27
August 2001
ON THE OCCASION OF
THE INAUGURAL ANNUAL MEMORIAL DINNER
BY MR LES CARLYON
Charles Bean and the Gallipoli journalists
By Les Carlyon
Many years ago -- I
can’t remember where, but it was a gathering rather like this -- someone asked
me who was the Australian journalist I most admired. Without thinking I said
Charles Bean.
I might have said Alan Moorehead, who didn’t know how to write a bad sentence.
Or Harry Gordon, who covered the Korean War and writes even more sweetly today
than he did 50 years ago.
I could have
mentioned these or one or two others. But, no, I instinctively said ‘Bean’, as
if that one syllable said it all.
Everyone that night seemed to accept Bean’s name well enough. This was, after
all, the man who left us an honest and detailed account of the Great War that is
unlike any other official history anywhere.
And this was a man of humility and decency, not a seeker of power or wealth, a
man -- and to use the word these days seems almost quaint -- with a sense of
duty.
But on my way home
that night I began to wonder. Why had his name popped so freely out of my mouth?
Part of the reason, I knew, was my friendship with Angus McLachlan, another fine
journalist, who had been Bean’s friend and had told me much about him. McLachlan
was a man I looked up to. If he said Bean was special that was enough
endorsement.
But another voice kept saying to me that Bean had flaws as a war correspondent
-- he certainly wasn’t Ernie Pyle -- and that, had I been his editor in 1915, I
might at times have felt the need to throw things.
Journalism isn’t the writing of history, although very occasionally it turns out
to be. Journalism isn’t the writing of literature, although occasionally it
turns out to be, most commonly -- oddly enough -- with sports writing.
Journalism is first of all being able to write an account of events to a
deadline. The tyranny of journalism is that deadline.
It doesn’t matter that three days after a close federal election or a Melbourne
Cup we think of the felicitous sentence we should have used, the one that had
been running around in our brain, half-formed but as elusive as a drop of
mercury.
What mattered was:
did we write the best story we could in time to meet the deadline.
Journalism is also about reaching large audiences. One does this by coming up
with interesting prose that is as clear as a country creek.
I mention these things because at Gallipoli Bean was not always good at meeting
deadlines. He was as accurate as a journalist could be given the limits of
censorship, but he tended to become caught up in fussy details that, as he piled
them on, often became confusing.
So why did I so blithely say he was the journalist to admire? Maybe I had meant
to say he was a great historian.
His history is wonderful for its democratic temper, its honesty and its detail.
If a soldier -- be he a private or a colonel -- did anything that mattered in
the Great War you’ll find him in Bean’s history, along with the news that
Corporal Smith, a farrier, was born at Elmore, Victoria, in 1895.
But as a historian
Bean did not have the clarity of a Geoffrey Blainey or the rhythms of a Manning
Clark. He sometimes joined one sentence to another so as to create jungles where
one had to trudge on, page after page, until a shaft of sunlight finally broke
through the canopy.
And, anyway, Bean was more than an historian. He had become the keeper of the
Anzac flame, the archbishop of an Australian church. Shrapnel Valley had been
his Damascus Road.
Maybe, I thought, I had been impulsive on both counts. Yet there was still
something about Bean, something very unusual that made him stand apart, and I
hope that when I finish speaking this will be self-evident.
Bean was a member
of a picturesque and picaresque group of journalists that covered the Gallipoli
war.
Malcom Ross of Wellington was the official New Zealand correspondent and he
couldn’t be altogether objective about this war. He had a son, also a
journalist, fighting as a lance-corporal, up on Walker’s Ridge.
Henry Nevinson of the Guardian was there for the English provincial
press. Nevinson was wounded in the head by shrapnel at Suvla in August. He was
carted off, bleeding spectacularly. He did not seek counselling or think to sell
his story to Today Tonight. He had his head dressed and reappeared, very
pale, an hour or so later to report the last act of the battle.
Bean was born at
Bathurst in 1879, the son a headmaster. Bean senior came from what Professor Ken
Inglis has called an ‘imperial family’. When Charles was 10 the family returned
to England. They spent winters in Brussels and young Charles often walked the
battlefield at Waterloo. Charles didn’t win first-class honours at Oxford. Had
he done so, he would almost certainly have gone into the Indian Civil Service
and Australia would have lost one of her best spirits.
Bean returned to
Australia with a law degree but journalism beckoned. And so did the bush. There,
in the struggle against the heat and the dust, Bean saw the quintessential
Australian virtues.
He eventually
joined the Sydney Morning Herald and travelled up the Darling to do a
series of pieces on the wool industry. These became a charming book, On the
Wool Track.
When he came to
write the war histories, Bean often seemed awed by the seriousness of his
subject, rather like a clergyman writing about God. On the Wool Track has
humour; the prose is relaxed and conversational, and you can sense Bean forming
his ideas on why these Australians out in the red country were different from
the English folk from whom they were descended. He had discovered what he saw as
‘the Australian character’.
When he won the AJA
ballot that would take him to Gallipoli, Bean was given the honorary rank of
captain and a few other military privileges, such as the right to a horse. He
splashed ashore at Gallipoli at 10 am on the first morning, a shy and skinny man
with russet hair and the air of an ascetic.
He installed
himself in a dugout with his clackety Corona typewriter, his brass telescope,
his box of paints, his piles of blank diaries. And he began to report a war as
no other correspondent has done before or since. He would often spend the whole
night writing those diaries by candlelight, and when you read them you can
sometimes sense his tiredness.
But he got it
right. He put together a mountain of facts that he had checked and
cross-checked. And this mountain is still so rock-hard that no one can write
about Gallipoli without going to it and acknowledging a debt.
After a few weeks
Bean went to Helles with Australia’s 2nd Brigade for the British attack on
Krithia. The Australians were shot up badly late in the afternoon of May 8, and
the wounded lay in the open as dusk approached. Bean made at least seven trips
across that battlefield to take water to the wounded and to direct
stretcher-bearers to them.
Among those he
saved was Walter McNicoll, then the father of a son, just six months’ old,
called David. David in 1944 reported the liberation of Paris as a war
correspondent.
If you stand on the
hill behind Krithia village today you can trace Bean’s path back and forth
across that battlefield, a couple of hundred yards out and a couple of hundred
back, all exposed. Bean was recommended for the Military Cross. He couldn’t
receive it because he was a civilian. He would have been embarrassed anyway.
Decades later he was offered a knighthood. He said he couldn't come to terms
with the idea of his wife going to the butcher and asking for the meat for Sir
Charles Bean.
A few months after
Krithia, Bean was shot. He felt a blow to his right thigh. He thought the
bullet, a stray from up on the escarpment, may not have penetrated, then he felt
greasy blood inside his trousers. He hobbled back to his dugout, told no one he
was wounded, and slumped down.
Next morning a
doctor recommended he be evacuated. Bean refused and lay in his dugout for three
days. This was a man who got all his material first hand. Of course he wouldn’t
leave. The Turkish bullet was still in Bean when he died in 1968.
Shortly after being
wounded, Bean wrote a revealing passage in his diary. He knew that he wasn’t
filing the tales of heroism and triumph that the editors back home wanted.
He wrote in his
diary that other war correspondents exaggerated and that the ‘tender Australian
public’ only wanted to hear flattery. He mentioned that other correspondents had
written ‘nonsense’ about wounded men begging to be sent back to the front.
He went
on to write -- and this isn’t a bad creed for any journalist --
‘I can’t write that it occurred if I know it did
not, even if by painting it that way I could rouse the blood and make the pulse
beat faster.’
All his life, Bean
was a teller of truths, even if it cost him, and Gallipoli cost him because
several papers stopped taking his copy. Bean believed in what should always be
the first rule of journalism: get it right.
When Bean was lying
wounded in his dugout, Phillip Schuler, the Age correspondent, looked
after him for three days. Phillip was in his mid-twenties, a handsome young man
whom everyone seemed to like.
Schuler’s father
was editor of the Age and, after 1914, he suffered because of his German
name and birthplace. Phillip went off to Egypt on seven quid a week from the
Age but couldn’t get accreditation to go ashore at Gallipoli until July. He
saw the August offensive and the Dantesque horrors of Lone Pine. He wrote a
series of pieces on the scandal of the medical arrangements. He told of wounded
being left on a hospital ship in Alexandria because the English staff onshore
wanted to go to the races.
In 1916 Schuler
wrote a book Australia in Arms, the story of Gallipoli. It has light
touches and lots of vivid descriptive stuff. Schuler had a good eye.
Australia in Arms is an astonishingly good book when you remember that its
author was only 26-years’-old.
One would have
thought that Schuler by now would have realised that it is better to be a
reporter than a soldier. But the following year he enlisted -- not as an
officer, as he probably could have been -- but as a driver. In 1917 he was
promoted to second lieutenant. In June that year he died of wounds in Belgium --
specifically wounds to the left arm, the right leg, the face and the throat. He
was just short of 28 years old and he had been literally shot to pieces.
Schuler
could have been anything. He might have become editor of the Age like his
father, or something grander. His father, Frederick, received his son’s effects,
little things such as a pipe and a pair of spurs, and -- the thing any good
journalist always carries -- a dictionary. Frederick never got over his son’s
death. He died in 1926 while still editor of the
Age.
No one, either at
the Age or in the wider community, much remembers Phillip Schuler today.
I would suggest he is a man who deserves to be remembered, especially by a
gathering such as this.
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett,
an Englishman, was nothing like Bean or Schuler. He reminds me of my old friend
Peter Smark -- brilliant. Brilliant at stitching words together quickly to meet
a deadline. And brilliant at filling in an expense account.
Both Ashmead-Bartlett
and Smark could write ‘hire of yak -- 1000 pounds’ without blushing. If
questioned they would explain that good yaks were hard to find and, by the way,
the lead rope was a steal at just 250 extra.
Ashmead-Bartlett
brought a Parisian chef to Gallipoli to cook for him. He got about in a yellow
silk dressing gown with crimson trim. He liked to drink, preferably champagne.
He was always broke. He didn’t know whether he was a journalist or a political
player, and he was sometimes careless with facts. His glum demeanour seemed to
say that he was the only person who could truly see what was going on and that
it was lonely to be surrounded by so many small minds.
But we should not
take him lightly. He was right about most things at Gallipoli. The night before
the landings he told Commander Dix, who was in charge of the tows for the Anzac
assault, that the landing forces at Anzac and Helles were both a division light.
Everyone, Dix wrote, was in high spirits and Ashmead-Bartlett was thought to be
a Jeremiah. Ashmead Bartlett was, of course, right.
Ashmead-Bartlett
wrote the famous account of the Anzac landing, with its exaggerations here and
there. Bean couldn’t file at that time because he hadn’t yet received his full
accreditation. Ashmead-Bartlett’s story was pasted in scrapbooks and carried in
the pockets of men who rushed to enlist.
Bean nurtured the
Anzac legend, gave it form and substance; Ashmead-Bartlett, an Englishman,
started it.
Ashmead-Bartlett
was in his mid thirties in 1915 and he knew about war. He had served in South
Africa and reported seven other wars. And he could write. He once described a
destroyer trying to avoid Turkish shells as writhing about as if she had a pain
inside her.
Mention of Ashmead-Bartlett
inevitably leads us to Keith Murdoch. Mythology has Keith Murdoch exposing the
scandal of the Gallipoli campaign with his newspaper articles.
Ashmead-Bartlett --
whatever his excesses and vanities -- was a master craftsman; Murdoch was then a
journeyman. Murdoch spent only four days at Anzac in September. Just about
everything he learned about the failure of the campaign, he got from Ashmead-Bartlett.
Ashmead-Bartlett --
not Murdoch -- publicly exposed the muddling of Gallipoli with a piece in the
Sunday Times. Two British soldiers -- Guy Dawnay and Maurice Hankey --
privately exposed the muddling in conversations with Cabinet ministers. And
those articles of Murdoch’s? There weren’t any.
He wrote, as was
his way, a private letter to the Australian prime minister. English Cabinet
ministers used a copy of this letter for their own ends.
To be fair, much of
what was in Murdoch’s letter was true and, as a result of how the letter was
used by Lloyd George and others, it did help to save lives. Murdoch’s methods,
however, had nothing to do with conventional journalism.
Bean and Murdoch
were involved in another curious incident in 1918, and I mention it only because
the aftermath of it tells much about both men. Both campaigned against John
Monash being made commander of the Anzac Corps. Bean was against the appointment
because he honestly believed Brudenell White was a better soldier.
Murdoch engaged in
all manner of intrigue to have Monash’s appointment changed, including --
again-- letters to his prime minister. We don’t know why Murdoch opposed Monash,
although the documents suggest that, unlike Bean, he was simply playing at
kingmaking.
Bean, decent man
that he was, later wrote in his diary and elsewhere that he had been wrong about
Monash. Murdoch never explained his part.
It’s right that we
now have a foundation that bears Bean’s name. He virtually created that unique
and wonderful institution down the road, the Australian War Memorial. And for
those of us who care about journalism, he is a man to look up to.
He got the facts
right.
He did all his
reporting first hand.
He didn’t defer to
anyone, but he was never arrogant.
He stayed in the
background; he never thought he was the story.
He never sought
riches nor conventional honours.
He was an
Australian patriot, but he was never blind. What he believed in most of all --
and he said it many times -- was the truth.
He was all his life
a man of ideals, but he would throw an ideal away if it no longer made sense.
He was famous for
reporting a war, yet he was a man of peace.
All that
journalists can ever hope to leave behind them are the words their readers care
to remember. Which means Bean will be remembered, because he told us so much
about the way we were long ago.
So I end this talk
by saying that I think I got it right all those years ago when, one night, I
said -- without thinking -- that Charles Bean was the journalist we should all
admire.
[ends]
