ANZAC Day: A Commemoration, not a Circus

Click here for the full Flickr set of photos associated with this story- my Gallipoli photos.

Seeing our TV Screens full of Australasian backpackers flooding onto the Gallipoli peninsula is an ineluctable and annual staple. “Good on them”, we think. The commemoration of that singular event in our history which gave birth to our national identity is carried to a new generation by young people picking up the mantle saying “Lest we forget”. If we look a little closer, we note that those making the pilgrimage to the sacred site don’t always pick up their rubbish, some look a little worse for wear, and sometimes the gravity of the occasion has been lost a little. Most have made an overnight coach trip from Istanbul, which is nearly 300km away, stay to see a compressed guided tour of the ANZAC precinct, and head back the same day. Those seeking the historical flavour might sit through The Gallipoli movie with their package tour group the night before the trip. Few, if any, actually make it to the town called Gallipoli (Gelibolu, to the locals), which is some distance from ANZAC Cove.

Every year I see those pilgrims, I’m filled with pride that so many people continue to be motivated to travel to what’s still quite a remote spot to stand with other Aussies and Kiwis and blow on the coals of remembrance.
I’m also filled with a lot of sadness, because they’re robbing themselves of the best ANZAC experience. Let me share my Gallipoli story…

I was fortunate enough to travel to Turkey in 2000. Making my way from Ankara, 750km away, and with no fine command of Turkish, all I decided to do was keep saying “Gelibolu” at bus depots and sea ports and then go in the direction people were pointing. For simplicity, my plan was a 10 out of 10. For accuracy, as my five-year-old says: “minus zero”. Not that it mattered. I was mesmerised. Every waypoint was a palimpsest of history. Getting lost was a pleasure. Beneath the modern city of Istanbul lay the Ottoman’s den. Beneath that, the Roman city of Constantine. Beneath that, the Greek’s Byzantium, and beneath that, a Phoenician’s Seaport. As I was crossing the Dardanelles by boat, I was dreaming of those young, brave souls from country NSW or outback Queensland, about to set foot into hell. But I could have as easily dreamed I was Paris of Troy, or Alexander the Great, or Xerxes, or the Apostle Paul, all of whom made the same journey over the same stretch of water.

Unfortunately, my geography wasn’t quite as good as my history. Shortly after my triumphant arrival in the actual town of Gallipoli was the news that, sorry, Gallipoli isn’t actually anywhere near, well, Gallipoli. Only a minority of ANZAC pilgrims end up there, although there must have been enough; the local lodgings were called “ANZAC House”. Ah, ANZAC House… where the toilet next to my bed whose interior surface was black ran all night, and the showers wouldn’t. Long story…

Now those that know me well will expect me at this juncture to tell my How I Got Arrested By the Turkish Army Story and Held at Gunpoint story, and perhaps I will… another time. I want to make a different point.

You see, all those well meaning pilgrims attending the ANZAC Day dawn service are missing out on an enormous part of the Gallipoli experience. It’s like going to the Louvre and staying half an hour… it’s just not on. Certainly, there is a unique feel to being there with so many other people, but my own experience was far more moving because of how I found myself there. Here’s what happened.

Firstly, I wasn’t travelling in the area at ANZAC time. I happened to be in the area in early April, weeks out from ANZAC Day.
Second, since my poor navigation landed me in a fishing village bearing the name of my destination but unfortunately not the co-ordinates, I got to see somewhere that a lot of people don’t, even those who come back saying “I’ve been to Gallipoli”.
Third, as a result of losing myself, I was approached by a charming local man, Gurkay, who negotiated a price to drive me down the peninsula in an ancient Combi and show me personally all the sites I wanted to see, such as the Gallipoli museum, Lone Pine, ANZAC Cove, and all the various monuments one would expect; a trip which would last a long day. I had my own personal guide! He thought he was rorting me blind for AU$100, and I thought I was getting a bargain. He had no English and I had no Turkish (unless you count “I love you, my darling”, “get well soon”, or “thank you”… long story). We were firm friends by the end of the day.
Fourth, I had a mission- something to personalise my trip. A dear family friend in his nineties had heard I was going to Gallipoli. He explained that his older brother, Stan, had died at Lone Pine and that in all the years since, he had never seen as much as a photo of his grave. Wow. What a mission!
Fifth, when I made it to ANZAC Cove, and Lone Pine; when I walked the partially reconstructed trenches, and when I went bush-bashing a bit just to see what it felt like to climb a hillside in Gallipoli with no railing or path, I was able to think in silence, by myself. I think I thought for a long time. A really long time. It was a sunny, breezy day, and birds were chirping, but I think that only by standing there quietly for half an hour allowed me to hear the faint echoes of the fallen, and what they were trying to say to me.

Sixth, when I found the grave I was looking for, the depersonalising nature of the huge number of dead was all washed away. Courtesy of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Website, I had located one of nearly a hundred thousand graves, and yet, this one was special. I arranged it with an Australian flag I had brought for the purpose, took photos and video of the area, and yes, I cried. I cried for a man who had not had a single soul to cry by his grave in 84 years.

If you’re contemplating a trip to Gallipoli, don’t settle for the prepackaged “back to the bus in 15 minutes”, shrink-wrapped, cattle-class version. See it properly. See it with time to sit quietly somewhere, by yourself. If it’s just an item on your itinerary and someone is holding your hand the whole way, then it isn’t a pilgrimage- it’s just a trip.

A Major Australian Museum’s Disgraceful Concession to Creationism

Jan 2009: A warm welcome to those who have been directed here by John Stear's NAiG site. If you want a one-line summary of the direction I am coming from, it's as a Christian (who works at a Christian School), who loves Science and regards the non-Scientific, ideological rantings of Young Earth Creationists as deeply corrupt and damaging to our faith.

If you enjoy this article (ironically, what I regard as my thinnest on the topic of Creationism), then please feel free to explore my other posts on the same subject which carry the tag of "Creationism"


Young Earth Creationists suffer from a humiliating lack of credibility, and rightly so, among the mainstream scientific community. Hence, if any “secular” institution appears to slip and confirm any tenet of the Creationist worldview, you can count on them to crow about it. Of course, the context or intent of the reference is rarely of interest to them.

Our major museum of natural history in Sydney, the Australian Museum, has very recently opened its long awaited and overdue Dinosaur exhibit. It’s impressive, and I attended today with my five year old son (pictured above) to check it out.
Being the School holidays, I was surprised (and delighted, and then surprised that I was delighted) to be standing in a long queue that stretched out the door and around the corner. The queue was full of families and kids, all in high spirits. A large banner outside the grand old Victorian sandstone museum portrayed an archetype carnivore, rampant, and the words “Can’t wait to meet you”. The “m” in meet was slashed out with claw marks. Cute. The museum had languished for many years and this exhibit is the first proper Dinosaur exhibit it has probably ever had, and a major shot in the arm. I harbour fond and dim memories of the “Dinosaurs from China” exhibit at the same museum when I was a kid, and here I was, my rambunctious, blond, paleontologically encyclopaedic offspring in tow, passing the dino-mania on to a very willing next generation.

Of course, one of the cardinal assumptions in palaeontology is that Homo Sapiens and the Dinosauria occupied far removed and mutually exclusive epochs in the Earth’s history. Any admission that men and dinosaurs co-existed would be a major gaffe, right? Something so crazy and stupid, you would only expect that from, say a pretend museum that corrupts and prostitutes the very concept of a museum, yes?

Well. Oooboy, are the Creationists going to be cock-a-hoop over this one. This was part of the exhibit.
OK. OK. I can’t keep this up. I’ve been stringing you along. Of course the Australian Museum aren’t being serious. When I read this, if I’d been drinking milk, it would have come out my nose, if you know what I mean. It tickled my fancy, being a huge fan of The Far Side. The Thagomizer. I love that. And while they aren't serious about cavemen and dinosaurs co-existing, scientists do actually use this term. Here's my photo of one.

And now I feel guilty. If you’ve read this far, suckered by my claim of a Creationist gaffe at a respectable public institution and angry, let me make amends: This is how a museum should be- full of questioning and the joy of engaging young minds, rather than full of tawdry appeals to ideology and Flintstones-level fantasy. Differing views are presented in the exhibit, such as the debate between catastrophists and gradualists concerning the end of the Mesozoic era; Care was taken to represent Archaeopteryx as an offshoot of bird development rather than as linear antecedents of Aves, and each of the many transitional features marking the difference between reptiles and birds were mentioned (and supported by examples). The evolution of snakes was explained with an Australian example of sand swimming skinks, which are living illustrations of the varying stages of limb loss. I was impressed at the degree to which propositions made about Dinosaurs, their lives, behavior and evolution were backed up by so much evidence from the fossil record. Some might say that the degree of explanation might put people off, but I thought it was all very accessible. Obviously the authors of the exhibit had an eye to the criticism that many statements about Dinosaurs are made without qualification, and then accepted because of an "appeal to authority". I felt sure that if the exhibit said something factually incorrect about Dinosaurs, one of those bright eyed 5 year olds like mine might be the one to correct it in the years to come, and that no one at the Museum would be unhappy about that.

I only had one gripe. One Velociraptor was portrayed with hairy feathers.
I don’t care what the science says. It looked silly, like some cast off carnival haunted house prop. Many of the displays were hands-on, and there were palaeontologists exhuming fossils from real rocks as part of the exhibit.

As I was walking through the exhibition, one of the things I couldn’t keep out of my mind was how any Creationist viewing the exhibit would find the visit ruined for them. Of course, I use the term "Creationist" here as shorthand for Young Earth Creationist- I regard myself as a "Creationist" by definition as a Christian, but I'm poles apart from being a Young Earther. Never mind the hordes of young people being sparked to an interest in science and learning, or the quality of the multimedia and static displays. I can just imagine these people, indoctrinated into hating science in a kind of sick, pavlovian response, as they would fume and rail at the references to deep time and evolutionary processes scattered throughout the exhibit. It reminded me of just how embarassing Young Earth Creationist organisations like CMI and AiG should be regarded as by Christians of all creeds.

People who know me know that I get a bit knotty when people eject their brains in matters of Faith. If people go to museums like this one and lose their faith in God because the sign says “millions of years ago”, then I’d have to doubt their faith was very grounded to begin with. However, when people start teaching that you can’t believe in Jesus without regarding the presentation of such a wonderful Dinosaur exhibit as a monstrous atheistic conspiracy then, well, perhaps the kindest thing I could say about such people (alas, even as a Christian) is that they should be publicly ridiculed. And then flogged. And then fed to Velociraptors. With lasers on their heads.

When Computers are Smarter than we are

For years now, I've subscribed to an email list from the Australian Prime Minister's department. This mailing list sends me a copy of all Prime Ministerial speeches and press releases.

When John Howard was the Prime Minister, these emails arrived regularly and always came straight through to my inbox.

Since Kevin Rudd has been Prime Minister, using exactly the same mail client and settings, this now happens on a very regular basis...


Artificial Intelligence is nigh upon us. My automated Junk Mail filter instinctively knows that what Kevin Rudd says is utter rubbish. My mail filter applies a dispassionate algorithm to look for shonky language, spin, fake deals and nonsensical claims. My filter correctly categorises Kevin Rudd's speeches as being in the same category as cheap Rolex watches, penis extension pills and Nigerian banking scams. How apt.