THE State Library’s iconic black-and-white photo of the district’s first World War 1 enlisted men posing on Tathra Wharf is an entry point to a new exhibition on Gallipoli’s soldiers.
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Visitors to the National Archives of Australia's new exhibition Life Interrupted: Gallipoli Moments must pass by a vastly enlarged version of this picture.
Sensitive visitors will find themselves peering into the faces of these chaps and wondering what became of them.
Handwritten diaries and letters from the State Library have been paired with service records and a range of unique photographs from the National Archives of Australia to further reveal the human beings behind the official war histories and to try to immerse visitors in their everyday experiences of Gallipoli.
“It was a magnificent spectacle to see those thousands of men rushing through the hail of Death as though it was some big game – these chaps don’t seem to know what fear means – in Cairo I was ashamed of them, now I am proud to be one of them though I feel a pigmy beside them.”
- Ellis Silas, April 25, 1915
Curator Anne-Marie Conde explained, with men on a Tathra wharf and on Gallipoli eerily looking out from photographs, that she hoped visitors to the exhibition will "get some sense of the personal experience of those who were there".
"There's deliberately no grand narrative,” she said.
“It's all about the guys there on the ground, wondering what the hell is going on.
“I hope visitors get a sense of life actually on the ground on Gallipoli, of the men [feeling bewildered], of the mixture of excitement, boredom and bad food and terrible disease but occasionally of the birds singing and the sun shining.
"The display concentrates on those sorts of ordinary things so that visitors are given a sense of involvement, instead of having to pay attention to the patriotic words of the politicians of the day.
“I hope people get some sense of what people there really went through, some access to that reality that most of us find difficult to imagine.
“I'm hoping people will try and get into the thick of that experience rather than the wrap-themselves-in-the-flag style of activity that tends to go on [in some commemorations of Gallipoli].”
"The little hill above Taylor’s Gap was strewn with dead and badly wounded whose cries for ‘water water’ were pitiful. We had received orders before the assault that men wounded in the abdomen were not to be given water as it would do them more harm than good."
- Thomas Ray Crooks, August 6, 1915)
Life Interrupted: Gallipoli Moments is a partnership exhibition based on a concept developed by the State Library of NSW and enhanced with items from the National Archives of Australia.
It opened on Friday, July 31, at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra and runs until November 15.
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