The graves of Gallipoli, exquisitely maintained, where Anzac folk can walk amid thousands of names as familiar as those along Collins or Pitt Streets, do call for visitors.
[Charles Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Sydney, 1990, p 346]
Welcome to an Anzac Walk. It is designed for the Australian visitor who has little time but can devote one day to explore the main area the ‘Anzacs’, Australian and New Zealand soldiers and others, held on Gallipoli from 25 April to 20 December 1915. It was known as ‘Anzac’, or eventually ‘old Anzac’ once more territory to the north had been captured from the Turks after the so-called ‘August Offensive’ of 6–10 August 1915. ‘Old Anzac’ embraced a strip of scrub-covered treeless land deeply indented by steep valleys and eroded gullies about two kilometres long and under a kilometre deep at its widest point.
For the walk you will be provided with the following material to help you appreciate something of the experience of Australian soldiers here in 1915:
Please be aware that the Anzac Walk is not an extensive guide to everything that happened at Anzac. Nor has it been devised to supplant detailed guidebooks which visitors are urged to consult. Two that we can recommend are:
Click here to go to the bibliography section and a review of these two books
This walk is a brief ‘in situ’ introduction to a huge and fascinating subject for Australians. Of necessity, it has little to say about the thousands of others who fought at Anzac – New Zealanders, British, Nepalese, Indians – but it acknowledges their presence. It would like to have said a lot more, if time and space were available, about the most significant ‘others’ that the Australians met at Anzac – their Turkish enemies. It is hoped that other walks of this kind will be developed in the future to more fully embrace the many human stories of this beautiful but tragic landscape.