Researchers to prick Aussies' Gallipoli time bubble

In the lead up to Anzac Day a research team wants the nation to reconsider its fixation on the 1915 Gallipoli campaign by raising awareness about the long and complex history of conflict and settlement on the Gallipoli peninsula.

The Australian researchers are pulling together the first exhaustive history of the Gallipoli region from the Bronze Age through to the 21st century commemorative industry.

“For many people, Gallipoli exists in a kind of time bubble that popped into being in 1915, a chamber of national memories which we open up once a year on Anzac Day,” argues historian Dr Peter Londey from the School of Humanities at ANU. “We want to show that rather than being a ‘silent wilderness’ on which a brief WWI campaign was fought, the peninsula has been a site of numerous settlements, population movements and wars for thousands of years.”

Dr Londey will outline the research project at the Second International Gallipoli Symposium, to be held at the Centre for Arab & Islamic Studies at ANU 15-16 April 2009.

The research team will dig deep into the Bronze Age, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman and contemporary periods, looking at the history of human settlement, the military history of the region, and the layering of memories as the many visitors to the peninsula have reacted to the landscape and its stories.

“In ancient Greek times, for example, there were several expeditions from Athens and Sparta to help defend the Greek settlements on the Gallipoli peninsula from Thracian incursions,” Dr Londey said. “The Greeks even built a major defensive wall across the top of the peninsula – the remains of which we’ll be looking for.”

Dr Londey said that similar movements and conflicts took place under the Persians, the Romans, during the crusades, under the Ottomans and into the modern period. “The Gallipoli peninsula and the Dardanelles are a natural crossroad from Asia Minor to Europe, but the area also been a desirable site for settlement because of its suitability for agriculture.”

The researcher said that even though Australian perceptions of Gallipoli tended to focus on World War I, officers and official historians during the Great War were much more aware about the Classical connections to the terrain. “British officers knew they were stationed very near to Troy,” Dr Londey says. “Closer to home, the Australian war historian Charles Bean wrote about finding shards of ancient pottery or coins in the trenches.

“Rather than taking anything away from the place that WWI-era Gallipoli holds, we hope that Australians who travel there in the future will gain a better appreciation of the long history that lies behind the Gallipoli they know.”

The core project team includes Dr Peter Londey, Professor Joan Beaumont, Dr Elizabeth Minchin and Dr Mehdi Ilhan from ANU, Associate Professor Chris Mackie from the University of Melbourne and Dr Tamara Lewit from Trinity College, University of Melbourne.