I was up at the Nek the other day—no, really, I was. I’m on Gallipoli with a film crew, working on a documentary about the campaign. And of course we did a scene at the Nek in which I paced out the 15 yards that the light horsemen got before they fell to Turkish machine-gun bullets. Gallipoli in December is no picnic. But the crew—actually just Paul and Jaems, who combine a passionate mastery of the arts of sound and film recording with being funny and reflective blokes—beat the cold and the wind with non-stop repartee, an easy professionalism and a willingness to just keep batting on.
So we were up at the Nek and it rained as well as being windy and cold. But suddenly we stopped larking about and became very solemn, as if we recognised without having it pointed out that this was a place where the ground beneath us was as full of Australian bones as a fruitcake is of dried fruit. We’d seen a few cemeteries and battlefields by then, but the Nek was still something special.
John Hamilton’s similar feeling for the charge at the Nek can’t be faulted. Like all of us who know even a little about the charge—whether by having caught Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli on TV again, or having visited the little cemetery on Gallipoli itself—the event demands a passionate response. Who can think of the brave, hopeless, useless attack and not feel outraged, mournful or just pissed off that something like this should have happened?
Hamilton, a Walkley Award-winning journalist, encountered the story on a visit to Gallipoli and resolved to write a book about it. The result, its title taken from the last words of one of the 234 Australians killed in the charge, is a whopping 365 pages. It must be the longest book devoted to one of the shortest events in Australian history.
Hamilton’s task has been made much easier by the existence of books by his predecessors, notably my colleague at the Australian War Memorial, Peter Burness, whose 1996 book The Charge at the Nek also tells you about this event but at a third of the length. Hamilton acknowledges that he has used Burness’s citations to find more, but what he says doesn’t substantially add to our understanding of what went wrong at the Nek. Indeed, he has often lazily quoted great chunks of other writers’