Australian Imagery
A noticeable feature of the despatches sent by Australian correspondents from Gallipoli was the inclusion of Australian imagery.
Few if any Australian readers had visited the rugged Turkish coastline on which the troops fought in what was instantly recognised as a significant feat of arms that would be revered by posterity. In order to explain the nature of what their troops were experiencing, Australian correspondents adopted the customary journalistic device of describing the terrain in terms familiar to readers at home, drawing comparisons with recognisable features in the Australian landscape. These geographic and lifestyle references, in themselves totally contrary to the scenes of blood and devastation at Gallipoli, nonetheless helped explain something that was entirely removed from the reader's experience.
In his account of the landing at Anzac Cove C.E.W. Bean likened the terrain encountered by the troops to 'a section of the Blue Mountains, full of winding gullies'. Referring to a spectacular perpendicular cliff formation in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, known as Govett's Leap, Bean painted a word picture to help his readers understand what confronted the troops:
But when all is said, the feat which will go down in history is that first Sunday's fighting when three Australian Brigades stormed, in face of a heavy fire, tier after tier of cliffs and mountains, apparently as impregnable as Govett's Leap.
Bean drew links between Anzac Cove and Sydney's Manly Beach, although the former was not the least like the latter. On 30 May 1915, just five days after the landing, he wrote that some of the men 'after about 80 hours fighting without sleep, indulged in bathing-the beach looked almost like that at Manly.' What made the Gallipoli beach different, as he noted, was that 'stray bullets lobbed over there occasionally and killed at least one man'.
In an official report in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette of 29 June 1915, Bean associated Anzac Cove with a different identifying feature: 'The beach today resembled Manly on a holiday. Just now the flies are far more annoying than the Turks'. His report, which appeared in the Gazette on 23 July said of a soldier walking through shrapnel, 'He might have been a swaggie toiling up the old main road over the Blue Mountains'. The same article describes Anzac Cove when the Australians return from Helles on 17 May after one of the Krithia battles. The big transport ships were no longer moored near Anzac, 'there was an emptiness like that of Sydney Harbour when the wool and wheat season is over'.
Victorian correspondents, with their own readers in mind, related the Gallipoli coastline to their state. In an article from Alexandria, probably by Charles Smith, the journalist explained the ruggedness in terms of 'the steepest cliffs south of Sandringham'. No Argus correspondent had actually visited Gallipoli at this stage, so the correspondent would have been relying on official briefings and comment from wounded soldiers evacuated to Egypt:
Let anyone . . . who desires to form an adequate idea of what the Commonwealth troops accomplished on that memorable Sunday in April [25 April] pay a visit to the steepest cliff south of Sandringham [16 km south-east of Melbourne], and try to imagine it just twice as high, with Turkish rifles bristling from every vantage point and shells coming from the unseen. Nature at no point along the Port Phillip coast line, however, presents anything more than a miniature model of the climb which the Commonwealth troops had to accomplish with death waiting for them at every turn.



![Bathing [at Anzac where soldiers swim near the beach or near the cover provided by pinnaces] May 1915](images/pic-an23217959-t.jpg)