Commonwealth Club of Adelaide Speech Mat Mclachlan – 30/6/2015 **SLIDE 1 INTRO Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen
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Commonwealth Club of Adelaide Speech Mat McLachlan – 30/6/2015 **SLIDE 1 INTRO Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to be asKed to speak here today about the importance of Gallipoli and the Western Front and, specifically, what the men of South Australia sacrificed and achieved on those iconic battlefields. **SLIDE 2 My name is Mat McLachlan – I am a military historian, author and television presenter, and the founder of Mat McLachlan Battlefield Tours, Australia’s leading battlefield tour company. Every year I have the rare privilege of helping thousands of Australians to visit the battlefields where our soldiers, airmen and sailors fought and died. For many people it is a pilgrimage in the footsteps of a relative, and a journey that, in a small way at least, fulfils an obligation to honour these men, and their legacy. **SLIDE 3 I would liKe to thanK my colleague Ashley StarKey, who has recently produced an outstanding documentary about the First World War and its importance to South Australians, entitled The First Anzac Day. Ashely is here today and I’m sure would welcome the opportunity to discuss the film with you at the end of today’s proceedings. Many of the images and much of the inspiration for this presentation came from his film. PART 1 **SLIDE 4 Now let me set a scene for you. On a cool afternoon nearly a century ago a crowd gathers at the Adelaide Oval. In the preceding hours they had joined services to commemorate the brave men who had died at Gallipoli, and had watched veterans marching through the streets of the city. It was of course Anzac Day, and the scenes were redolent of any Anzac Day in any Australian city, in any year. The newspapers of the day proclaimed the event a great success, and that the date of Anzac Day should be etched into history – October 13. Yes, you heard me correctly. Now I’ve only lived in Adelaide for a short time, but already I understand that you South Australians liKe to do things a bit differently. And it was no different in 1915. While the conflict at Gallipoli was still raging, and siX months before the rest of the country came up with the idea, the people of Adelaide staged the very first Anzac Day. **SLIDE 5 The origins of the event were complicated, and the day differed in many ways from the Anzac Days we now commemorate, but the basic idea was the same – a public holiday to commemorate the men fighting and dying for Australia and a series of events to enable people to pay their respects. Of course, the concept was new, and at times the people of Adelaide struggled to agree on eXactly how those respects should be paid. The march of veterans through the streets was a dignified affair. The speeches were respectful and sombre. Blowing up two old trams the middle of the Adelaide Oval? That one, not so much. Yes, that was the highlight of this special day. Two obsolete wooden trams, laden with eXplosives, were set up on a single tracK in the centre of the Oval and propelled together at great speed and with spectacular results. **SLIDE 6 In the words of a spectator: The effect of the collision was startling. The cars burst into flames immediately the impact tooK place … Nearly eight tons of wood and iron were involved in the collision. To the ordinary eye-witness it was like watching two tramcars melt into a shapeless mass of twisted iron and splintered wood. The flames completed the total destruction of the cars. Public detonation of railway stocK notwithstanding, the day was a great success, and raised nearly 2500 pounds in donations. The people of Adelaide were proud of their achievement, which was fitting. Since the start of the war they had paid a high price for their support of King and Country. The previous year, within two weeKs of the outbreak of war, the men of South Australia had formed one of the first battalions of the new Australian Imperial Force. The 10th Battalion formed part of the Third Brigade, and was the first Australian battalion to sail for Egypt, departing Australia after only two months of training. Among the thousand-odd men of the battalion were a group of scouts, good mates who had trained and camped together in the chaotic early days of the battalion’s formation. **SLIDE 7 Here’s a photo of them, taken at the battalion’s training camp at Morphettville Racecourse shortly before sailing off to the war. Arthur BlacKburn, a man many of you would have heard of, is there. He’s the young bloKe with the eXuberant ears second from left in the front row. BlacKburn would survive the war, but in this he was in the minority. Of the nine men pictured here, four would die at Gallipoli in 1915, and a fifth on the Western Front in 1917. One of the survivors, Guy Fisher, mounted this photograph neXt to his shaving mirror, so he could remember his dead mates every morning for the rest of his life. The 10th Battalion’s first great test came on the morning of the Gallipoli landing. As one of the first battalions ashore, the 10th was tasKed (along with the rest of the 3rd Brigade) with securing a covering line on Third Ridge, to hold bacK TurKish reinforcements while the main Anzac force came ashore. The scouts from the photo had been ordered to probe forward to a low hill Known as Scrubby Knoll, and to dig in there and hold on. At least, that was the plan. As we well Know, nothing about the Gallipoli landing went to plan, and the 10th Battalion was soon tangled up in a chaotic and bloody struggle well short of its objective. The Anzacs eventually dug in on Second Ridge, and didn’t move much for eight months. Charles Bean, Australia’s official War Correspondent and later founder of the Australian War Memorial was with them, and he understood the chaos of that first morning as well as anyone. As soon as the war was over, Bean returned to Gallipoli to try and solve some of the mysteries of that iconic day’s fighting. And one of the Key mysteries he wanted to solve, was how far the Australians had actually gotten on the first day. After walKing the ground and conducting eXhaustive interviews with survivors, Bean concluded that Second Lieutenant Noel Loutit (also an Adelaide man, you’ll be pleased to Know) had reached the seaward slopes of Third Ridge on the morning of the landing, and had therefore advanced further than anyone else. And this was the account that appeared in the first edition of Bean’s Official History in 1920. Soon after the history was published, however, Bean received a rather cranKy note from a veteran of the campaign, which basically pointed out to Bean that he didn’t Know what he was talKing about. The veteran was Arthur BlacKburn, and he spelled out to Bean in no uncertain terms that he and his mate Phil Robin (also pictured in the photo of the scouts) had sprinted straight for Scrubby Knoll after coming ashore, dodging TurKish patrols as they went. By the time they got there they looKed out to see thousands of TurKish reinforcements streaming towards them, so sensibly scarpered bacK to the Australian line. Bean corrected his account in subsequent editions of the Official History, confirming that BlacKburn and Robin had advanced further than any other Australians at Gallipoli. **SLIDE 8 **SLIDE 9 Not a man to rest on his laurels, BlacKburn went on to achieve many more great things during his life. At Pozieres on the Western Front in 1916 he led a group of men in repeated assaults on a German machine gun position. For his ‘eXtraordinary bravery’ he was awarded the Victoria Cross. During the Second World War he commanded a machine gun battalion in Syria and accepted the surrender of the Vichy French at Damascus in 1941. In 1942 his unit was hurriedly sent to Java to face the rapidly advancing Japanese, and after a brave but brief resistance, he was captured with his men and spent the neXt three years in a POW camp. After the war he returned to Adelaide and served in a number of public and private positions. He died in 1960 and was buried with full military honours in West Terrace Cemetery. **SLIDE 10 Buried nearby are three other Victoria Cross winners from the First World War, Reg Inwood, Phil Davey and Jorgan Jensen. And as a side note, if you haven’t visited military section of West Terrace Cemetery, I highly recommend it. As a burial place for First World War veterans, it is unique in the world. After Gallipoli, the 10th Battalion served with distinction on the Western Front, in famous actions at Pozieres, Ypres, Polygon Wood, Amiens and more. **SLIDE 11 By the time the battalion returned to Australia in 1919, it had lost 3151 men Killed or wounded – by the end of the war the battalion had been effectively wiped out and rebuilt three times. When the men of the AIF returned to Australia, they were promised a ‘land fit for heroes’. But as is so often is the case, the gap between good intentions and starK reality proved vast. The system that had so easily turned hundreds of thousands of ordinary Australians into soldiers failed badly when it came time to turn them bacK into civilians.