PANEL 6
LONE PINE AND THE NEK
Peter Weir's film Gallipoli, which was first shown in 1982, is undoubtedly the best known portrayal of the Australian Gallipoli experience for a modern audience. Its finale – the charge of the Australian light horsemen on 7 August 1915 – has become THE image associated with the seemingly wasteful slaughter on Anzac.
Years earlier, Charles Bean had realised, long before the era of the modern feature film, that this charge was one of the defining moments of Australian courage – the willingness of the men to go forward into what was almost certain death. In 1919, he instructed George Lambert to create a large war painting of this incident for hanging in what Bean saw as Australia’s new war museum. This museum eventually became the Australian War Memorial and Lambert's ‘The Charge of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade at the Nek, 7 August 1915’ is among the Memorial’s most treasured items. Once again, part of the agenda for this panel was that there should be somewhere on Gallipoli where these images were available to the public in the surroundings where the charge took place.
The Nek lies on Russell’s Top not far from where Walker’s Ridge runs out on to the top of the Sari Bair range above North Beach. Bean and Lambert walked all around the area while Lambert did sketches for his painting. In Gallipoli Mission Bean described Lambert’s work on the painting:
‘Descriptions are all too true,’ wrote
Lambert to his wife. ‘Evidence grins coldly at us non-combatants …
from the point of view of the artist-historian the Nek is a wonderful setting
to the tragedy’. The grim, rather beautiful landscape of distant
ridge-tops surrounding this upland would be his background, his foreground the
patch of level scrub with the line of charging men shown at the moment when, a
few yards out from their trench, the full force of the Turk’s rifle-fire
struck them. As he says, he regarded himself in these works as the
artist-historian, and he purposed in this picture to show the reaction of
different types of Australian to this shocking experience. There was to be the
larrikin; and the gently-bred type; the fair-haired Scandinavian Anzac; the
lean countryman, and so on. You see them all in the picture which he painted
some years afterwards in Australia from the landscape studies begun that
morning on Plugge’s Plateau and The Nek.
[Charles Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Canberra, 1948, p109]