Gallipoli

It’s an odd thing to look up Gallipoli on the internet. No one ever forgets this extraordinary visualisation of the journey and the pity of war which deepened a nation’s sense of how an Empire could use its youth as fodder for the machines of death and the conveniences of military strategy. Yet if you look for it amidst the plethora of Mel Gibson films thinking it will be there with the Mad Maxes and Hamlets and what have yous, you will find yourself disappointed and sigh with relief to find that at least it’s on YouTube. But it’s a bit odd to find the film—which reflects the haunting of the national identity with the needless slaughter of Gallipoli—in the category of art films, however admirable. And because of this the view has sprung up that Gallipoli is in an essential way not just mythopeic but fundamentally mendacious. It’s a significant distinction.

Last Anzac Day Geoffrey Blainey wrote that, “Peter Weir’s fascinating movie Gallipoli was popular here in the 1980s partly because of its anti-British sentiments”.

He says too, “In all, 8100 Australians died and more were seriously wounded. The British and the French armies lost even more”. He adds, “It is fair to suggest that Gallipoli was not unique in its mishaps. Most wars, and most military campaigns, are marred by a blend of blunders and over-optimistic predictions. British politicians made their share of mistakes before the landings at Gallipoli began.”

Blainey adds that, “Mistakenly when young, I thought that Gallipoli was a defeat for Australia” where now he sees it as “a drawn match”.

Les Carlyon in his Gallipoli chronicle said the film falsely indicted the English and says, “The scale of the tragedy of the Nek was mostly the work of two Australian incompetents”.

At the same time he concedes the British lack of regard for Australian military discipline which was also canvassed long ago by the first and definitive historian of the First World War, C.E.W. Bean.

It’s always worth recalling that not only did Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation have a significant investment in the film but that Rupert’s father Keith (later, Sir Keith) Murdoch covered the First World War. He went to Gallipoli in 1915 and as a consequence became a dire critic of the role the British military leaders played in the needless—whatever that means—slaughter of the Australians.

There is also from the sober C.E.W. Bean the suggestive detail during the God-forsaken Battle of the Nek and role of a fleet-footed messenger, William Harper who “was last seen running forward like a schoolboy in a foot race with all the speed he could conjure”. Talk about an historian’s nudge in the direction of a final shot.

It should be clear that this is enough history to be going on with. The complexity or detail of the incompetence or the callousness of the military decisions that were made to the detriment of the Australians does not discredit the horror of how they died nor the name for which they died. Australia back home was a country with complex and contrary attitudes, as Daniel Mannix’s campaign against conscription on behalf of Irish Australians attests, and what we want in a film including history is for there to be a viable enough quantum of truth for the deeper truth of art to be imaginable. This is, after all, how Shakespeare proceeded. Richard III may have been a prig not a child murderer, Hotspur a boy when he is depicted leading a rebellion that might topple a king, but we still feel that this in the optimal and viable sense was what the past was like. It’s related to what the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga of The Waning of Middle Ages meant when he said that Shakespeare in Richard II had miraculously captured what the Middle Ages were like.

So the mythology that underlies the fiction of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (which is one of the great signposts in Mel Gibson’s starry career) is enough to be getting on with.

We begin with Mark Lee as the young blond boy who can run like a leopard. He is goaded into running barefoot by a young lout who ends up agreeing to race him on horseback, bareback. The upshot is that the blonde boy’s feet are terribly gashed and bloodied. His old uncle Bill Kerr comforts and chides him and then in a surprising but deeply appropriate sequence the old man reads to him the passage from Kipling’s The Jungle Book in which Mowgli cries his heart out but is told by his comforter and his elder that these are good tears, they are true tears and will purge his soul.

It is a characteristic and deeply appropriate moment because it indicates the depth of the culture of the Empire these boys inhabit. It fits them like a glove, they’re the boys of the great dominion Australia. They’re naturally fit and they run for the fun of it and the glory.

That’s one reason why the Mel Gibson character can decry the war as England’s war, not Australia’s, because his background is Irish and still feels the allure of a world of physical and psychological excitement in the thrill of war, the sheer adventure of a do and die world. So Lee and Gibson end up together in Perth joining the Western Australian Lighthorse. Mel Gibson can’t really ride a horse but he bluffs his way in.

Peter Weir’s film works with a rich—deeply affectionate—evocation of the mateship between the young men which is at once laconic and effortless. They repeat stock phrases to each other: “I’ll see you,” “Not if I see you first.” They laugh with pleasure at the idea of being in each other’s company with the rollicking innocent laughter of boys and this works with a zigzagging poignancy because we know they are not as a duo long for this world.

So this sunlit evocation of young manhood is all the more moving because we know it’s an anthem for doomed youth that the sheer innocence of the friendship will test most mortally.

The circumambient depiction of war—and the pastimes that are a distraction from war—are so flawlessly depicted, with such sunlit relish. There is the cavorting in Egypt, the rip offs with tradesmen, the combination of brashness and decency and defiance. Is there any fresher Australian depiction of soldiers at war and at play than Gallipoli?

There are superb depictions of older officers and it makes effortless dramatic sense that Bill Hunter—as an old commander of troops—should listen to Albinoni’s ‘Adagio in G minor’ and that he should also play on his wind up gramophone the great baritone/tenor duet from The Pearl Fishers which is one of the great buddy duets in the operatic repertoire.

That’s why Mel Gibson is half-right when he says Gallipoli is “not really a war movie. It’s really the story of two young men”. Peter Weir already had the angel faced Aussie boy in Mark Lee—whose career never escaped his physical beauty, he played the young Bosie in Cobra to the aged Robert Helpmann and did that other gay role in the film of Frank Moorhouse’s The Everlasting Secret Family but the gay role captured him whereas it’s a tinkling irrelevancy in Gallipoli.

Mel Gibson as the guy who is initially reluctant to enlist gives a beautifully shaded performance, sharp and easygoing at the same time. He must have been all of 23 at the time but it is an exhibition of natural acting which means the audience cannot take their eyes off him.

What, if anything, does he represent? A kind of why not, you’ve got to be in it to win it insouciance, a gambler's luck, a natural born gambler’s nonchalance in the face of loss. He too becomes a runner bringing tidings which are horrific to these young men who have come to fight and who turn out to have come to be slaughtered as a diversionary measure in the overall horror of Gallipoli. Gibson’s is a masterful, very mature performance but with no hint of exaggeration. It makes us recall the legendary Mel Gibson performances of long ago: the Waiting for Godot with Geoffrey Rush, the Biff in Death of a Salesman with Warren Mitchell, the NIDA performance of Romeo and Juliet with Judy Davis.

It’s no mean feat for an actor to project a cool masculinity in a film like this where young men die like cattle. You can if you like say that in Gallipoli Gibson represents the mordant voice of a mature Australia—and Peter Weir said something like this at the time—but it’s not how the character is projected (or not simply).

In practice we see him running across the field of battle conveying the cold High Command edicts to his commanding officer Bill Hunter and at one point telling him with great passion to ignore the cold brutality of the orders.

It’s worth remembering the nature of elegy when it comes to the kind of sacred site we have made of the Gallipoli massacre. The focus on snow haired boys and their last bequests is poignant and it is also in a long tradition. Remember the Three Hundred who died at Thermopylae? Simonides wrote the words that will be forever remembered:

Go tell the Spartans

You who here pass by

That obedient to their word we lie.

You don’t have to have the patriotic theory of bloodletting to see that it is the last stand that has a massive poignancy.

Ken Inglis wrote a study of the war memorials that we built after the First World War and the way these myriad shrines of remembrance were designed to establish a quasi-religious reverence which was beyond all sectarianism (of whatever Protestant or Catholic kind). And as a film Gallipoli is true to that vision.

It is an impassioned ode to mateship, at once intense and laughingly, passionately affectionate. “I’ll see ya,” Mark Lee says. “Not if I see you first,” Mel Gibson replies.

The voices of the High Command are brutal and the opposite of humane but they are not actually English voices (whether they’re meant to be or not) but educated Australian ones, the imperious voices of imperial dogmatism to which the Australians were all but inevitable victims. They are, if you like, the voices of a Dominion culture that is subservient to the vision of a Home culture, a culture of Empire, from which it draws its sense of destiny in the hopeful sense and (when it all comes down to it) it’s sense of a predestined fall.

The notion that Gallipoli the film is anti-English is as half-cocked as the proposition that the values reflected in the film are British to their bootstraps. Both propositions are equally true. How could they not be?

The kind of tug of war which the film plays with these complex cross-indicated feelings is both masterful in the starkness of its simplicity and difficult to adjudicate because the factors are so mixed. The fact that more troops died from other nations does not lessen the gravity of the Australian loss.

The sombreness of the Albinoni Adagio underlines the depth of sadness this film contains and is congruent with Mowgli’s tears and the intensity of comradeship in Bizet’s song from The Pearl Fishers.

We know too, beyond the confines of this lyrical and boyish adventure, it must terminate with the after-effects of World War I, the most terrible of fighting wars. Hemingway said that The Middle Parts of Fortune by the Australian Frederick Manning—it is also called Her Privates We, preserving the pudendal pun from Hamlet—was the greatest novel of the Great War.

Peter Weir’s Gallipoli with its utterly idiomatic and economical script by David Williamson tallies with this. What begins as a bit of a lark ends in the savagery of death even as the boy who can run like a leopard is caught in the final frame.

And we know just outside of the circle of death towards which all things have been circling that the war left haunted and depleted soldiers when they survived and that it also created a generation of women who never married because their destined menfolk lay buried on a distant shore.

All of this allows us to see Gallipoli as the enactment of a mythology with an abyss of truth, all detail aside. There is also something at once attractive and poignant about Philip Adams’s suggestion that Gallipoli gave dramatic form to the intimate friendship of Peter Weir and David Williamson.

Weir was in 1981 strongly associated with the frilly dressed schoolgirls lost in a realm beyond time because of Picnic at Hanging Rock with Helen Morse and Rachel Roberts. It was an evocation of a world at once spectral and feminine.

Gallipoli is a boy’s own world writ tragic. It makes perfect sense that the kids go to the killing field in an act of homage to an inviolate sense of loss which is also like the Dawn Service and the Last Post an act of remembrance:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

An imperial act of lamentation which time has rendered—how could it not?—deeply Australian.

None of which is separate from the beauty of Russell Boyd’s camera work which traces the continuity between the boys horsing around and the ancient face of the pyramids.

Someone actually says the face of the Sphinx is the face of the attempt to escape the Shadow of Death. The great John Seale does the rest of the camerawork.

But let’s not be too precious about this: here is Boris Johnson, from The Churchill Factor.

Churchill not only sent thousands to die at Gallipoli (‘your father killed mine at the Dardanelles’, as one Eton boy said to his son Randolph when he arrived at the school).

The whole operation was finally wound up in 1916, by which time there had been about 180,000 Allied casualties, most of whom died of disease on the beaches and the promontories of the Gallipoli peninsula, without getting anywhere near Constantinople.

Not an Australian emphasis but a frank admission from a great admirer of Churchill that Gallipoli was a terrible balls up.

Main picture: Publicity still via moviestillsdb.com

The commentary by literary critic Peter Craven was commissioned especially for The Genius of Australia project and published in 2025.

For commentaries on other works in the IPA’s Canon, go to the Index at The Genius of Australia.