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. But he did embroider it with a bit of Pom-bashing spin, which is why, even to this day, we think of it as an Anzac affair, rather than as one in which the vast bulk of the fighting and dying was done by the British and the French (and Turks).
Murdoch invented Gallipoli. And in return, Gallipoli created Murdoch. Up until then the ambitious Keith had been rather unlucky in his career. In the 1900s, he’d scraped together enough money to buy his passage to England, only to be undone by his stammer, which cost him his job on the Pall Mall Gazette. Returning to Australia, with his tail between his legs, he hoped to be chosen as a correspondent in the war that had just broken out. But he lost out on the ballot by a single vote, and was given the lesser role of working for a cable news service based in London.
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