connected festival attendee resemble a commanding officer in some hastily convened guerilla military. In my immediate vicinity were liberal quantities of drink, numerous people willing to buy me same and the aristocracy of contemporary rock’n’roll. On top of all that, I was being paid for my attendance, covering events for a national newspaper. I thought: this is pretty much the supreme realisation of all the wildest dreams I ever harboured as a teenager bent on becoming a rock journalist. And then I thought: if I push off now, I can be back at the hotel in time for
Frasier
.

At the time, I felt burdened by the commission of this monumental heresy, much as Spinoza and Julian the Apostate must have upon rejecting all that they had
grown up believing—though my recantation prompted neither formal process of excommunication nor Persian arrow in the gizzard. Eventually, however, the truth proved as liberating as the truth always does, and the truth is this: festivals suck. Like the religious faiths foresworn by the enlightened, festivals are organised dementias, collective determinations to ignore logic. The entire prospectus is a monstrous falsehood.

If you set out to design an environment hostile to the enjoyment of music, you could construct nothing more diabolical than a festival field: an acoustically moribund arena in which the minority actively interested in whichever hapless troupe are occupying the stage struggle to hear anything over the din of herds of idiots yammering into phones, yelling after their friends and blowing whistles (any adult who blows a whistle in public for purposes other than officiating in a sporting fixture is—and it behooves us to be very clear on this—an irredeemable simpleton who genuinely deserves to be kicked to death). And the idea—which lurks, still, in the advertising and marketing of all festivals—that these ghastly events are a manifestation of a counterculture is plain risible. Even the annoyingly mythologised free festivals of the 60s and 70s, held when rock’n’roll was comparatively innocent, and before Glastonbury grew as sponsor-spangled as a Formula One meeting, accomplished nothing beyond the only demonstrable good that festivals accomplish today: luring battalions of morons away from the cities for the weekend, thereby making the comforts of civilisation that much more agreeable for the rest of us.

The festival cult is not merely grotesque, but actually faintly unsavoury. Broadly speaking, two sorts of people attend rock festivals. The first sort is under the age of 24, and charged with the giddy exuberance of youth. Given the likelihood that they will, as I did, grow out of it, there is nothing wrong with their attendance at such things—indeed, any regular user of public transport will concur that there’s a reasonable argument for incarcerating them in such remote encampments on a full-time basis. The second sort is everybody else, who urgently need to take a fairly withering look at themselves. In disdaining, even just for the weekend, the everyday technological miracles of modern urban existence—indoor plumbing, paved thoroughfares—they also implicitly reject the moral advances that our urban centres have encouraged to flourish. For all the flowery feel-nice rhetoric that inevitably accompanies festivals, the reality is utterly reactionary. A rock festival is a total monoculture: beneath the stupid hats lurks less diversity of thought, culture and race than you’d find at a Ku Klux Klan picnic.