Home / Retirement / Bringing the Turkish viewpoint to the Gallipoli campaign

Much of Australia’s belief in what the nation symbolises was forged in this military catastrophe. While understanding why that is so is laudable, all too often we neglect to remember what it meant – and still means – to our enemy, the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey). This tome aims to correct that imbalance.

On April 25, the nation pays homage to the fallen at Gallipoli. After this national day lost some if its appeal in the anti-war decades of the 1960s and 1970s, it’s been reinvigorated as a celebration of all those traits we pride ourselves on – mateship, loyalty, courage and sacrifice. A country a mere 14 years old forged its national identity on the bloody beaches of a country on the other side of the world.

That’s the legend of Gallipoli. That’s what’s taught in the schools. That’s how the young footballers, who get a “history lesson” the week before the games commemorating the Anzacs, talk about it in reverent tones, always hastening to add their courage pales into insignificance when compared with those young men in khaki.

That Anzac Day has come to symbolise our national identity is hardly surprising. Ours is a tame history with no war of independence, revolution (the Eureka Stockade was essentially a tax revolt), or invasion – at least post-1788. It almost seems inevitable that our national identity would derive, in large part, from an overseas military conflict, especially considering our membership of the British Empire and our eagerness to fight for “king and country”.

There’s nothing wrong with this. Understanding Gallipoli’s role in nurturing our national ethos is important. But while the focus is on the Anzacs and what they have come to symbolise, what’s often neglected is what this conflict meant to our enemy, the Ottoman Empire, which then controlled much of today’s Middle East.

For amateur historian Tim Knight it was a big missing link in his understanding of Gallipoli – and for the very obvious reason his wife is Turkish.

“She migrated to Australia when she was eight and had to grow up in our school system learning how the Anzacs were heroes cut down mercilessly by Turkish machine-guns. We went to high school together, and I sat in the same history classes getting a very one-sided perspective of the Dardanelles campaign.

“This is not to say that the Australians weren’t heroes, that they weren’t brave. That’s all very true, but it’s not the full story.”

To get a Turkish perspective, Tim and his wife took their five children to Gallipoli where the children, especially the eldest, started asking questions.

“Why did Australia come and fight in Turkey? After all, mum’s Turkish. Our grandparents, our friends, are Turkish. So, why were we fighting them? And I didn’t really have very good answers for that.

“When we came back from the holiday, I really wanted to understand that better myself. Then I started imagining a book, not another history but historical fiction, and I wanted to include the Turkish perspective. From their point of view, they were defending their homeland, so they thought what they were doing was right.”

The end result is a 592-page paperback Gallipoli Soup, but only after Tim, an engineer by training, had to teach himself how to write – a difficult process.

While the genre is historical fiction, Tim says it’s probably more accurate to describe it as dramatised history.

“It’s got more history and less fiction than most historical fiction. Each chapter is written from the point of view of one character, and in the book, there’s 17 different characters. About half are fictional and the other half are historical such as Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal (better known as Atatürk who became the founding president of the Republic of Turkey in 1923) and Winston Churchill.

“The fictional characters are more your soldiers on the ground such as two Australian brothers and a Turkish father and son defending their homeland. I’ve really tried to get inside their heads and represent what it was like to be there as accurately as possible based on diaries of people who were there.”

Tim takes umbrage at the concept of Gallipoli as a “glorious defeat”.

“The more you investigate war, the more you get this sense that there’s no glory in war. The things that happened are just horrible. And certainly, that’s portrayed in many of the soldiers’ accounts at all levels, from senior officers to privates. “Most had this perception of going off to a glorious war, but when they came back, they were disillusioned, burdened with the reality that war isn’t glorious at all.

“If I had one ambition with this book, it would be to dispel that kind of thinking. If there’s a young person who has that view of war, that they would read it and think, ‘that was just a horrible mess’, that they suffered terribly – and achieved nothing.”


Gallipoli Soup: A War Story of Statecraft and Sacrifice by Tim Knight. Publisher: New Holland. $31.75 (Amazon)