Rock And Hard Places Part 10

"There's nothing else possible," says Julia. "More than 75 percent of the reactor has always been inaccessible, due to radiation or structural damage."

So n.o.body really knows what's going on in there.

"Not really."

Other sights on the Chern.o.byl tourist trail include a lurid monument to the firefighters who fought the blaze-they comprised the majority of the thirty-one people who died of radiation exposure immediately after the explosion. There's the tank graveyard, containing the radioactive military vehicles that transported workers to the disaster zone, and the enormous, ungainly Mi-8 helicopters which flew more than 1,800 sorties above the fire, dropping lead and sand on the burning core. There's also the place that was once a village called Kopachi, and which is now scrub-covered hillocks planted with nuclear hazard warnings-the whole village, and substantial quant.i.ties of nuclear waste, was buried here, and all that remains are the road signs. In Ukraine, as in much of Eastern Europe, towns have signs informing you when you've pa.s.sed their city limits. These consist of the name of the place you've just left, with a red line through it. Kopachi's still stands, an unintentionally prescient monument to a town that has been crossed off the map. It's a creepy place to be, but it's only a warm-up.

Pripyat's name should be better known, at least as well as those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are the only three cities to have been destroyed by nuclear power, and Pripyat, four kilometres from Reactor No. 4, is the only one that didn't recover. On April 25, 1986, Pripyat was a model Soviet new town, purpose-built in the 1970s to house the best and brightest of the USSR's nuclear technicians. By April 28, 1986, Pripyat was abandoned, its 47,000 people evacuated in a hastily convened fleet of buses. They never came home, and they never will. Their town was fatally poisoned, and its corpse is still slowly decomposing.

Behind the main square is a funfair, which was due to open on May 1, 1986, as part of the May Day celebrations held annually throughout the communist bloc. Yuri tells me not to tread too close to the dodgem rink. When I ask why, he holds the dosimeter against green moss which has gathered around the rink: 1.080, our highest reading of the day, even more than we'd racked up standing right outside the reactor. "Just don't touch anything organic," says Yuri. A few decades from now, that moss may have enslaved the human population of Earth.

Pripyat was a nice place to live, apparently. Before the accident, Sergei wanted to move here.

"One of the best places in the USSR," he remembers. "Lots of young families-people who worked at the plant, and they earned good money. You could get imported things. Good clothes, good food."

Sergei is keen on clothes and food. He has reported for duty today in a dapper olive-coloured suit, and he credits his survival of the radiation he absorbed in 1986, and since, to Crimean red wine.

"Everyone who drank it was okay," he confirms.

The atomic Pompeii of Pripyat is a complete mismatch of sound and vision. To walk through a city and hear no sound at all, other than your own footsteps and the occasional tweets and buzzes of birds and insects, is as disorienting as, say, having your contemplation of a desert interrupted by a cacophony of police sirens, car stereos and Hare Krishna drums. Nothing, save for the slow reclamation of buildings by trees, has happened here for eighteen years. The hammer-and-sickle emblems still hang on the lampposts and perch astride the tallest apartment blocks-there was n.o.body here to discredit communism when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, or celebrate Ukraine's independence from the USSR in 1991. In a dusty room at the back of the concert hall on the square, we find a room stacked with Soviet flags and banners acclaiming Lenin and placards bearing portraits of local Communist Party officials.

"Props for the 1986 May Day parade," explains Yuri. "Indefinitely postponed."

Away from Pripyat, some normal human life, of a sort, persists in the Zone. Though it is not permitted for newcomers to move into the Zone, a few of the people who lived here before April 1986, mostly elderly, have drifted back. Of the 130,000 people evacuated from the district after the accident, about 350 have returned. The village of Parishev boasts a population of eighteen, all of pensionable age. Yuri takes us to meet one of them.

Maria, seventy-five, is delighted to see us, which is understandable, as we may be the most exciting thing that has happened to her in months-a meeting with a local is a common feature of the Chern.o.byl day trip, but the outings are not over-subscribed. Maria lives alone in a three-room wooden house, decorated with family photos and her own tapestries. A small farmyard outside is home to chickens, geese and cats. The cats have just the one head each, and the chickens don't lay square eggs. The average background radiation here, according to Yuri's dosimeter, is 0.014, about normal.

Maria produces a generous spread-vegetables, goose lard, raw eggs-which I'm not sure about at all. Yuri rea.s.sures that the vegetables are from outside the Zone, sold by a mobile shop that comes through twice a week. The eggs?

"From Maria's chickens," he smiles, cutting a hole in the top of one and sucking back the contents. Anxious not to offend, I accept a gla.s.s each of Maria's excellent homemade moonshine, and birch juice-water tapped from the trunks of birch trees. This tastes like diluted furniture polish.

I ask Maria what she remembers of the accident. Yuri translates, between mouthfuls of egg.

"A sunny day, like this one," she says. "I had been swimming in the river. This village was part of a collective farm then, and the head of the collective farm told us we had seventy-two hours to get out. We were put on buses on May 5. A year later, I came back."

Why?

"It's my home. I'm happy here. I have my chickens and cats, and my grandchildren come to visit."

Weren't you concerned about what the government was telling you?

"Those lying communists?" she cackles. "They never told the truth to anyone."

IN THE CHERn.o.bYL Museum back in Kiev, there's a copy of the New York Times New York Times, dated April 29, 1986. The front page announces that the government of the USSR had issued the following statement: "An accident has occurred at the Chern.o.byl Nuclear Power Plant as one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. A government commission has been set up." This communique could charitably be described as an understatement, and more accurately as a dishonest, belief-beggaringly cynical attempt to deflect publicity from a catastrophe with global consequences.

Reactor No. 4 at Chern.o.byl exploded at 1:23 AM on April 26, 1986. The accident occurred after a test of the cooling systems, during which safety procedures were ignored or overridden and, once things began to fizz out of control, panicked errors were committed by the Homer Simpsonovitches on duty. The USSR did their best to keep the story secret. The same New York Times New York Times story reports, chillingly, "A British reporter returning from Kiev reported seeing no activity in the Ukrainian capital that would suggest any alarm." The people of Kiev weren't told they had anything to be alarmed about-Kiev's May Day parade went ahead as scheduled. Sergei had told me that he'd been warned that if he spoke of what he'd seen in Chern.o.byl to anyone in Kiev, he'd be locked in the nuthatch. The Soviets were only shamed into their admission when abnormal radiation levels were detected in Scandinavia. story reports, chillingly, "A British reporter returning from Kiev reported seeing no activity in the Ukrainian capital that would suggest any alarm." The people of Kiev weren't told they had anything to be alarmed about-Kiev's May Day parade went ahead as scheduled. Sergei had told me that he'd been warned that if he spoke of what he'd seen in Chern.o.byl to anyone in Kiev, he'd be locked in the nuthatch. The Soviets were only shamed into their admission when abnormal radiation levels were detected in Scandinavia.

The scale of the disaster is so vast that it may never be precisely measured. What is known is dreadful enough. More than five million people, mostly in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, suffered some detriment to their health. At least 2,000 cases of thyroid cancer have been attributed to Chern.o.byl, and the numbers of such cancers still being found in children in towns near the Exclusion Zone may mean that more evacuations, more Pripyats, are necessary. The only good news was that the betrayal of its own people perpetrated by the complacent USSR in the days after the accident helped speed the end of the entire dreary communist experiment. The rupture in Reactor No. 4 was the first crack in the Berlin Wall.

I do eventually find a souvenir of Chern.o.byl. On Kiev's famous market street Andriyivsky Uzviz, I stop at a stall specialising in the ephemera of both Ukraine's twentieth-century occupiers. After I've fossicked through the Lenin badges and swastika-spangled SS cigarette cases, I ask the stallholder if he has anything relating to the nuclear plant. He nods, and shows me a medal-a scarlet and gold cross hanging from a green and red ribbon. The design in the middle of the cross consists of a blood-coloured teardrop, and some atomic symbols.

"For the Liquidators," says the stallholder. "Twenty dollars."

The Liquidators were the people who cleaned up the mess, and who built the sarcophagus. They were drafted from the military and other government agencies, and there were somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 of them-as is often the case where Chern.o.byl is concerned, n.o.body really knows for sure. There are both financial and social advantages to claiming Liquidator status, and it is believed that some have contrived to get themselves falsely added to the list-the Ukrainian equivalent of hanging around in New York bars after September 11 in a rented firefighter's costume.

"It was presented in the 1990s," says the stallholder, while I hold the medal up to the sun. "So no radiation. Don't worry."

That's not what I'm worried about. What I'm worried about is what happened to the bloke it was awarded to.

12.

STRAIT TO h.e.l.l.

Anzac Day at Gallipoli APRIL 1998.

WHEN PETER WEIR'S 1981 film Gallipoli Gallipoli was released in the United States, it was trailed with the slogan "From a place you've never heard of, comes a story you'll never forget." Had this sales pitch been more widely known about in my homeland, we'd have put your amba.s.sador to sea in a longboat with a hunk of stale bread. The idea that anybody should know of Gallipoli only because it helped launch the career of Mel Gibson would be the sort of thing we'd take enormous offence at, if only we didn't find the idea so incredible. was released in the United States, it was trailed with the slogan "From a place you've never heard of, comes a story you'll never forget." Had this sales pitch been more widely known about in my homeland, we'd have put your amba.s.sador to sea in a longboat with a hunk of stale bread. The idea that anybody should know of Gallipoli only because it helped launch the career of Mel Gibson would be the sort of thing we'd take enormous offence at, if only we didn't find the idea so incredible.

If you grow up in Australia, not hearing of Gallipoli is approximately as likely as not hearing of Australia. American readers desiring some perspective as to Gallipoli's place in the Australian psyche could try imagining Valley Forge multiplied by Iwo Jima, but they'd still be struggling. Gallipoli became the most famous place in Australia, despite the apparent handicap of its situation in Turkey, when soldiers of the Australia & New Zealand Army Corps stormed Turkish defences on the peninsula on April 25, 1915; the date is a devoutly observed national holiday in both countries, known as Anzac Day.

I visited Gallipoli for the Sunday Times Sunday Times on the eighty-third anniversary of the landings, and left more bemused than ever by my country's relationship with this bleak stretch of sh.o.r.eline. My feelings about the place have become no more resolved in the decade or so since. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard swaddled itself ostentatiously in khaki-partly to sh.o.r.e up support for Australia's involvement in the War on Terror, mostly as a symptom of Howard's instinctively belligerent and defensive notions of patriotism. This sometimes made observing Anzac Day feel an act of collaboration with aspects of Australia that the country should-and can-rise above: parochialism, insularity, a certain suburban suspicion of the rest of the planet. In that same period, however, Gallipoli inspired the historian Les Carlyon's on the eighty-third anniversary of the landings, and left more bemused than ever by my country's relationship with this bleak stretch of sh.o.r.eline. My feelings about the place have become no more resolved in the decade or so since. In the early years of the twenty-first century, the Australian government of Prime Minister John Howard swaddled itself ostentatiously in khaki-partly to sh.o.r.e up support for Australia's involvement in the War on Terror, mostly as a symptom of Howard's instinctively belligerent and defensive notions of patriotism. This sometimes made observing Anzac Day feel an act of collaboration with aspects of Australia that the country should-and can-rise above: parochialism, insularity, a certain suburban suspicion of the rest of the planet. In that same period, however, Gallipoli inspired the historian Les Carlyon's Gallipoli Gallipoli-not just magisterial military history, but a genuine literary masterpiece-and an interesting national soul-searching prompted by the death, in May 2002, of the last surviving veteran of the campaign.

He was Alec Campbell, and he was 103 years old when he died, just a few weeks after leading the 2002 Anzac Day parade in his native Hobart. He joined the fifteenth battalion of what was then called the Australian Imperial Force in 1915; he lied about his age, adding two years to the sixteen he had on the clock at that point. He arrived on Gallipoli six months into the eight months that the campaign lasted. He served as a rifleman and water carrier, was wounded, contracted a serious fever which partially paralysed his face and was invalided out of the army still a year too young to have joined it in the first place.

Campbell's remaining eighty-six years were eventful and industrious: he built railway carriages, sailed ocean-going racing boats, helped in the construction of Australia's first parliament house, organised and ran trades unions, married twice, and fathered nine children, the last of them at the age of sixty-nine. He disdained attempts at co-option into the role of mythical elder. "Gallipoli," he told one inquirer, "was Gallipoli."

This chapter is for him, and for all the others.

AS DAWN a.s.sERTS itself through unseasonal April clouds, the first Australians to make it off the beach have occupied the steep, flat-topped hill they call Plugge's Plateau; one of them wears his national flag draped around his shoulders like a cape. On the next row of ridges, a few bold pathfinders pick their way through the clinging scrub and the deep, treacherous trenches dug by the hills' defenders. Some of the Australians break left, scrambling up to positions at Quinn's Post and Walker's Ridge. Others head right towards Lone Pine.

Back down on the beaches of Ari Burnu and Anzac Cove, chaos reigns. Confused and exhausted invaders search in the dim light for the people they landed with, and the people they were supposed to meet prior to pressing on up the cliffs. Thousands of dry, blunt, Antipodean accents call names and swear the sweet, misty air blue.

A lone bugler by the cenotaph at Ari Burnu signals the end of 1998's Anzac Day dawn service, and I wander off in my own hopeless hunt for the bus I arrived in, which is parked in the dark among dozens of others in a queue of headlights that winds along the beach road. Not for the first or last time, I wonder what it is with my countryfolk and this rugged, uninviting sliver of Turkey, trailing awkwardly into the Aegean. Eighty-three years, we've been coming ash.o.r.e here, and we still can't get it right.

THE DARDANELLES CAMPAIGN of 1915 had all the core ingredients necessary for the staging of a really top-notch military catastrophe: a) a bad idea; b) the inept execution of same; and c) the total boneheaded refusal by those responsible for a) and b) to stare the truth in the face when it became apparent that the wheels were falling off.

The bad idea, largely that of a First Lord of the Admiralty called Winston Churchill, was the forcing of the Dardanelles, the narrow strait between the asiatic Turkish mainland and a dog-leg-shaped peninsula called Gallipoli. The view from whichever region of Cloud-Cuckoo Land that British high command were inhabiting was that such an expedition would lead to the swift capture of Constantinople and the removal of Turkey from World War I. So confident were they that simple, fearful Johnny Foreigner would fold his tent and flee at the first meaningful brandishing of British steel, that the initial attempt to take the Dardanelles, on March 18, 1915, was an exclusively naval operation. A British fleet, consisting of 18 battleships and many more cruisers and destroyers, sauntered up the straits-"an unforgettable picture of aloof grandeur," according to the historian Robert Rhodes James.

It didn't impress the gunners in the Turkish fortifications. They sank three of the British battleships and crippled three others. By the time this aloof, grand Imperial armada limped back whence it came, no doubt with hoots of Turkish derision pursuing it across the water, it had 700 fewer sailors than it arrived with. Turkish losses totaled forty men and four cannons. From a British point of view, the humiliation can barely be imagined: a nation which had defined itself so much for so long as the greatest of the world's naval powers had been dealt a rare old caning by a people still popularly regarded as backward peasants with daft ta.s.sled hats and a mania for selling carpets. It was as if Manchester United had been given a Cup draw away to Ed's Bar & Grill of the Runcorn & District Jumpers For Goalposts Sunday No-Hopers' League and gotten stuffed 6-0-except, of course, that the overwhelming majority of the British public didn't think it was hilarious. On April 25, 1915, allied troops went ash.o.r.e on Gallipoli.

British troops of the twenty-ninth division landed at Cape h.e.l.les, on the tip of the peninsula. French troops took k.u.m Kale on the Asian side of the strait. The British encountered stiff resistance and incurred shocking casualties. The French captured their objective with minimal difficulty. Both groups of soldiers were instantly forgotten by posterity. To the north, on Gallipoli's Aegean sh.o.r.e, the first a.s.sault was made by the Australian & New Zealand Army Corps-the Anzacs.

Gallipoli has since been so completely appropriated into the mythologies of Australia and New Zealand that it's news to most of my British friends that anybody other than the Anzacs took part in the campaign. The truth is that French, Canadian and Indian troops also fought and died for the allied cause, and that of the 36,000 commonwealth servicemen whose names are listed in Gallipoli's thirty-one allied cemeteries, two-thirds are British. Regrettably, if they're remembered at all, it is mostly in the context in which they were portrayed in Peter Weir's 1981 film Gallipoli Gallipoli: ambling ash.o.r.e at Suvla Bay, "drinking tea on the beach," while the eighth and tenth regiments of the Australian Light Horse were fed into Turkish machine-guns at a slim, rocky platform called The Nek in a series of absurd bayonet charges. While it's true enough that this criminally senseless slaughter occured, on August 7, 1915, the implicit suggestion that British, or French, or Turkish troops were having a relatively easy time of it is at best insensitive and at worst insulting.

What Gallipoli Gallipoli the film does depict accurately is Gallipoli the popular legend, a myth that is as much a part of growing up Australian as Vegemite toast for breakfast: our bravest and finest martyred by stupid, arrogant, brandy-swilling, upper-cla.s.s pommy martinets with suspiciously camp lisps. True or not-and the officers who could have called off the carnage at The Nek, Colonel Jack Anthill and Brigadier Frederic Hughes, were both Australians-it's what we've been taking out on the English on the cricket pitch ever since. I suppose it could be worse. The only other nation to base so much of its self-image on a military sh.e.l.lacking by Turkey is Serbia, and the world would certainly be a happier place if they'd been able to placate their rage by whizzing a few bouncers around Michael Atherton's ears. the film does depict accurately is Gallipoli the popular legend, a myth that is as much a part of growing up Australian as Vegemite toast for breakfast: our bravest and finest martyred by stupid, arrogant, brandy-swilling, upper-cla.s.s pommy martinets with suspiciously camp lisps. True or not-and the officers who could have called off the carnage at The Nek, Colonel Jack Anthill and Brigadier Frederic Hughes, were both Australians-it's what we've been taking out on the English on the cricket pitch ever since. I suppose it could be worse. The only other nation to base so much of its self-image on a military sh.e.l.lacking by Turkey is Serbia, and the world would certainly be a happier place if they'd been able to placate their rage by whizzing a few bouncers around Michael Atherton's ears.

The Anzacs were put ash.o.r.e a mile or so north of their intended landing site-the squabbling has continued ever since about whether this was due to drifting currents, inaccurate maps, misunderstandings on the ground or thundering incompetence at command level. "All of the above" seems as good a bet as any, though the latter option, naturally, is the received folk wisdom (In July 1993, I came to Gallipoli while backpacking around Turkey, and went to the battlefields with a group of Australians. When our guide introduced himself as an Englishman, we raced to make the same joke-"Make sure you take us to the right beach.") Instead of hitting the relatively gentle slopes just south of h.e.l.l Spit, the Anzacs found themselves staring up at serrated cliffs and ridges that rose almost vertically from the beach, hundreds of feet high, to a triangular pinnacle nicknamed The Sphinx.

Even discounting such obstacles as barbed wire, trenches, mines, mortars and raking machine-gun and sniper fire, the cliff face at Ari Burnu is daunting. I couldn't climb it in a day, not even with regular breaks for water and hyperventilation. The first Anzacs ash.o.r.e on the first Anzac Day began their ascent at around 4:30 AM. By 8:00 AM, one group of Australians, led by Captain E.H. Tulloch and Captain J.P. Lalor, had not only scaled these towering heights, but fought their way inland as far as The Nek, a mile or more from where they'd landed.

The Gallipoli campaign-grotesque, murderous and futile even by the standards of World War I-was allowed to fester for eight more months before the peninsula was evacuated. In that time, the Anzacs got no further than they had on the first day, but they dug themselves immovably into the cherished memories of three nations-Australia, New Zealand and, altogether bizarrely, Turkey.

ACROSS THE DARDANELLES from Gallipoli, tucked into a bay at the narrowest point of the straits, is the town of Cannakalle. Cannakalle is the centre of the Gallipoli industry, and one of the strangest places on earth. Cannakalle, uniquely, is a city-sized shrine to a defeated invader.

In Australia, commercial exploitation of the Anzac name is prevented by law. In Cannakalle, there is an Anzac Hotel, an Anzac Bar and at least two Anzac grocery stores, both of which stock Vegemite and Violet Crumble bars. One restaurant posts the latest Australian Rules football scores in its windows, and another hangs a sign offering free gla.s.ses of the Australian chocolate drink Milo with every meal. The map of the peninsula I buy in Cannakalle confirms that Turks still call Gallipoli's desolate ridges and hills what the invading soldiers did: Quinn's Post, Monash Valley, Shrapnel Gully. Anzac Cove is known officially as Anzak Koyu. So far as I know, there is not an area of the Ardennes renamed Wehrmacht Wood-nor, more pertinently, a suburb of Darwin called Tojo. On April 24th, the day before Anzac Day, the barely distinguishable flags of Australia and New Zealand are flying from poles along the seafront and in the windows of every shop.

Granted, Cannakalle's status as a corner of a foreign field that is forever Australia is partly basic commercial sense, of which Turks are not generally short. Several companies based in Cannakalle run tours of the battlefields, and while Cannakalle is a pretty little town with a couple of nice places to eat, there's no other reason why you'd go out of your way to visit it. But the respect of the locals for the invaders of 1915 and the fondness they harbour for the visitors of 1998 are both unmistakably genuine. I have a cold gla.s.s of Victoria Bitter in the Anzac Pub and reflect that if I was to open a bar where I live now, in the East End of London, and call it The Luftwaffe, my only pa.s.sing trade would be from local arsonists.

The Anzac Day embarkation begins just after midnight. Ponderous white ferries crowd Cannakalle's tiny dock area while tourist coaches, minibuses and bedraggled, bleary-eyed solo travellers with bedrolls and backpacks roll and shuffle aboard. Aboard the ferry, it's quieter than I ever imagined several hundred Australians in a confined s.p.a.ce could be, though I suspect this is due less to a sense of occasion than it is to exhaustion. Most are in their 20s, though there's a smattering of older folk, some with service medals pinned to their cardigans and windcheaters, and a few here in uniform, taking breaks from peacekeeping operations in the Middle East and Bosnia.

In the interminable queue for the toilet on the car deck, I strike up a conversation with an Australian Air Force officer in desert camouflage. He has been serving in Kuwait.

"f.u.c.king hot, f.u.c.king dusty, f.u.c.king full of f.u.c.king Americans who f.u.c.king think they f.u.c.king know f.u.c.king everything, and a complete f.u.c.king waste of our f.u.c.king time," he says, summing up his current posting. "Nothing to f.u.c.king drink, either." I ask him if he and his men are excited, or awed, or honoured, or what, by the thought of being on the beach at Gallipoli for Anzac Day. "f.u.c.ked if I know," he shrugs. "We'd have gone on holiday to f.u.c.king h.e.l.l to get out of f.u.c.king Kuwait."

We are not, as a people, p.r.o.ne to rigorous self-a.n.a.lysis. I don't get much further elsewhere on the boat with my efforts to find an explanation for this pilgrimage (the term is appropriate: the Anzac Day crowd is not just backpackers who were pa.s.sing through-my flight from London to Istanbul two days previously had been rammed full of Australians). Sample responses include "Dunno, mate," "Dunno, really," and "Dunno, mate, really, just wanted to see what the place felt like."

This is actually not a bad answer. It's certainly why I came to Gallipoli the first time. I've never known what to make of the whole thing-no rationalisation of its place in the Australian consciousness really holds up. True, a lot of Australians died here, but more died at Villers-Bretonneux three years to the day later, and we won that one. True as well that Australians fought here with extraordinary courage, but it's not like we remember their names-though most of us have heard of Private Simpson, killed while ferrying wounded soldiers to safety on his donkey, few Australians could name even one of the seven Anzacs who won Victoria Crosses during the battle for Lone Pine between August 7th and August 9th, 1915 (Keysor, Symons, Shout, Tubb, Burton, Dunstan and Hamilton, but I had to look them up).

When an Australian journalist called Jonathan King went in search of Gallipoli veterans in 1997, he found only seven still alive, aged between 99 and 104. These amazing old men all told life stories that made the Indiana Jones films look like "Five Go To The Seaside." One, Len Hall, had not only served at Gallipoli, but charged in history's last successful cavalry action with the Light Horse at Beersheeba, ridden into Damascus with Lawrence and then returned home and married the stranger to whom he'd given the emu feather plume from his hat when he'd embarked five years previously. However, these survivors are not half so individually revered in life as their less fortunate comrades are revered collectively in death.

There's not even consensus on the symbolic value of Gallipoli. There are some who claim that the fiasco was "the birth of the nation," that the blood spilt was a belated consecration of Australia's federation in 1901; those who push this line are generally the sort of people who are perfectly happy that Australia's head of state is decided by an accident of birth in a foreign castle owned by the most dysfunctional family on earth not called Jackson, and that a quarter of our flag is taken up by somebody else's. Gallipoli has also been used as a cornerstone of the Australian republican position-as a signifier of the trouble blind loyalty to some other mug's empire can get you into, it's difficult to beat.

For whatever reason, Gallipoli is hallowed ground-Anglo-Saxon Australia's only sacred site. It occurs to me, as the ferry draws up to the peninsula, and buses and people start puttering and stumbling ash.o.r.e in the dark, that those back home who continue to strew obstacles in the path of land rights for Australia's indigenous people could do worse than to ponder how they'd feel if a Turkish government told us we couldn't come to Gallipoli anymore and, furthermore, that they were going to dig the place up to look for uranium.

NOT THAT TURKEY is likely to do anything quite so cra.s.s.

"Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives," begins the dedication, "you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country, therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

These generous words are embossed on a sort of stone billboard near the Anzac landing position at Ari Burnu. They were spoken in 1934 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder and first President of modern Turkey. As a 34-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel serving in the peninsula's defences in 1915, Ataturk led from the front in halting the Anzac advance. His exploits won him a popularity which, after the war, he exploited and expanded to allow himself to reinvent Turkey in his own image. His zest for modernisation gave Turks a roman alphabet, a semblance of secular democracy, a largely western outlook and surnames-Ataturk, the name he chose for himself, means "Father Turk." His attention to detail was as admirable as his fashion sense: he pa.s.sed laws abolishing baggy trousers and fezzes because he thought they looked silly.

Turks venerate Gallipoli with concrete reason: if Ataturk's gold pocket.w.a.tch had not, in true Boys' Own Adventure style, stopped the fragment of British shrapnel that struck him in the chest near Chunuk Bair, Turkey today would be an utterly different place, and Turks need only look over their borders to Syria, Iran and Iraq to see how different. Ataturk's portrait hangs in every public building in Turkey. His statue stands in every empty s.p.a.ce, and he smirks raffishly from the 100,000 lire note, looking undeniably like Peter Cushing after a few sherries.

There must be more Australians and Kiwis on the beach this morning than there were in 1915-seven or eight thousand at least, I reckon. The Anzac Day dawn service is conducted from a temporary platform mounted just above the beach. It includes some stomping and shouting by a Maori warrior, a speech by the Governor-General of New Zealand and another speech by an Australian minister for something. These are followed by the spoken lament that starts "They shall not grow old," and ends with "Lest we forget," a one-minute silence and a communal mumbling of our national anthems.

As the day progresses, more ceremonies take place at the other cemeteries on the peninsula. There's a memorial for the Turkish 57th regiment, wiped out on the first day of the campaign. Those who have travelled from New Zealand mourn their dead at Chunuk Bair. A few-very few-attend ceremonies at the British and French graveyards. The Australian service takes place at Lone Pine.

The terrible thing about Lone Pine is how small it is. The entire battlefield is perhaps the size of three football pitches. In two days in August 1915, 2,200 Australians and 5,000 Turks died here. Here, there are more speeches, more silence and another hopelessly indecisive stab at "Advance Australia Fair." It's a common a.s.sumption, though a debatable one, that Australians aren't much use at expressing emotion on a personal level. It is indisputable fact that when it comes to expressing emotion in a group, we're completely b.l.o.o.d.y hopeless-though, this morning, some inventive souls do find an appropriate vent for their feelings.

On the carefully manicured lawn behind the Lone Pine cenotaph, in what is clearly a well-rehea.r.s.ed rite, three young men remove their windcheaters to reveal Australian Rules Football jumpers-the navy blue of Carlton, the black and white of Collingwood, the gold and brown of Hawthorn. As a lifelong Geelong man, I initially find the spectacle rather distressing, but what follows is, in its way, lovely. The bloke in the Carlton jumper produces a weatherbeaten red Australian Rules ball from his backpack. To general approval from onlookers, a solemn kickabout ensues.

The last official ceremony takes place at the Turkish memorial at Morto Bay, towards the tip of the peninsula. The road to this giant grey brick henge is lined by Turkish solidiers, all nervously polishing and buffing hidden nooks of their kits while they await the limousine carrying their President. Eight flagpoles stand at the front of the Turkish memorial, on which the banners of Gallipoli's Australian, New Zealander, French, Canadian, Indian and British invaders are flown just as high as those of its Turkish and German defenders.

A comically inept Turkish army bugler honks mercilessly through all eight anthems, making "Advance Australia Fair" sound indistinguishable from "La Ma.r.s.ellaise," and "G.o.d Save The Queen" indistinguishable from "c.u.m On Feel The Noize." Another thing Australians aren't good at is stifling giggles. If the bloke with the trumpet wanted a ten-year posting to an isolated sentry post out in the militarised Kurdish badlands of the southeast, surely he only had to ask.

The service is conducted in Turkish and English, and concluded with a ma.s.sed rifle volley that scatters the hundreds of starlings nesting in the top of the memorial, an instant constellation of tiny black stars.

THE REST OF Anzac Day is given over to aimless wandering around the battlefields. There's a desultory museum of the campaign at Gaba Tepe, but there's little in it that can't be found with minimal effort in the trenches that still scar Gallipoli's hills. The smallest amount of scratching in the dirt will disinter rusted splinters of tin can, congealed knots of melted shrapnel or a few of the countless millions of bullets that were expended. For decades, Turkish authorities tried to cultivate an atmosphere of serenity on the peninsula by planting pine forests, but they all burnt down a few years ago in a fire widely blamed on Kurdish terrorists. It's better this way, though. It looks like a battlefield, bleak and barren and lonely.

I never really understood what Australians were doing here in 1915-how many of them had even heard of Turkey?-and I still don't know what any of us are doing here now. Sometimes, as I wander through the overgrown trenches and across the immaculate graveyards, I think, on the whole, that our veneration of Gallipoli and the men who died here is a good thing, that the demonstrated sense of history and the concurrent lack of any kind of nationalistic bitterness is admirable. Then I notice that the Australia represented here today isn't an Australia I recognise: there is barely a trace, among the pilgrims, of Asian, or Mediterranean, or Baltic, or Middle Eastern ancestry. And I wonder if there isn't, somewhere at the depths of the Gallipoli myth-which inspires more and more people to come here every year-something unhealthy, reactionary and frightened.

Then I think that I'm trying too hard. Still, it's my job. I guess more than anything it's a nagging, subliminal sense of loss. Even if we don't realise it or won't admit to it, we come here in a quest for clues of what might have been, had a country only 14 years old, with a population of less than five million, not buried 8,702 remarkable young men here-to say nothing of the 52,000 more who perished on other World War I battlefields-along with everything they might have gone on to achieve, build, discover, create or solve.

On Baby 700, the forlorn hillock with a name like a bad mid-80s pop group, I stop by the grave of Captain Joseph Patrick Lalor, the officer who'd led his men as far as The Nek in those three unimaginable hours on April 25, 1915. Lalor didn't survive the first Anzac Day. He was killed here during the frenetic fighting for this dismal little lump of land, which changed hands five times on that afternoon.

Lalor's name was already famous when he arrived on Gallipoli. His grandfather, Peter Lalor, lost an arm leading the 1854 Eureka Stockade miners' rebellion on the Ballarat goldfields, before going on to become a distinguished parliamentarian. Captain Lalor's own CV was scarcely less picturesque. Before wading onto the beach at Anzac Cove that morning, clutching his cutla.s.s and whiskey flask, Joseph Lalor had joined and deserted the British Navy, served with the French Foreign Legion and fought in a South American revolution. He was 30 years old.

Joseph Lalor might have become any combination of brilliant, inspirational, eccentric or dangerous. A man like that, you can imagine, might have ended up figuring, on the scale of great Australians, anywhere between Errol Flynn and Ned Kelly, and I'd like to have found out. So would we all.

13.

IF YOU WANT MUD (YOU'VE GOT IT) Woodstock II AUGUST 1994.

I DON'T GO TO festivals anymore. It would be neatly piquant to be able to report here that the unmitigated calamity that was Woodstock II was the last festival I attended, but it wasn't; one or two further straws still needed to flutter down atop the hefty log dropped, that dreadful weekend in 1994, upon the camel of my enthusiasm for outdoor rock'n'roll. The precise moment at which I understood that my days as a festival-goer were over was, in fact, the opening night of the 1996 Reading Festival. I was, that evening, in a position which, I am certain, would have been envied by most of the tens of thousands in attendance: I was backstage, festooned with the wristbands, stickers and laminated access pa.s.ses which can serve to make the better-connected festival attendee resemble a commanding officer in some hastily convened guerilla military. In my immediate vicinity were liberal quant.i.ties of drink, numerous people willing to buy me same and the aristocracy of contemporary rock'n'roll. On top of all that, I was being paid for my attendance, covering events for a national newspaper. I thought: this is pretty much the supreme realisation of all the wildest dreams I ever harboured as a teenager bent on becoming a rock journalist. And then I thought: if I push off now, I can be back at the hotel in time for DON'T GO TO festivals anymore. It would be neatly piquant to be able to report here that the unmitigated calamity that was Woodstock II was the last festival I attended, but it wasn't; one or two further straws still needed to flutter down atop the hefty log dropped, that dreadful weekend in 1994, upon the camel of my enthusiasm for outdoor rock'n'roll. The precise moment at which I understood that my days as a festival-goer were over was, in fact, the opening night of the 1996 Reading Festival. I was, that evening, in a position which, I am certain, would have been envied by most of the tens of thousands in attendance: I was backstage, festooned with the wristbands, stickers and laminated access pa.s.ses which can serve to make the better-connected festival attendee resemble a commanding officer in some hastily convened guerilla military. In my immediate vicinity were liberal quant.i.ties of drink, numerous people willing to buy me same and the aristocracy of contemporary rock'n'roll. On top of all that, I was being paid for my attendance, covering events for a national newspaper. I thought: this is pretty much the supreme realisation of all the wildest dreams I ever harboured as a teenager bent on becoming a rock journalist. And then I thought: if I push off now, I can be back at the hotel in time for Frasier Frasier.

At the time, I felt burdened by the commission of this monumental heresy, much as Spinoza and Julian the Apostate must have upon rejecting all that they had grown up believing-though my recantation prompted neither formal process of excommunication nor Persian arrow in the gizzard. Eventually, however, the truth proved as liberating as the truth always does, and the truth is this: festivals suck. Like the religious faiths foresworn by the enlightened, festivals are organised dementias, collective determinations to ignore logic. The entire prospectus is a monstrous falsehood.

If you set out to design an environment hostile to the enjoyment of music, you could construct nothing more diabolical than a festival field: an acoustically moribund arena in which the minority actively interested in whichever hapless troupe are occupying the stage struggle to hear anything over the din of herds of idiots yammering into phones, yelling after their friends and blowing whistles (any adult who blows a whistle in public for purposes other than officiating in a sporting fixture is-and it behooves us to be very clear on this-an irredeemable simpleton who genuinely deserves to be kicked to death). And the idea-which lurks, still, in the advertising and marketing of all festivals-that these ghastly events are a manifestation of a counterculture is plain risible. Even the annoyingly mythologised free festivals of the 60s and 70s, held when rock'n'roll was comparatively innocent, and before Glas...o...b..ry grew as sponsor-spangled as a Formula One meeting, accomplished nothing beyond the only demonstrable good that festivals accomplish today: luring battalions of morons away from the cities for the weekend, thereby making the comforts of civilisation that much more agreeable for the rest of us.

The festival cult is not merely grotesque, but actually faintly unsavoury. Broadly speaking, two sorts of people attend rock festivals. The first sort is under the age of 24, and charged with the giddy exuberance of youth. Given the likelihood that they will, as I did, grow out of it, there is nothing wrong with their attendance at such things-indeed, any regular user of public transport will concur that there's a reasonable argument for incarcerating them in such remote encampments on a full-time basis. The second sort is everybody else, who urgently need to take a fairly withering look at themselves. In disdaining, even just for the weekend, the everyday technological miracles of modern urban existence-indoor plumbing, paved thoroughfares-they also implicitly reject the moral advances that our urban centres have encouraged to flourish. For all the flowery feel-nice rhetoric that inevitably accompanies festivals, the reality is utterly reactionary. A rock festival is a total monoculture: beneath the stupid hats lurks less diversity of thought, culture and race than you'd find at a Ku Klux Klan picnic.

A rock festival also represents, for all its pretensions to equality and brotherhood, a brutally stratified cla.s.s system. Try the stuff about how we're all one, man, on the bouncer keeping the riffraff out of the backstage enclosures (where, I can a.s.sure you, n.o.body expects the corporate freeloaders to endure the indignity of non-flushing toilets; those are strictly for paying customers). A person who spends money on festival tickets is contributing their small but infuriating bit towards hauling us back to an age of sun-worship and witch-burning. If you think I exaggerate, read on. Woodstock II was the nearest thing to a post-apocalyptic society I ever wish to visit.

When I try to be charitable about festivals, I wonder if maybe they subconsciously represent a pure, if misguided, attempt to expiate the guilt about the comfort and security that we enjoy on a harsh, chaotic, unforgiving planet. Maybe, much like the Filipino Jesus freaks who volunteer to be nailed to crosses at Easter that they may feel the pain of Christ, millions of privileged citizens of the first world spend money to endure weekends in conditions that, if foisted on ragged-trousered, soggy-socked foreigners, would instead see them buying charity records and/or demanding that the UN send soldiers to do something about it. Perhaps festivals are, at a subliminal level, a message of solidarity and hope to the wretched of the world: to the refugee who may happen across coverage of such an event on his dung-powered satellite dish, and think, "Wow. Well, I also live in a tent, subsist on awful food, suffer oppressive proximity to hordes of malodorous crackpots, and have to c.r.a.p in a pit. But at least I can't hear The Stereophonics."

The simplest explanation that fits the facts, of course, is that every person who voluntarily attends a rock festival is completely off their trolley. On that front, any reader who gets as far as the first paragraph of the ensuing dispatch may find themselves wondering if the author hasn't a case to answer as regards his own sanity, with specific regard to his apparent bonhomie vis-a-vis The Cranberries. It does require a degree of contextualising. I had followed them to Woodstock at the behest of long-expired British music monthly Vox Vox, on the grounds that I'd been faintly partial, at this early stage in their career, to The Cranberries' pastoral folk-pop noodlings. I had been a quarter of the crowd at their first London show, and once travelled to the Scottish town of Wick to watch them play in front of of 27 people at an arts and poetry festival.

Back then, however, their music possessed a certain winsome charm and Dolores O'Riordan actually sang-which she was very good at-as opposed to squawking like a territorially aggrieved corncrake, which is what she has largely done in the years since. Granted, by the time of Woodstock '94, The Cranberries had released "Zombie"-their ham-fisted, if well-meaning, a.n.a.lysis of the Northern Irish question, with its TANKS and its BOMBS and its BOMBS and its GONNS-but they were still a way off perpetrating the truly fearful To The Faithful Departed To The Faithful Departed alb.u.m, which is without much doubt one of the very worst records ever made. Seriously, look the lyrics up online, after first disabling your browser's bad rhyme blocker. Scan through "I Just Shot John Lennon," or any of the songs about Bosnia, and just try to imagine how the earlier drafts must have read. alb.u.m, which is without much doubt one of the very worst records ever made. Seriously, look the lyrics up online, after first disabling your browser's bad rhyme blocker. Scan through "I Just Shot John Lennon," or any of the songs about Bosnia, and just try to imagine how the earlier drafts must have read.

Anyway. Woodstock II. The horror. The horror.