I've finished travelling around the country for work, at least for now, so it's good to be back home and rant a little. One thing which almost got by me was Paul Keating's comments regarding Gallipoli, which led to an outpouring of criticism of our beloved ex-PM (although I'll admit that I didn't truly belove him until he was an "ex"...). One of his most vociferous critics was not yet ex-PM Kevin Rudd, who also admitted that he didn't know exactly what Keating had said, but nevertheless disagreed with the gist of what he meant, no doubt.
While I understand what Keating was getting at - which I think was basically a rejection of the idea that Australia needed something like a Gallipoli to find its own identity - I still think visiting Gallipoli can be a profoundly moving experience.
Not to mention cheap.
I was fortunate enough to hit Gallipoli on Anzac Day in 2002, and waiting with thousands of Aussies and Kiwis in the cold pre-dawn during April on a Turkish beach, with the cliffs rising above
and behind us, really drove home how forbidding and scary the whole situation must have been for our boys. And that was without being shot at which, I imagine, could only worsen the situation.Yes, it's true that Winston Churchill, responsible for the Gallipoli plan, bollocksed it up and wasted many Australian lives in a conflict that had more to with Imperial ambitions than defence of Australian (or even British) lives, but that doesn't mean that visiting Gallipoli is a wasted exercise. Should we only visit war sites where the Australians won? Or perhaps sites where we achieved something like peace?
BORING!
Gallipoli is an excellent movie with a pre-anti-semitic Mel Gibson, and we should be proud of our links to it.
Plus, Turkey is a really cheap country to visit.
PS The title of this post is an homage to Moe Szyslak's famous line from "Krusty Gets Kancelled", as if you didn't already know.
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