Aussie rules | 30 April 2015

Some years ago I paid a visit to the site of the Gallipoli landings because I was mildly obsessed with the Peter Weir movie and wanted to gauge for myself how horrible it must have been. En route I met up with a young Australian who was training to be an actor (in my false memory it was the unknown Russell Crowe) and together we clambered up the near-cliff-like slopes in the blazing sun, imagining the Turks sniping and rolling grenades at us from the trenches on top. That anyone could have survived at all, we agreed, was a miracle.

What I didn’t appreciate at the time was that the version of Gallipoli I had in my head — heroic young Aussies dying like flies while the incompetent British commanders drank tea on the beach — was largely the invention of one man, an Australian reporter called Keith Murdoch. He didn’t exactly lie about what happened.