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Clip description
Having said goodbye to his family, Will (Guy Hastings) marches out with his unit to board a transport ship. As his ship sails, he reads his farewell letters. His mother (Ruth Wainwright) prays for his safe return as his girlfriend Lily (Loma Rossmore) studies his picture. Once in Egypt, Will is stationed at Mena camp near the Great Pyramid at Giza (just outside Cairo). The troops train and live in the shadow of the pyramids and the Sphinx. Four soldiers take a ride on two camels, before embarking for Gallipoli.
Curator’s notes
The departure sequence is interesting – and quite accomplished for the time. The director Alfred Rolfe cuts between three locations here – held together with a striking shot of Will on the deck of a boat, heading out of Sydney Harbour.
The Egyptian scenes are themselves taken from another film, just as this film’s footage was later reused (see clip four). The Egyptian footage was shot by Pathé newsreel cameras and shown as a series of 11 films in the Pathé Animated Gazette. These were probably screened in Australia early in 1915, and sections were reused by Alfred Rolfe when he needed to illustrate Australians in Egypt for The Hero of the Dardanelles. We do not know quite how much of this he used, only that he used some of it, because it survived in the print that was the basis of this partial reconstruction. The National Film and Sound Archive reconstruction makes an educated guess, based on what might have been used.
Rolfe also used film from another source: the scenes of naval ships blasting their guns off Gallipoli are based on stock footage, although Dr Daniel Reynaud, whose research led to the reconstruction, has established that this stock footage is at least accurate to the Dardanelles campaign, if not to the actual landings at Gallipoli. Dr Reynaud is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at Avondale College. He worked on this restoration in 2005 with Marilyn Dooley, who was then a senior researcher at the NFSA.
