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00:00It's the biggest game on the nation's most respected day, Anzac Day at the MCG for the 30th time.
00:17The crowd at this annual Anzac Day Clash at the G make this the single biggest commemorative event in the country.
00:25We're expecting up to 95,000 fans here today.
00:31The intention of this match is to honour the spirit of the Anzacs, first forged to Gallipoli during World War One.
00:44I'm a Geelong supporter, so this is my first time at this game held every year between arch rivals Essendon and Collingwood.
00:55What else but reverence for the Anzacs could silence almost 100,000 fanatic or footy fans?
01:10And what could an iconic Aussie film have to do with it?
01:14I'm Rachel Griffiths and I believe that when it comes to understanding war, art is our secret weapon.
01:29So in this series, I'm putting this theory to the test, one war and one artwork at a time.
01:38Because while journalists tell us what happened.
01:44They left in scenes that are now part of television's history.
01:47It's our performance.
01:49When the song was released, it was banned.
01:51Yeah.
01:53Filmmakers.
01:54Peter Weir.
01:56Writers.
01:57The narrow road to the deep north.
01:59Artists.
02:00I was the only one not carrying a weapon.
02:02And musicians.
02:04If it's too risky to say, sing it.
02:07Who help us make sense of it.
02:10Holy sh...
02:12This is incredible.
02:16Art's not just there to be pretty and admired.
02:19Art is the magnifying glass and the mirror.
02:21This was a pub rock song that changed our lives.
02:25That's what art can do.
02:27This is when the war is over.
02:41I have never been to this place before, but it's so strange because I really feel like I have.
02:46And a lot of it is because of a film I saw when I was barely a teen.
02:52Gallipoli.
02:54How fast can you run?
02:55As fast as a leopard.
02:56How fast are you going to run?
02:57As fast as a leopard.
02:59Then let's see you do it.
03:01The film tells the origin story of the Anzacs.
03:05The disastrous campaign that took place right here along this peninsula during World War One.
03:10It was one of our first Australian blockbusters and heralded a golden age of Aussie cinema.
03:19Now the filmmakers set out to explore the futility of war.
03:25But once it hit our screens, it took on a life of its own.
03:30And had an impact that not even the filmmakers themselves could ever have imagined.
03:35The Australian feature film Gallipoli has been widely acclaimed by critics.
03:46We're talking about a film which is probably I would consider the best film to come out of Australia.
03:51Gallipoli has been a tremendous success here in New York.
03:54We broke house records this week and we had lines around the block.
03:57It was celebrated around the world and it won eight AFI awards in 1981.
04:07Gallipoli.
04:08Gallipoli.
04:10David Williamson for Gallipoli.
04:12Peter Weir for Gallipoli.
04:14It was part of that definition of us as a nation.
04:19Gallipoli was a huge hit with young Australians because it was a war film they could recognise themselves in.
04:31He's not all that good.
04:32Supposed to shoot the enemy mate, not fight him.
04:35It wasn't about hardened soldiers.
04:37Instead, focusing on the friendship between two young and very handsome West Australians.
04:45Archie, played by Mark Lee, and Frank, played by Mel Gibson.
04:50We're both mates.
04:51They brought to life the legendary mateship we think of as defining the Anzac spirit.
05:04Boosted by a healthy disrespect for authority.
05:08What do you think you're doing?
05:09We might, sir.
05:10This is supposed to be war film.
05:11The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 is still remembered as the first major overseas battle we took part in as a nation.
05:26But we weren't fighting for ourselves, we were fighting for mother England.
05:32The Anzacs find themselves not smashing the European stalemate, but fighting the same stationary war with trenches facing enemy trenches.
05:42It was the complicated plan of Winston Churchill, who aimed to weaken Germany by knocking out one of its key allies, the Ottoman Empire.
05:52The strategy was that the Anzacs would help seize the peninsula, allowing the allies to take the capital, Constantinople.
06:01I've no force to fear.
06:04But despite the patriotic songs of the day, it was widely considered a disaster.
06:11Australia will be there.
06:15Australia will be there.
06:18After eight months, some 18,000 Australians were wounded and around 8,700 lay dead.
06:31About half of all the Anzac troops at Gallipoli.
06:34The First World War, even though it was terrible and dreadful and so many people died for Australia, the war had this whole sort of nation-making role and we brought out this thing called the Anzac legend.
06:53Mateship, sacrifice, death, death, glory.
06:58Yes.
07:00It has that sort of warrior mythology.
07:02It has the glory of the British Empire.
07:05All those ideas are embedded into that original version of the Anzac legend.
07:09And it was this blind faith in king and country that the film intended to challenge when it premiered in 1981.
07:20I remember the lights coming up just with tears streaming down my face.
07:25For a few seconds we thought, oh, this is, well, might be a bummer there's just nothing happening here.
07:31Then an enormous applause because we tapped into something.
07:37By the time David Williamson wrote the screenplay for Gallipoli, he was already one of Australia's most prolific playwrights, capturing the zeitgeist with hit after hit.
07:52But he was not the most obvious pick to write a war film.
07:56One, two, three, four, three, two, one, one, one, two.
08:02I was heavily involved in the anti-Vietnam movement.
08:04I was president of the Youth Campaign Against Conscription, so I had no positive feelings about war or what it did.
08:10When they used to bring the old digger every year to Bairnsdale High School to ramble on, my mates and I thought, oh, here it comes again.
08:19By the 1960s, 1970s, the valleys of those old Anzac diggers had just come to seem so anachronistic, so outdated.
08:35Crowds at dawn services and Anzac Day marches were declining, the World War One veterans, the ranks of them were thinning out, the ones who were still alive were very elderly.
08:49So it was widely expected that Anzac Day commemoration would die out along with the last of the old diggers.
08:55As solidarity with the Anzacs waned, one of the first pieces of art critical of the Anzac legend landed with a bang.
09:07A play called The One Day of the Year was hugely controversial.
09:12The playwright Alan Seymour received death threats and a bomb scare marred the opening in Sydney.
09:18You're picking on the old diggers now, is he?
09:20I'm out of hell with the old diggers.
09:21You.
09:22Do you know what you're celebrating today?
09:23Do you?
09:24Do you even know what it all meant?
09:26The old man marched slowly, old bones stiff and sore, the tired old heroes from afar.
09:38By the 1970s, even folk songs began to rethink the Anzacs' glory.
09:44What are they marching for?
09:49And I ask myself the same question.
09:56It was in this anti-war era that Peter Weir emerged.
10:00A brilliant director who would go on to have huge international success.
10:06But at this stage, he was best known for an Aussie classic.
10:10Picnic at Hanging Rock.
10:15I'd made a big strategic mistake in my career by turning down his offer to write Picnic at Hanging Rock.
10:23So when Peter rang me up, he gave me a second chance and said I want to talk about another project.
10:27I jumped at the chance. I wasn't going to miss out the second time.
10:31The Mike Walsh Show.
10:33What was the start of your love affair with the idea of Gallipoli?
10:36Well, I was on my way to London for the opening of Picnic actually and I'd thought of doing a story on the First War.
10:41I thought it was logical to drop in and have a look at the battlefield.
10:44Because staggeringly, it's as it was after the evacuation.
10:49And I think a very powerful atmosphere clings about that peninsula still.
11:06I cannot believe that I'm walking here at Anzac Cove, where in 1950, the Australian New Zealanders, along with a great uncle of mine, Bill Beeching, arrived at what was the beginning of the Gallipoli campaign.
11:21Now, 60 years later, the director, Peter Weir, turns up.
11:26He's got an inkling he might want to make a wall film.
11:30And Peter's actually shared with me a couple of pages from his diary that recorded his reaction about being here.
11:39And I'm wondering if by walking in his footsteps, literally, I might find the moment of inspiration for his extraordinary film.
11:51Peter Weir hasn't given a major interview about Gallipoli for more than 20 years, because he believes the film speaks for itself.
12:03But his diary, which has never been shared publicly before, reveals the genesis of his masterpiece.
12:12Friday, October 1st, 1976.
12:16Am I really here?
12:20I can't work out the features, but even tired and confused, the silent power of the place grips me immediately.
12:31I set out, feeling great, to walk up Shrapnel Valley.
12:37I'll never forget that two-hour walk, eerie stillness, felt ghosts all about me.
12:43I found water bottles of shells, a bullet, a tin ripped open by a bayonet, thousands of shards of broken stoneware made in Tamworth.
12:58And I see bones lying about.
13:02Ridges towered above me.
13:04Yea, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, occurred to me.
13:13Yea, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, occurred to me.
13:15When he was still seeing bones, it's so difficult to imagine.
13:30But one thing I think we both are experiencing is this whole peninsula is basically a cemetery.
13:41It's just one battlefield after another, graves upon graves upon graves.
13:46Reading that passage makes me feel that he decided to make the film Gallipoli somewhere along that two-hour walk from coast to peak.
13:58I wouldn't be surprised if he was already hearing that Albanoni famous piece of music that starts and finishes his film.
14:04Your film isn't a sort of war movie in the John Wayne tradition.
14:20It's more of a story about the friendship between two young men who go off to war.
14:23Exactly. The lightbulb went on at one point and we said this should be about a couple of Anzacs.
14:30Let's take a country bloke and a city type and let's get to know them because that way one will learn more about Gallipoli than all the battles joined together.
14:42The stupidity of war was obvious to both Peter and I from the start.
14:46It took years to pare it down to the essential story of two young guys going off to a war under false pretenses, thinking it was a great game.
14:57That's how it was sold to Australian youth.
15:00Free trip.
15:02To Turkey.
15:04And we'll beat the whatever we're going to beat. It's like a football match.
15:07When Gallipoli hit the big screen in 1981, it was part of the new wave of Aussie cinema that told our stories with our voices, writers, directors and actors.
15:29It was a cultural turning point.
15:38Gallipoli represents really the beginning of Anzac 2.0.
15:43Water bottles, water bottles, bottles.
15:47Without art in the form of the film Gallipoli, the Anzac legend might have just died.
15:54Instead, the Anzac spirit came roaring back to life.
15:58Now the face of the Anzacs was not old diggers. It was the Adonis like Mel Gibson and Mark Lee.
16:08So what is the role of art about war in the context of this film Gallipoli?
16:15I think the impetus was to say something profound about the futility and the tragedy of war.
16:24But I think, ironically, what they did in some ways is rebirth the Anzac legend for new generations.
16:33This renewed interest in Anzac 2.0 put Gallipoli on the backpacker map.
16:44Which gravestone did you take a photo of at Lone Pine?
16:47This is the most visited of the European battlefields.
16:51And the most common visitors are 20-year-old Australians and New Zealanders.
16:59One of them was Aussie Benina, who later married Turkish tour guide TJ.
17:06Together they started a tourism business to cater to the growing mass of pilgrims.
17:11Pretty much every night we put the Gallipoli movie, 7.30pm, and all the backpackers in there, they're watching it.
17:24And next morning when they get to the peninsula, they can feel, you know, what they've been through in the trenches in 1915.
17:32They hear the soundtrack.
17:36Now Turk in his right mind is going to waste a bullet on you.
17:38But so many more Turks died on the peninsula.
17:44It's officially 86,000 Turks died and unofficially 253,000 Turks died.
17:53Gallipoli wasn't just a horrendous loss for Australia.
17:57There were no real winners here.
18:02Welcome to this historic broadcast coming to you right across Australia and New Zealand live.
18:08from Anzac Cove.
18:10The backpacker pilgrimage became a rite of passage.
18:14Now the Prime Minister of Australia, Bob Hawke, is taking the podium...
18:17And soon politicians followed suit.
18:19Because of their ingenuity, their good humour and their endurance...
18:24Bob Hawke became the first Australian Prime Minister to attend a dawn service on Anzac Day at the landing site.
18:32This place, Gallipoli, is in one sense a part of Australia.
18:39Indeed, five years earlier, the Turkish government had acknowledged our deep attachment to this place by officially renaming it Anzac Cove.
18:50And so the dawn service became a popular fixture for Australian Prime Ministers.
18:59The sun will never set on the story of their deeds.
19:02It was for duty, loyalty, honour and mates.
19:08They bequeathed Australia a lasting sense of national identity.
19:15But as influential as it was, the film Gallipoli wasn't the last word on the Anzac legend.
19:28For me, the film Gallipoli is one of those touchstones that you go to to try to understand what Australia was.
19:35If I'm watching it now, I go, it's not us now. It doesn't represent us.
19:42For director Wesley Enoch, the eve of the 2015 centenary of the Gallipoli landing was the perfect moment to tell a new Anzac story.
19:53I'll put down very strongly Aboriginal in type.
19:58Jeez, how do you work that one out?
20:00Instead of just reaffirming the story, we knew there was an energy to kind of really look at it and say, what else does this story hold?
20:13There's a black history here that has gone untold and Black Diggers was part of telling those stories.
20:20I remember opening night at the Sydney Opera House, there was a sense that the whole audience just this intake of breath and this sigh and people up on their feet.
20:32They'd heard something they hadn't heard before.
20:36Black Diggers highlighted the stories of Indigenous servicemen and women during World War One,
20:41who despite facing discrimination at home, fought for king and country abroad.
20:50Do you think we're done telling this origin story, this Anzac legend?
20:55I've got a great belief in the Anzac story, which sounds contradictory, but if you think of the Anzac story as a beautiful trunk,
21:01it says something about the values, it says as this tree grows, it can then branch out into hold a whole myriad of beautiful stories that are connected to it.
21:12One hundred percent.
21:14And yet we can't escape the fact that the roots of the legend of the Anzacs lead back to the needless death of young Australians.
21:23And one battle became emblematic of the disastrous campaign.
21:34This small area of grass is the no man's land of the Battle of the Neck.
21:39The Australians, about 20 metres that way, the Turks with their machine guns just over the wall,
21:46it's an area barely bigger than two tennis courts.
21:50Peter Weir wasn't the first artist to stand on this ground and be moved by what happened here.
22:00The official war artist, George Lambert, came here in 1919.
22:04But what he discovered was truly shocking.
22:11Because this entire area was covered with the bones of fallen Anzacs.
22:16Men still lying exactly where they fell so it's no wonder that it had such a huge impact on him and he made the decision to make his great work about this place.
22:34George Lambert's monumental painting of the Battle of the Neck was one of the first visual representations of the Anzacs that wasn't propaganda.
22:48Instead, it was a truthful and raw depiction informed by the detailed accounts of Australia's official war correspondent, Charles Bean.
22:57Bean's powerful account of this battle would also inspire Peter Weir and David Williamson.
23:06The 10th went forward to meet death instantly as the 8th had done.
23:10The men running as swiftly and as straight as they could at the Turkish rifles.
23:14With that regiment went the flower of the youth of Western Australia.
23:25How fast can you run?
23:27Fast as a leopard.
23:30How fast are you going to run?
23:33Fast as a leopard.
23:35Then let's see you do it.
23:36Look, the boys haven't ever made it a foot.
23:44Get away! Get away! Get away! Get away!
23:47That's your message!
23:53Get away!
23:54Get away!
24:00Men rushed straight to their death.
24:02Gresley Harper and Wilfred, his younger brother, the latter of whom was last seen running forward like a schoolboy in a foot race.
24:10That passage was the breakthrough for David and I, and we based the film on that passage.
24:29I knew growing up that my grandmother had three uncles who fought in World War I, and I always assumed that it was in Europe.
24:36And it wasn't until I mentioned that I was making this show to our family historian, Jim, that he told me that one of those uncles was actually here.
24:47Now, he's pulled a few records and some other things and sent them to me and I haven't looked at them until now.
24:58There he is, Bill Beeching.
24:59Dear Rachel, your great uncle Bill Beeching joined up in 1914 at Gallipoli.
25:10God.
25:13That's wild.
25:16The regiment saw action in the ill-fated Battle of the Neck.
25:20By chance, Bill was taken ill with dysentery around 10 days before that battle and was shipped off to Lemnos for a week for treatment.
25:39He was in hospital during the Battle of the Neck.
25:44He was in hospital during the Battle of the Neck.
25:46So, I can hear my brother in this.
25:49He'd go.
25:51So, he got the shits and it saved his life.
25:55Amazingly, his two brothers, Jack and Fred, survived the war too.
25:58Now, the story that my grandmother told me was that the three boys went to war, the three boys came home.
26:13And the women in the town, when walking past their mother, couldn't look her in the eye because she got all her boys back.
26:22And they lost so many.
26:39Australians' connection to the Anzac legend is not based on what actually happened at Gallipoli.
26:45It's based on a feeling, it's an emotional attachment to a set of values and people enact those values through beautiful emotional rituals like the dawn service.
27:08The thing about Anzac Day is that it is a piece of art in itself.
27:12It starts with ceremony, deep, powerful ceremony of music, of poetry, of oratory.
27:25And then moves into the pageantry of walking the streets, of celebrating either your own service or the service of your family to the protection of our community.
27:35I guess it's impossible to prove if Anzac Day would be what it is today without the movie Gallipoli.
27:47But I've got no doubt that Australians who have seen the film across so many generations feel that much closer to the origin story of the Anzac legend.
27:57Were you proud of the fact that the film kind of refreshed the Anzac ideal?
28:11I would have been more proud if the film had left a much broader impression that we will never be involved in a senseless war again.
28:21That's what, that's what, in my heart, that's what I was doing it for.
28:27Next time, I head into the jungles of Vietnam.
28:39When the song was released, it was banned.
28:41Sit down with Aussie rock legends.
28:44This one is.
28:46And discover the music that brought together a nation divided.
28:51Don't ever, ever tell me that songs can't change the world.
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