Directions
Your Anzac Walk begins at the Anzac Commemorative Site of North Beach. Move to the inscription 'Anzac' on the wall above the beach. Now turn and look at the remarkable landscape around you taking in the ridge above.
Audio transcript
Charles Bean, whom you will meet many times on this Anzac Walk through the words he wrote as Australia's official war correspondent and later as official war historian, has described this spot:
The ridge led down to the sea in only two places - at either end of the semicircle - by the steep slopes of Plugge's [Plateau] on the right, and by a tortuous spur (afterwards known as Walker's Ridge) on the left. Between the two, exactly in the middle of the semicircle of cliffs, there had once been a third spur, but the weather had eaten it away. Its bare gravel face stood out, for all the world like that of a Sphinx, sheer above the middle of the valley … To the Australians from that day [25 April 1915] it was the Sphinx.
[Charles Bean, The Story of Anzac, Vol 1, Sydney, 1935, pp 267-8]
So the Anzacs on 25 April 1915, the day of the landing, arriving almost straight from their training camps in Egypt beneath the Pyramids and the Sphinx, claimed Gallipoli by naming its physical features for themselves. Admittedly, they knew little of the local Turkish names. Walker's Ridge they called after Brigadier General Harold Walker who took over the command of the New Zealand Infantry Brigade on the day of the landing. To the Turks it was Sparrow Hill and the Anzacs built a road, long since disappeared, up its sides to the trenches on the ridge. Plugge's Plateau (Cruel Hill to the Turks), the high flat-topped hill to your right, was named for Colonel Arthur Plugge, commander of the Auckland Battalion who had his headquarters there.
Moored at William's Pier is a self-propelled hospital barge, known on Gallipoli as a 'beetle'. Beetles, with conspicuous red crosses painted on their sides, carried wounded men out to nearby hospital ships. Just beneath where the cameraman is standing are the tents of the 1st Australian Stationary Hospital, a unit that had moved to Anzac from Lemnos Island in early November 1915 when it was still anticipated that Gallipoli would be held throughout the winter. In the distance are the tents of the 16th British Casualty Clearing Station.
The Sphinx was really an outcrop of the Sari Bair range that runs all the way up from the beach south of Anzac Cove to Koja Temen Tepe (Hill of the Great Pasture), the highest point on this part of Gallipoli. The Sphinx was Yusuk Tepe, High Hill, and the yellow eroded slopes all around it were known as Sari Bair (Yellow Ridge). The Anzacs used the name Sari Bair for the whole range to Koja Temen Tepe. Of all the names given by the Anzacs to the features hereabouts only that of the Sphinx is still used by local people today.
To relieve the soldiers from work at the beaches and piers over 400 Egyptian and Maltese civilian labourers were brought to Anzac along with some older recruits of the British Army Service Corps. Bean records that they suffered greatly in the conditions of Gallipoli and that foolishly their camp was placed in a position on North Beach where it was open to enemy sniping and shelling.
In January 1919, Bean returned to Anzac with the war artist George Lambert. He wanted Lambert to paint a huge canvas showing the landing and, fortunately for them, they had a guide - Lieutenant Hedly Howe - who knew exactly what had happened to him on that historic morning and where the events had taken place. Howe was now working with the Anzac Section of a British Graves Registration unit. But as Private Howe, on 25 April 1915, he had come ashore in a Royal Navy rowing boat along with most of the 11th Battalion from Western Australia on the beach to your right just beneath Plugge's Plateau. In one boat was a young Royal Navy Midshipman - 'a red-headed slip of a boy' - who, as his boat grounded, pulled out his revolver and, clambering over the backs of the astonished Australians, shouted 'Come on, my lads'! After he was a way up the beach he pulled himself up, realising it was his duty to go back out to the transports with his boat.
The Australian and New Zealand soldiers of the ANZAC Corps were camped beneath the pyramids in the months before they went to Gallipoli and it is easy to see why they gave the name 'Sphinx' to the prominent landform above North Beach.
Howe led Bean and Lambert back to that very spot on North Beach where he had landed. Then they climbed, just as the men of the 11th Battalion had done, up towards Plugge's Plateau. Bullets had then been landing around them from the heights and Howe remembered seeing two men - Turks - silhouetted against the growing dawn on the plateau. As they came out on to its flat top after about 15 minutes climb, Turkish soldiers were running back off it down into the valley beyond. And so Lambert painted that scene - the West Australians, some wounded and falling back, others pulling their way up the scrub-covered slope of Plugge's, with the dawn breaking and the coming light touching the yellow earth of the Sphinx.
Lambert's painting, Anzac, the Landing 1915, inspired by the grandeur of the scene here at North Beach and the story of the first minutes of the 11th Battalion's experience at Anzac, hangs today in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. A reproduction of it can be seen in one of the history panels at the Anzac Commemorative Site. These panels are located on the wall opposite you at the top of the pathway. Read the text in these panels before you set out on the rest of the Anzac Walk. They will provide you with a good general account of the whole Gallipoli campaign at Anzac.
After the so-called Battle of the Landing that lasted until 3 May 1915, North Beach became a relatively quiet spot. Men came down here to swim from the frontline trenches on the ridge above at Russell's Top and the Nek. Those positions, and others further north at the so-called 'outposts', were held for most of the campaign by New Zealand units and Australian Light Horsemen. The outposts marked the northern limits of the 'old Anzac' area and they were reached from the northern end of Anzac Cove through a long, deep trench, that cut right across the back of North Beach, known as the 'Big Sap'. Such a trench was necessary as Turkish snipers could fire on much of the North Beach area. After the 'August Offensive' of 6-10 August 1915, a large area of the range to the north of North Beach fell to the British Empire forces. North Beach then became a major base area with mountains of stores, a post office and a tent hospital. Two piers, Williams' and Walkers', were built to handle the unloading of barges and other small craft. Williams' Pier ran offshore virtually opposite where the commemorative wall now stands and it was from here, on the morning of 20 December 1915, that the last Australian soldiers left Anzac at the final evacuation. From first to last the Sphinx had witnessed it all.