People throughout Australia and New Zealand rose early this morning to attend their local dawn service, gathering in the morning chill to hear The Last Post and reflect quietly on our wartime past. In years gone by, a significant number of us might have done something similar in Turkey, with a Gallipoli pilgrimage widely seen as a key commemorative Anzac Day activity.

As Brad West argues today, Australia’s historical commemoration of war has been particularly shaped by the symbolic representations and experience of travel. “Travel was often romanticised for the purposes of recruitment, while soldier diaries reveal many saw themselves as tourists on foreign battlefields,” he writes. “Many soldiers also derived comfort from the belief that if they died in battle, their graves could become a site of pilgrimage through travel.”

Recent events here and in Turkey, however, have made the Gallipoli battlefields increasingly inaccessible to Australian travellers. In finding new ways to commemorate Anzac Day, West writes, “we should learn a lesson from the rise of the Gallipoli pilgrimage. To be meaningful, military history now needs to acknowledge the contributions of all parties and sides, while the experience of remembrance itself has to be memorable.”

And in Melbourne today, many will gather at Young and Jackson’s hotel to have a drink with Chloé, painted by Jules Joseph Lefebvre in France at the end of the 19th century. Katrina Kell dives into the interesting history to tell the story of how a message in a bottle led to this painting becoming embedded in Anzac rituals.

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