The ANZACS: An Inside View Of New Zealanders At Gallipoli (2015) By Damien Fenton
 
With essays and illustrations, the photography of the New Zealand soldiers on Gallipoli, the campaign as they experienced it.
 
Published to commemorate the looming anniversary of the landings, this handsome book contains a wide selection of mostly soldiers' photos from the museum's archives compiled by its pictorial curator, Shaun Higgins.
 
Many soldiers took a camera to the war thanks to the new technology of small, lightweight cameras, and they found a remarkable amount of freedom to take pictures, as is reflected in this collection.
 
The photos step the reader through a chronology of the campaign from the struggle to get ashore to the eventual evacuation and the various mini-campaigns wages within the overall struggle in which many more Turks perished than did Allies – but it was the invaders who were to packed it in.
 
The men are viewed at "play" as much as preparing for or engaging in fighting--bathing in the sea, for example, getting a haircut (an important hygiene precaution), or just sitting around waiting for orders.
 
There are depictions of the casualties, too, of course, such as one shot sardonically captioned  "A good Turk", for example, which shows the sprawled body of an enemy combatant.
 
But overshadowing all else it is the terrain which dominates the photos and the collection as a whole - harsh, near-treeless, rocky and unforgiving. Anyone seeing it would wonder what on earth they were thinking when they embarked on an invasion at this place.
 
The peninsula was, in the succinct words of historian Damien Fenton's analysis, "a bastard of a place".
 
His verdict on the continuing grip Gallipoli seems to exert on the New Zealand psyche: There is something about what they did in the gullies and on the slopes of Gallipoli in 1915 that strongly appeals to us today,  although it is no simple matter nailing down what that "something" is as we "celebrate" the centenary of the landings. 
 
Soft Cover
239 pages
In Good Condition