This was ANZAC day, and we went along to the dawn service at Austinmer. I have a certain amount of ambivalence about ANZAC day for reasons far too long and complex to go into here. It serves as the day of remembrance for those who have served in the armed forces. (Ceremonies also take place on the actual Remembrance Day of November 11 (marking the end of World War I), but the public holiday is on Anzac Day.)

The reason it's considered special is because it was the first large scale deployment of Australian and New Zealand troops. (Some had served in the Boer War, though that was before Australian federation in 1901 so they weren't actually "Australians", technically. And the numbers were not large.)

Unfortunately the commemoration isn't of a great and heroic military victory; in fact the entire campaign was a resource-wasting defeat and one of Churchill's (First Lord of the Admiralty at the time) more spectacular examples of brain flatulence. The intention was to conduct an amphibious landing in Turkey to knock it out of the war. Easy to say, not so easy to do. But the performance of the forces was worth commemorating. In any case, the landings occurred exactly 100 years before this Anzac Day, which is why I went along to this one.

The intention was to capture some aspect of the ceremony but I had underestimated the problems of light and position. Accordingly I turned my camera the other way over the rock pool. In terms of Binyon's "At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them" it seemed to work, somehow.

Last Year