'They shall not grow old': Australian, British and New Zealand history writing on Gallipoli, 1915-96

Abstract

The processes involved in both scholarship and in mythmaking are by necessity selective, and it is this process of selection, and how it relates to interpretations of Gallipoli, that is the focus of this study. Australian, New Zealand and British historians have written about the same event from divergent backgrounds and with different objectives. This study does not reconsider the military aspects of the campaign, but rather identifies the extent to which the historical literature on Gallipoli has reflected contemporary preoccupations and concerns in New Zealand, Australia and Britain. The study begins by examining the initial propaganda literature of writers such as John Masefield. It then looks at how these ideas were either developed or challenged in the 1920s and 1930s, by historians such as C.E.W. Bean, Fred Waite, C.F. Aspinall-Oglander, Winston Churchill and Ian Hamilton. Interpretations of the campaign since 1945, by historians such as Alan Moorehead, Robert Rhodes James, Bill Gammage, Patsy Adam-Smith and Christopher Pugsley, are also critically examined. The relationship between history and mythology generally, and, in particular, how this relationship is epitomised in the collective memory of the Gallipoli campaign, is explored in this thesis. The problems of historical objectivity are considered, in the context of an examination of the competing claims to 'truth' about Gallipoli by various historians, and of the political motives and national preoccupations which are inextricably linked with these claims.