Australia and the Gallipoli Campaign
1916–2000
1 April 1916
The Victorian Department of Education’s magazine — The School Gazette — advised that the first anniversary of the landing of the Australian troops at Anzac on 25 April 1915 would be commemorated in all State schools in Victoria on 20 April. This date had been chosen because 25 April in 1916 fell on a Sunday during the Easter vacation.
13 April 1916
Department of Education’s magazine — The School Gazette — advised that a medallion commemorating the landing at Anzac on 25 April 1915 was available for school children to buy at a price of six pence. The medallion was of bronze. On one side was the head of the King, George V, surrounded by the inscription ‘For King and Country’. The other side featured the word ANZAC surrounded by a wreath below which were the words ‘Lest We Forget - 25 Ap. 15’.
25 April 1916
The following ‘In Memoriam’ notice appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. Thousands of similar notices were inserted in newspapers throughout Australia:
BUTTON — Killed in action, on April 25, at the Dardanelles, Lance-Corporal F. Button, 4th Battalion, beloved husband of Daisy Button, aged 33 years.
He felt it was his duty
To take a noble part.
There was no fear of danger
In his loyal and brave young heart.
In a soldier's grave he is sleeping,
Our loved one, the dearest and best.
In our hearts we will miss him for ever,
Though we know he is only at rest.
Inserted by his loving wife and two children, Daisy and Violet.
20 September 1916
A Dance and Card Party was held in the Town Hall, Paddington, Sydney, in aid of the fund for the widow and daughter of Captain A J Shout VC MC. Shout had died of wounds at Gallipoli on 11 August 1915 shortly after the action at Lone Pine for which he had been awarded the Victoria Cross.
15 February-1919
Between 15 February and 10 March 1919, Charles Bean revisited Gallipoli for research purposes. In 1948 Bean published an account of this visit entitled Gallipoli Mission.
25 April 1922
Mr and Mrs Norton Grimwade visited their son's grave on Gallipoli. Beside his grave they placed a stone and this message:
This stone was brought from the home of George R Grimwade, Melbourne, Australia, and placed here in ever loving remembrance by his parents, April 1922.
Private George Grimwade, 6th Field Ambulance, Australian Army Medical Corps, age 20, died at Gallipoli on 23 September 1915. His grave is in Shrapnel Valley Cemetery.
25 April 1931
Journalist J C Waters, accompanying an Australian pilgrimage to Gallipoli, described how one mother placed a wreath below her son's name on a memorial to the missing:
She knelt and prayed and sobbed.
25 April 1935
On the twentieth anniversary of the landing, Mr Tasman Millington, the Australian-born supervisor of the Imperial War Graves Commission cemeteries on Gallipoli, scattered on the beach at Anzac the ashes of the ribbons of wreaths burnt in Australia. He sent back to Australia earth from Lone Pine in the urn that had brought the ashes to Gallipoli.
20 August 1984
A new Gallipoli Gallery at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra was opened by the Governor-General, Sir Ninian Stephen, in the presence of 240 Gallipoli veterans.
25 April 1990
Fifty-nine Australian Gallipoli veterans return to Anzac Cove, Gallipoli, to mark the 75th anniversary of the landing of 1915.
9 December 1997
'Ted' Matthews died in Sydney, New South Wales. Ted Matthews was the last surviving Australian of the approximately 16,000 men of the Anzac Corps who landed on Gallipoli on 25 April 1915. In his eulogy for Ted Matthews at St Stephens Uniting Church, Macquarie Street, Sydney, the Governor-General, Sir William Deane, said:
Ted Matthews had been among the last of the Australians to go, leaving on the night of December 19, 1915. He was therefore at Gallipoli from the beginning until the very end, and his passing marks a final break in a living thread that united us Australians with the complete Anzac epic.
25 April 2000
Dedication of the new Anzac Commemorative Site at North Beach, Gallipoli, by the Australian Prime Minister, the Hon John Howard MP and the New Zealand Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Helen Clark MP.