The Correspondents
In the eight months between April and December 1915, reports of the actions of Australia's soldiers at Gallipoli, and the reactions of those at home, moulded the way Australians still think of themselves.
How did this happen?
Australians first learned of the exploits of their troops from the news reports of a select group of war correspondents, the journalists who wrote about the Gallipoli campaign for Australian and British newspapers. At a time before radio, television or the Internet, newspapers were the way people learned of major events overseas. By today's standards of satellite-relayed news, delivered in real time, it seems incredible that two weeks passed before Australians received the first detailed account of the Gallipoli landing, and even then from the pen of a British journalist.
It was the despatches of the correspondents, with all their strengths and weaknesses, and the reaction of Australians at home reading these reports, that shaped the Anzac tradition and the continuing perception of what it is to be an Australian.
Official war correspondents were an innovation of the First World War but the practice of informing the home population about overseas conflicts using the services of a civilian reporter began in Britain with the coverage of the Crimean War in the 1850s.
'Before the Crimea, British editors either stole war news from foreign newspapers or employed junior officers to send letters from the battlefront, a most unsatisfactory arrangement.' (Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: From Crimea to Vietnam, London: Quartet, 1978 p. 4.)
In the Australian colonies, four newspaper correspondents, one of whom was wounded, accompanied the New South Wales contingent to the Sudan War in 1885. Similarly reporters, including A.B. (Banjo) Paterson, were sent from Australia to cover the Boer War in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century.
Charles Bean was different. In 1914, the British Government decided each empire force could be accompanied by an official war correspondent. Bean, from The Sydney Morning Herald, was chosen as Australia's first official war correspondent for the Australian Imperial Force, the AIF. He had been elected by his colleagues in the Australian Journalists Association and the nomination was accepted by the Australian Government. His despatches were to be available to all Australian newspapers and published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette.
Bean was the only Australian war correspondent to remain on the Gallipoli Peninsula for the entire campaign and the only consistent Australian front line reporter. He brought a deep sense of responsibility to his craft:
The war correspondent is responsible for most of the ideas of battle which the public possesses ... I can't write that it occurred if I know that it did not, even if by painting it that way I can rouse the blood and make the pulse beat faster-and undoubtedly these men here deserve the people's pulses shall beat for them. But war correspondents have so habitually exaggerated the heroism of battles that people don't realise that real actions are heroic.
-Charles Bean, 'Ashmead-Bartlett and a Crisis' in his Personal Records, Item 892, AWM 38 3DRL/6673.
As historian Kevin Fewster noted, Bean approached his work with great enthusiasm and a cool nerve. ('Military Censorship in Australia during the Great War', Phd thesis, 1980, AWM 0836 p.79) Writing of his Gallipoli experience in a private letter in 1917, Bean said:
I obtained a chance such as no journalist in this war, or probably any other, has had of going absolutely where he liked, in the line (or indeed in front of the line, if I had wanted) without any restriction so long as I was with our own troops.
Three other Australian journalists-all from Melbourne newspapers-were to report on aspects of the Gallipoli campaign. Phillip Schuler of The Age and Charles Patrick Smith of The Argus were permitted to report from Gallipoli over one month in July and August. For much of the rest of the campaign they, and Smith in particular, assembled despatches from Egypt, gathering material from official briefings, other military sources and the accounts of wounded soldiers evacuated from the peninsula. Keith Murdoch of the Melbourne Herald visited briefly in September on his way to take up a post in London.
Different styles and approaches are reflected in the work of each or the correspondents. All experienced the frustrations of censorship and the pressure to get material back to an expectant readership, eager for a constant flow of news about their troops.
Some reports were overly colourful and generous to a point which sat uneasily with some Australian soldiers. An entry in The Anzac Book (London: Cassell, 1916), quoted by Ken Inglis, was straight to the point:
Oh, I've snarled to read the phrases that the writers coined for us- 'Deathless heroes-Lasting Glory', and other foolish fuss For we're simple, sinful soldiers, and we're often rude and rough, And our characters ain't altered since we donned the khaki stuff.
- Ken Inglis, 'The Australians at Gallipoli-1', Historical Studies, vol. 14 no. 54, April 1970, p. 227
But all the correspondents were important. According to Fewster, their despatches were the average person's most reliable way of remaining in touch with the activities of their troops. Information in soldiers' letters was out-of-date by the time it reached home and overseas news services, while they provided a great deal of coverage of the war, mentioned Australian troops only when they were involved in a major battle.
The Australian war correspondents, on the other hand, concentrated their attention almost solely on the men and deeds of the AIF. Their work is thus of considerable importance to the historian as their stories were the people's best and frequently only means of gaining some understanding of soldiering in the AIF. What they wrote is consequently most pertinent to any explanation of Australia's attitudes and responses to war.
- Fewster, ibid., p 73

