Visit Gallipoli

In the early 1920s North Beach rang again to the sound of work parties. Monumental stone from a Turkish quarry was off-loaded at a pier under the lee of the wreck of the Milo. From there it was lifted by aerial ropeway up past the Sphinx to the heights near Baby 700 and south down the ridge to the site of the great Australian monument on Gallipoli–Lone Pine. From North Beach stone also went out to build the cemeteries of Anzac, from Hill 60 in the north to Shell Green Cemetery in the south, 21 cemeteries and three memorials in all. The work was overseen by the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission’s Director of Works on Gallipoli, Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Hughes, a Tasmanian who had served on Gallipoli.

Before Hughes commenced this work of remembrance, he was visited between 15 February and 10 March 1919 by the Australian Historical Mission led by Charles Bean. The mission had come to solve, if it could, some of what Bean called ‘the riddles of Anzac’. It came also to collect material for Bean’s proposed war museum in Australia, a museum that was eventually to develop into the Australian War Memorial. George Lambert, the painter, accompanied the mission and Bean set him to the task of making sketches for what would become two of Australia’s best known war paintings–Anzac, the landing 1915 and The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, August 1915.

On the morning of 16 February 1919, Bean and other mission members set out for the site of the landing of the 11th Battalion on North Beach. Their guide was Lieutenant Hedley Howe, ex-11th Battalion, who took them to where he and his mates had come ashore and then struggled their way under fire up towards Plugge’s Plateau, with the Sphinx clearly visible on their left. From this spot, the mission photographer, Captain Hubert Wilkins, took a shot looking north towards the old steamer Milo and taking in the full sweep of the natural amphitheatre of cliffs at the Sphinx. Using this photograph, later reproduced in The Story of Anzac, Bean told visually the story of North Beach on 25 April 1915. Marked on the photograph, for those readers who would never see Gallipoli, were some of the significant sites of North Beach on that day–the landing place of the 11th Battalion; where Colonel Clarke of the 12th Battalion had come ashore; the cliff Clarke had climbed from the beach beside the Sphinx; No 1 Outpost; and Fisherman’s Hut from where enemy fire had killed so many Australians of the 7th Battalion. Today, near the spot where Clarke and men of the 12th Battalion came ashore, is the Anzac Commemorative Site designed for ceremonial events at Gallipoli.

Over the next weeks, Bean visited all the battlegrounds of Anzac. At Hill 60, he sketched the scene looking towards the gap in the scrub-hedge from which so many men of the 18th Battalion had gone to their deaths on 22 August 1915. Their unburied remains were still strewn ‘fairly thick in the stubblefield they had to cross’. Doubtless, those of Lieutenant Wilfred Addison, 18th Battalion, lay among them. Here, today, is the Hill 60 Cemetery and a memorial to the missing for 183 men of the New Zealand Mounted Rifles who fought and died in this area and have no known grave. Burials at Hill 60 number 754, of whom 699 are completely unidentified. Special memorials record the names of eleven Australians, one New Zealander and one British soldier believed to be buried among the unidentified graves. One of these eleven Australians is Lieutenant Colonel Carew Reynell who died at Hill 60 on the night of 28 August 1915 while leading his men of the 9th Australian Light Horse. Part of the cemetery register entry for Colonel Reynell shows the impact of this one death on Gallipoli on an Australian family –‘Husband of May Reynell, of Reynella, South Australia’.