Remembering the Gallipoli Campaign on its 110th Anniversary
Yesterday marked the 110th anniversary of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ (ANZAC) landing at Gallipoli, Turkey. To commemorate the occasion, three generations of my family - my father, my son, and myself - made a pilgrimage to Mortlake, in Victoria.
Mortlake is where my great-grandfather and his two brothers were living and working when they answered the call to serve in the First World War. Their stories embody the sacrifice and courage that we honor on ANZAC Day.
Two of the brothers fought at Gallipoli. One was being transported on the troop ship HMT Southland (pictured above) which was torpedoed traveling from Egypt to Gallipoli. When the vessel began taking on water, he was among 40 who remained on board as it was sinking to hold the ship together while everyone else evacuated. These actions helped keep the ship afloat for a whole day after the attack. He later died in France at the battle of the Somme in 1916.
The other brother was a soldier who landed on the Gallipoli Penninsula in February 1915, alongside New Zealand and British soldiers. Uninjured, after a month he was evacuated from Turkey before too being rotated out to France.
My great-grandfather, the third brother, spent three grueling years fighting on the Western Front in France. Wounded twice during his service, he was hospitalised each time before being sent back to the front lines, a harrowing experiance. He demobbed in Wales, where he met and married my great grandmother.
As we arrived in Mortlake for the ANZAC Day commemoration, it felt like the whole town was gathered at the old Post Office.
A Highland marching band (pictured above) led the procession of former soldiers, highschool kids and ordinary locals, proudly carrying the Australian flag and the Mortlake Returned Service Leave Sub-Division Club flag down the main street.
As we walked the same path my great grandfather and his brothers would have taken before departing for Melbourne, and eventually the battlefields of Turkey and Europe, people joined the procession as we passed them.
We went past one store that had unexpectedly raised a Union Jack. The march concluded at the town war memorial, a cenotaph, where the names of local soldiers who never returned home are remembered (pictured below). Among them are two members of my family, the brother who fell in France in 1916 and a cousin of the same generation who also never made it back.
After the march, we joined the ANZAC Day service along with many others (pictured below). Together, we listened to speeches recounting the horrors of war, did our best to recite the hymns, and observed a moment of silence to remember those who did not return. Then we went and ate a Clarke's pie - something less sobering Mortlake is well known for.
This ANZAC Day reminded me that history lives on in our local communities, our families, and in the stories we pass down. In visiting Mortlake, we reconnected with our family story.
Lest We Forget.