'Letters from a pilgrimage': reflection on the 1965 return to Gallipoli

Abstract

This article examines Ken Inglis’s journey to Gallipoli in 1965, marking the 50th anniversary of the Landing. It involves a detailed consideration of his earliest writings on this subject, drawing on unpublished manuscripts held by the National Library. The article uses this study as an opportunity to examine the character and method of Inglis’s historical writing and situate this early work within the corpus of a larger body of scholarship. It contrasts Inglis’s nuanced and carefully argued account – his ethnographic approach to the gathering of testimony, close observance of ritual and language and the bold sweep of his writing – with the less searching and more reductionist approach taken by some subsequent critics of Gallipoli pilgrimage. One of the article’s key concerns is to consider how the character of commemoration has changed over time: it compares and contrasts this first large-scale return to Gallipoli (over 300 World War One veterans embarked on the ‘Jubilee Pilgrimage’) with more recent journeys to Anzac. It argues that with the passing of the generation that witnessed the Great War, ‘Anzac’ has lost much of its historical specificity and that the increasingly performative aspects of commemoration have served to overwhelm its original meanings. Show more