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Clip description
Billy has saved a fellow recruit from drowning, so his commander gives him a reward, a history book Australia and the World War, written by SH Perry. Billy becomes absorbed, reading before lights out in his bunk beside his best mate, Jack Thomas (William Green). Billy imagines the landing at Gallipoli, which is shown in recreated footage, borrowed from an earlier film.
Curator’s notes
Here we come to the big mystery. There are two films from 1928 containing this re-creation footage – this one and the AH Noad film. In 1996, Dr Daniel Reynaud, an historian at Avondale College, made a partial reconstruction of the 1915 Alfred Rolfe film, The Hero of the Dardanelles, using this footage of the Gallipoli landing, taken from both 1928 films.
Rolfe shot his re-creation on Tamarama beach in Sydney a few weeks after the actual landings in 1915. A second, competing film (called Within Our Gates, or Deeds that Won Gallipoli, 1915) also restaged the Gallipoli landing around the same time, but at Obelisk Bay inside the harbour.
The footage you see here, from when Billy holds the book to his chest and imagines, has been thought to have come directly from Alfred Rolfe’s 1915 film, but that is almost impossible. The first title after that shot of Billy says ‘60,000 Australians died in the Great War for Australia. 300,000 more offered their lives.’ That could only have been written after the end of the war, not in 1915. So either the footage comes from a film later than 1918, or the title comes (by itself) from a different film. If the landing is indeed Rolfe’s 1915 footage, why does it have a title written after 1918? This seems to suggest that someone else used Rolfe’s footage before 1928. If that is true, we don’t know what that second film was.
The beaching scenes, with the boats arriving from right to left, are used twice in The Spirit of Gallipoli. This is the first occasion. A few minutes later they are repeated, with a few extra preceding shots of landing boats being towed along flat water to the landings.
The shot with an outline of Australia as a darkened mask around images of soldiers on parade, is also seen in the Noad film. That film should perhaps now be retitled the Noad/Tinsdale film, because we can say with some certainly that Arthur Tinsdale made it (see main Curator’s notes). A number of the shots following that outline of Australia are identical to both 1928 films, but there is a curious difference at the end.
In The Spirit of Gallipoli there is a title saying ‘the victory of the Allies saved Australia – but for how long?’ In the Noad/Tinsdale film, that title is followed by a map showing Australia in white beneath a map of South-East Asia in black. The words on the black part of the map say: ‘1,000,000,000 overcrowd the North Pacific’. Beside the map of Australia, an arrow points at us, with the words ‘Empty how long?’
That is a reference to the White Australia policy and the fear of Asian invasion. We can only speculate on why it disappeared from The Spirit of Gallipoli. If The Spirit of Gallipoli was supported by the army, and apparently it was, it may have been an official sensibility. This view of racial purity and impending danger was relatively common in Australia after Federation, but not in quasi-official films.
