Boneyard
Niagara Galleries Melbourne
5th to 3rd April

It was Chris Pugsley who first got me thinking about Gallipoli after he gave me a copy of his book The Anzacs at Gallipoli. Reading this, along with his personal accounts of how the place had profoundly affected him stirred my interest in going there, along with exploring the notion of remembrance. In particular, how we remember and how the land remembers.

Euan Macleod, February 2016

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CONFRONTATIONAL LANDSCAPE

I have been to Gallipoli many times.I went there first in December 1980, it was winter and at the time the Gallipoli Peninsula was still under Turkish military control. Apart from the gardeners working for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, I was the only visitor in the five days I was there. I still remember the shock of my first encounter with the landscape. It was evening and I Had difficulty reading the map and asked the taxi driver to stop when I saw a cemetery near the beach. I walked into the cemetery and almost the first headstone that registered was that of Private John Simpson Kirkpatrick, the 22-year old stretcher bearer in the 3rd Australian Field Ambulance who is today a figure of legend, known as Simpson, the man and his donkey, killed on 19 May 1915. Suddenly where I was overwhelmed me, and as a 33-year old professional army officer, I burst into tears while the taxi driver behind me watched in bemusement.

Those five days changed the course of my life. I was conscious of walking in a landscape where evidence of war was everywhere to be seen: from the trenches, to the carpet of bones that lay all about. There was a story here that I did not know, that demanded more than rituals of Anzac Day commemoration. I feel it still, every time I return.

These are the themes that Euan Macleod battles with in his paintings. I still believe that when I am searching for a particular piece of ground or trench on Gallipoli that the ‘boys’ will tap me on the shoulder when I am in the right spot. There is always a sense of unseen company when I visit the cemeteries and walk the ground. The bones are less obvious than they once were, but skull fragments, a thigh bone or splinters of rib bone still have the power to shock. It reminds one that for all of the memorialisation and the transformation of the battlefield into a national park that is visited by hundreds of thousands each year, men fought and died here in trenches often only a few metres apart.

The images of Anzac Cove: The Sphinx, The Nek and the road along Second Ridge marking the Anzac front line are so familiar, yet still so strange. It is such a tiny piece of ground, yet the gullies and ridges, covered with thick native thorny oak, make a 100 metre walk an exhausting exercise, where one loses all sense of direction. Macleod’s paintings ask the same questions that each visitor to Gallipoli is confronted with: who are these men who fought here? How did they endure? Why were they here? Could I do this? And what do I tell my children and family about what I have seen? Macleod’s Gallipoli landscapes demand answers; they gnaw at you long after leaving the gallery. Gallipoli does that too.

Christopher Pugsley

Lieutenant Colonel (Retd) Christopher Pugsley, ONZM, DPhil, FRHistS is a New Zealand military historian. He is author of some 19 books including Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story, and The Anzac Experience: New Zealand, Australia and Empire in the First World War.