While he was travelling through Palestine, Lambert would get up early and work all day painting and sketching. This photo by Ossie Coulson was taken near Tiberias in early June 1919 during Lambert’s second tour of Palestine. It is most likely that Lambert was painting the sketch Tiberias when the photo was taken.

On 7 June 1919 Lambert wrote of his visit to Tiberias: ‘I visited and sketched Tiberias a motor ride of about six miles from here. Tiberias [is] really lovely & if one could only begin Palestine from this end of the Desert it would give a much better impression. Round about here there are wonderful subjects just now…’.

Janda

In January 1919 a small group led by Charles Bean left London to travel to Gallipoli. The Australian Historical Mission was comprised of war records section staff, photographers and officers who had served at Gallipoli in 1915. The primary tasks of the mission were to report on the state of the war graves at Gallipoli and for Bean to try and resolve many of the riddles of the 1915 campaign. George Lambert was asked by Bean to go with the mission and to make oil and pencil studies that could later help him create two large works commissioned by the Australian Government for the future Australian War Memorial. Bean was particularly anxious that Lambert be the appointed artist as he felt that Lambert was the best of the Australian artists available. Bean also asked Hubert Wilkins a well known photographer to accompany the Mission and record the landscape through photography.

When the mission arrived at Gallipoli, a Turkish Officer Major Zeki Bey who had fought at Gallipoli joined the group. Zeki Bey walked the ground with Bean exchanging information and giving him a Turkish perspective of the 1915 campaign.

Additionally, the Graves Registration Unit was working in the area locating and identifying the remains of allied soldiers, reburying them and charting the cemeteries. The atmosphere in which Lambert painted was greatly influenced by the work going on around him as bones and bodies were constantly being unearthed, catalogued and then re-interred.The work he produced on Gallipoli is more sombre and muted in colour. He described the landscape of Gallipoli as disturbing and ‘melancholy’ and as he was making ready to depart he wrote to his wife “I cannot tell you how pleased I am at getting clear of this graveyard beautiful as it is nor can I explain how satisfied I am to have done what work I have done.”

Janda

All of us live with landscape all the time. It surrounds us and is part of our lives. This section looks at some different aspects of art, landscape and how these two things can help shape our memories and our view of the world. 

When I first arrived at the War Memorial in February 2005, I started to make these biscuits for the Art Section. Such a simple recipe and steeped with history!

Ingredients:

• 1 cup of plain flour
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 cup of rolled oats
• 1 cup of shredded coconut
• 125 gms of butter
• 1 tablespoon of Golden Syrup
• 2 tablespoons of hot water
• salt

Grease – or line with baking paper – a baking tray.

Preheat the oven to 180 degree C.

Combine the dry ingredients – flour, sugar, oats and coconut – add about half a teaspoon of salt. It’s not essential but seems to give a richer more balanced flavour.

Melt the butter and golden syrup and add half of the water. (use the other tablespoon of water if the mixture ends up too dry)

Pour the butter mixture into the dry ingredients and mix everything together really well.

Drop desert spoons of the mixture onto the tray and flatten slightly with the back of the spoon. They will expand a bit so leave some space around them.

Bake for 10-15 minutes until golden, take out and let stand for a few minutes before putting on a wire rack to cool.

If your’e feeling adventurous, you can add other ingredients to make variations: strawberry Anzacs, lemon Anzacs and even white chocolate Anzacs all seem to work well.

Read more about ANZAC Biscuits.

All Imagery for the book, Contact, was captured at 16bit, 600dpi, ProPhoto RGB at 200mm x 250mm. This then became our raw uncorrected file. From this file we prepared a master RGB file, where we dodged and burnt with density as well as contrast, utilising the Adjustment layer and layer mask features within Photoshop. Once all files were prepared in this fashion we were ready to place them into the designer’s (Brett Wiencke, Art Direction Creative, Manuka) Indesign layout, but before this could happen we had to create a CMYK profile that would characterise and optimise the chosen printing press. This was done by printing colour patches through the off-set printer, then measuring them against a predefined colour number and mapping the difference.

Armed with the Printer specific CMYK profile we converted all master RGB images to the CMYK profile, and then placed these image files into the Indesign document. With the colour management policies set correctly in Indesign we exported a print ready PDF.x file of the book and this was delivered along with in-house proofs to Goanna Print. For the Focus exhibition we produced Giclee fine art prints on Hahnemuhle photorag paper. This is a %100 cotton rag fine art paper. The master RGB file was corrected again repurposing for this material. As part of the re-purposing procedure we had to increase contrast and sharpen selected images. For the colour images the printing was done on the Crane Museo Silver Rag paper, a digital equivalent of a traditional fibre based paper and the above repurposing was also required.

Raw image:

Corrected image:

With the assistance of our colleagues at the National Archives of Australia, readers of this blog can go straight to selected service records using hyperlinks we’ve provided in the text of our posts. These digitised records allow you to read much more about the background, service experience and fate of some members of the Australian Imperial Force.

For example, in an earlier post about our exhibition we mentioned Sgt Charles Reginald Yells (aka ‘Lewis’ in Seven pillars of wisdom). If you view his service record, you will be able to see on page 17 of that record, a reference to his work with Lawrence in an attack on an enemy railway line for which he was awarded the DCM.
Mal Booth

We are using this blog to introduce the Australian War Memorial’s new exhibition George Lambert: Gallipoli and Palestine landscapes. The exhibition will open at the Memorial on 30 March 2007 and run through until 29 July 2007. After that it will go on an extensive Australian tour. Check out the Tour page for details of the itinerary.

Lambert was an Australian official war artist during the First World War. He travelled to the Middle East in 1918 and in 1919 joined the Australian Historical Mission to Gallipoli. At the completion of his time at Gallipoli he travelled on to the Middle East to make some further studies of battlefields that were important to the story of Australia’s involvement in the war. Lambert worked on small oil panels and also made a great many watercolours and pencil drawings during his time as an official war artist. Many of these were preparatory studies for his major commissioned works that are held by the Australian War Memorial.

On this site we will have some information about the exhibition and its key theme – ‘landscape’. Curators and conservators will contribute posts about how the exhibition is being put together and outline some of the work involved in presenting an exhibition for tour. There will also be info about George Lambert and a few of his contemporaries as well as pages that relate to the regional tour, the official war art scheme, links to other sites of interest and from April 2007 a live blog feed coming in from Gallipoli.

The blog does not aim to provide an online version of the exhibition. It is instead intended to present an account of its development, and a forum for a discussion of the broader issues which are raised by the exhibition. Where possible and appropriate, feedback will be moderated and included on the blog.

Contributors

Janda Gooding is the Senior Curator of Art at the Australian War Memorial. Janda is the main moderator of this blog and curator of the George Lambert: Gallipoli and Palestine landscapes exhibition.

Warwick Heywood is Assistant Curator in the Art Section at the Memorial.

Nigel Steel is on loan to us from the Imperial War Museum in London for 12 months where he is usually the Head of the Research and Information Department and the IWM’s chief historian. He started with us in late August 2006 and will be a familiar face and voice to regular watchers of the History Channel. He also appeared as himself in Tolga Ornek’s 2005 film Gallipoli.

Mal Booth is Head of the Research Centre at the Memorial and currently curating an exhibition Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse. A blog for that exhibition can be found at http://blog.awm.gov.au/lawrence/ .

Links

Other Australian War Memorial and external sites that might be of interest:

Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse

Focus: Photography & War 1945-2006

Captured in Colour: Rare Photographs from the First World War

Gallipoli 1915: The Drama of the Dardanelles (joint IWM/AWM online exhibition)

Dawn of the Legend: 25 April 1915

Gallipoli Battlefield Tour 2007

The Australian Light Horse Association

Australia in the First World War

Visit Gallipoli website

Australian official war artists

National Gallery of Australia

Radio National Interview ‘Artworks’ site

INTRODUCTION
On 6 August 1945, when the atomic bomb was unleashed above the city of Hiroshima, the world changed forever. Photographs of the devastation brought home in raw detail the shocking power of this ultimate weapon.

Photography has been bound in an intimate and changing relationship with war since its invention in the 19th century. Whether as a record, an analytical tool, propaganda or revelation, photography has played a critical part in forming our response to global and local conflicts, communicating these historic events through the mass media of press and television.

Photographers report the physical impact and the emotional effects of war, the tortured battleground, its deadly aftermath, and the civilian relief, humiliation and loss. Whether working in an official capacity, as freelance or affiliated photojournalists, or as serving soldiers, each photographer brings a direct and personal focus to their imagery of the human condition.

These images are often of people, whether military or civilian, operating at extreme levels of stress, where the waiting nerves, trained for action, are stretched taut with anticipation; others are jangled by the unexpected or dissolved in grief. Even the photographs of relaxation or entertainment hint at submerged depths of emotion and latent susceptibilities.

These photographers can take us beyond the surface of the image into new perceptions and responses to place, context, and emotion.

People involved in the exhibition

• Patricia Sabine – Exhibition curator
• Shaune Lakin – Exhibition co-curator
• Hans Reppin, Bob McKendry and Steve Burton – Image preparation
• Jude Savage, Jane Murray, Jason D’Arx and Charlotte Sarossy – Travelling exhibition coordinators
• Jos Jensen and Ian Wingrove – Exhibition designers
• Michael Thomas and Tina Mattay – Text editors

On 19 September 1918 General Sir Edmund Allenby launched his final offensive in Palestine. The attack was a great success and the cavalry swept over the hills towards Megiddo, the ancient Armageddon. Turkish general headquarters was overrun on 20 September and thousands of prisoners were taken. Urban Stanley Billing was a trooper in 8th Australian Light Horse Regiment. A fortnight after the end of the war he wrote a long letter to his wife describing his experiences in the battle. At first the Australian Light Horse had been in reserve, but had swung into action on 20 September. The following morning the 8th Light Horse took around 8,000 Turkish prisoners back to Megiddo (Lejjun), as Billing told his wife.

They were a ragtime lot and … all were thirsty. Several would have died if I had not given them a drop of water and got them on their feet again. When we got to the well we had a fearful job to hold them. They were just like a mob of thirsty sheep and we had to keep riding round them and beating them back with the flat of our swords. It took 5 or 6 hours to water them and the wells were almost dry and the water muddy and stinking; but they drank it like champagne.

read on

A member of the TE Lawrence Studies List posted a pretty useful link today to a site that gives a neat 90 second visual display of who has controlled the Middle East over the course of history. It is all mapped out against a timeline from 3,000 BC, up to the present day. See Maps of War.

We thought it was good background, especially to the subjects of our exhibition who were engaged in rolling back the Ottoman Empire.

Hopefully we will also soon be able to provide you with some more detailed online maps that help you to identify the locations we will be mentioning in the blog and the exhibition itself.

Mal Booth