The place was rotten with dead...
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began—the jolly old rain!
– Siegfried Sassoon
Nearly 50 years ago, Alan Seymour submitted a play called The One Day of the Year to a drama competition. It was ostensibly a vigorous attack on the Anzac Day tradition in Australia—the reunions of old soldiers, many of whom would get very drunk, and whose behaviour seemed to demean and obscure the seriousness of the occasion and blur the truth of its history.
The play predictably provoked outrage and fury. It opened at the Adelaide Festival in 1960 under police protection, but was then banned. Its Sydney run closed because of a bomb threat, and it remained intermittently controversial for a decade.
A couple of years after the play's stormy debut—a play which, like most of my student peers, I found persuasive and an overdue critique of weary, received wisdoms—I had an opportunity to visit Gallipoli. At that time, such excursions were very difficult to accomplish. For one thing, in 1961, Gallipoli and its environs remained a military area and getting in there was like trying to enter the Eastern Bloc.
Interrogated under a bare light bulb by a chain-smoking, much bemedalled officer, whom my two mates and I privately christened "the Colonel", we eventually gained permission to enter the controlled area.
The next morning, in a bleak whippy wind beneath a thick gunmetal sky, we followed the Colonel in our stereotypically battered Kombi Van and parked near the beach at Anzac Cove.
Out in the bay, jagged shards and rusting, irregular crenellations of metal stuck out of the flat water, where some vessel had ended its active service. And, in the sand of the beach where we walked, metal everywhere: .303 shells; an Australian water bottle with a bullet hole right through it; metal in every random handful of sand—lumps and jags and slivers, legacies of the hard rain that had begun to fall across the peninsula on 25 April 46 years before, and left it nine months later lashed, shredded, shrapnelled, broken and silent. As we stood there, overwhelmed, the rhythmic lap lap of the quiet water did not break this silence, it simply became a part of it.
Looking at the steep rise of the embankment behind the beach, I decided to see what it felt like to run up it