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
- Conclusion: journey's end
- Epilogue: The ghost of memory
- Notes
- Survey Informants
- Index
Introduction: journeys into history
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
- Conclusion: journey's end
- Epilogue: The ghost of memory
- Notes
- Survey Informants
- Index
Summary
On the eightieth anniversary of the Anzac landing, Jenny made her way to Gallipoli. It was the first of two such ‘pilgrimages’, journeys that would take her from ‘the awfulness and beauty’ of tiny graveyards in the gullies of the Gallipoli Peninsula to the ‘huge cemeteries’ that sprawl across Flanders. Prior to leaving Australia, Jenny had often attended Anzac Day services. They were ‘small suburban events’ and try as she might she ‘did not find them very inspiring’. But Anzac Day at Anzac Cove was another matter entirely:
We arrived about 4 am in the dark and the lapping of the waves sent shivers up one's spine. The crowd was noisy until the ceremony commenced [then we were all swallowed up by the silence]. I cried when the last post sounded, as did several of my … friends. To be at Anzac Cove at dawn on the 25th of April is one of the most moving experiences … We … stood there looking out to sea and you could almost hear the sound of battle.
Well into her sixties, Jenny had read and travelled widely but ‘nothing prepared [her] for the sheer awfulness of the landscape’. Nor was she prepared for ‘the terrible sacrifice’ entombed in Gallipoli's cemeteries: ‘to walk along and read the names and inscriptions and ages of the soldier makes one feel so sad’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Return to GallipoliWalking the Battlefields of the Great War, pp. xviii - xxivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006