'The film is entitled "The Hero of the Dardanelles," and is the second of a series of pictures designed to assist the inducing men to enlist. The life of the soldiers in Liverpool camp is depicted, their subsequent entrainment and embarkation for Eygpt is shown, and "The Hero of the Dardanelles" is followed through the landing on the beach and over the rocky ridges right up to the time of his being wounded. Then he is seen back in Sydney at his wedding.'
Source:
'Hero of the Dardanelles', Cairns Post, 13 September 1915, p.4. (Via Trove Australia)
The Gallipoli landing was recreated at a Sydney ebach, with the assistance of military forces:
The Minister for Defence gave the production his official sanction, and placed at the disposal of the producers the whole of the New South Wales military forces. One thousand soldiers from the Liverpool camp were sent down to take part in the landing scene–enacted on a strip of coastline not far from Sydney, bearing a striking resemblance to the original landing place at Gaba Tepe. They went into it with all the vigor of their comrades at the Dardanelles, landing in the naval cutters, sweeping up the beach with fixed bayonetes, into the Turkish trenches, and up the face of the precipitous cliff exactly as reported by Ashmead Bartlett. The whole scene, it is stated, has been recorded by the camera with realism. Says one writer: 'The boys swimming under shrapnel fire or making the wild dashes that earned them the name of the "Mad White Ghurkas'' recreate those scenes of reckless courage, gallant sacrifice, and imperishable glory that marked the Australians' baptism of fire.'
Source:
'Johnson's Pictures', Barrier Miner, 31 July 1915, p.5. (Via Trove Australia)
'The World War I Gallipoli campaign in modern Turkey in April 1915 was calamitous from the outset, with the amphibious assault by British and Allied forces landing well off course. Australia's first major military engagement since achieving nationhood in 1901, its chief success would become their stealth evacuation, which saw seventy thousand men covertly withdrawn over nine days and nights in December 1915. The campaign was ultimately futile and deemed immaterial to the outcome of the war. Such an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire would seem an unlikely source for a national myth. It lacks, for example, “the psychic reassurance of triumph over the sources of threat” and the defeat of enemies that Graham Dawson identifies as a key psychic and social function of adventure narratives and soldier heroes (282). Yet, the ill‐fated Gallipoli campaign is popularly held in Australia's cultural imagination as the “birth of a nation” for a former colony then still under the yoke of the British Empire. In Australian politics and culture, the youthful nation's presumed character was forged in war and embodied in the deeds of its young men, in spite of ultimate defeat.' (Introduction)
'The World War I Gallipoli campaign in modern Turkey in April 1915 was calamitous from the outset, with the amphibious assault by British and Allied forces landing well off course. Australia's first major military engagement since achieving nationhood in 1901, its chief success would become their stealth evacuation, which saw seventy thousand men covertly withdrawn over nine days and nights in December 1915. The campaign was ultimately futile and deemed immaterial to the outcome of the war. Such an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire would seem an unlikely source for a national myth. It lacks, for example, “the psychic reassurance of triumph over the sources of threat” and the defeat of enemies that Graham Dawson identifies as a key psychic and social function of adventure narratives and soldier heroes (282). Yet, the ill‐fated Gallipoli campaign is popularly held in Australia's cultural imagination as the “birth of a nation” for a former colony then still under the yoke of the British Empire. In Australian politics and culture, the youthful nation's presumed character was forged in war and embodied in the deeds of its young men, in spite of ultimate defeat.' (Introduction)
