Grantlee Kieza - Sons of the Southern Cross

We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.

Oath of allegiance stated by Peter Lalor and sworn by miners underneath their rebel Southern Cross flag at Ballarat, 30 November 1854

I have never seen anything like these wounded Colonials in war before. Though many were shot to bits, and without hope of recovery, their cheers resounded throughout the night They were happy because they knew they had been tried for the first time, and had not been found wanting.

War correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett on the Anzac landing at Gallipoli, 25 April 1915

I t is a bitterly cold Sunday morning, 25 April 1915, three hours past midnight, and the bright half-moon sinks heavily into the inky blackness of the Aegean Sea. Four thousand Australian soldiers are about to lead the greatest sea invasion in history, on Turkeys Gallipoli Peninsula. One of them, Captain Joe Lalor, a small, 30-year-old professional soldier with a sharp, intelligent face, gazes at the sinking moon from the deck of the British destroyer HMS Chelmer just offshore. He draws a deep breath as he watches the moon go down and down, its faint light breaking through the clouds here and there to shine on the silky water. Lalors keen eyes study the waning glow as it flickers like a dying candle until finally it surrenders to the cold, ominous darkness and is snuffed out. The sky becomes intensely black and in the invisible, treacherous world that remains, Lalor cannot distinguish between the beauty and the terror that lie just ahead. He knows for certain, though, that beyond the placid water, as smooth as a fish pond, beyond the thin stretch of pebbles known as Z Beach and up into the rocky outcrops that loom 200 feet (60 metres) above, Turkish soldiers are waiting to defend to the death the barren piece of earth their god has given them. Beyond the gently lapping water, the Turks are up there, up there in numbers, somewhere in the cold, deathly silence of night.

Lalor is waiting as the first wave of 1500 soldiers heads for shore. They have carefully rehearsed their formation in tows of three rowing vessels tethered behind steamboats as they snake their way through the eerie stillness.

Close to the beach the steamboats will depart and the men will charge onto land with bayonets fixed to their .303 Lee-Enfield rifles. They have been told to kill the Turks quietly until the sun comes up; run as many through with cold steel before shots alert the nearby Turkish garrisons.

Lalor is known to his men as Little Jimmy, for they reckon he must have been standing on tiptoes to be anything close to the five foot six and a half inches (168 centimetres) it says on his army papers. He is waiting anxiously to join his comrades in chancing his fate. By his side he has an old sword, a family relic, and he wraps a piece of hessian rag around the gilt handle so the shine will not be a marker for Turkish snipers. Lalor has been ordered to leave the sword behind but, as he prepares to face death head on, he wants a trusted companion for battle.

Standing on the deck of the Chelmer , staring into the darkness as the first boats push off toward land, Lalors legs quiver from the cold and the fear.

His surname is a byword for courage back home because six decades earlier his Irish-born grandfather, Peter Lalor, led Australias most celebrated armed insurrection before becoming a prominent politician in the colony of Victoria. Underneath a great blue Southern Cross flag with its Christian cross linking the silvery-white stars of Australias cherished constellation, Peter Lalor had stared down death on his own patch of earth, rallying the Ballarat miners around him to fight against oppression.

Now Joe Lalor is about to invade a foreign land on behalf of the nation his grandfather helped form and his stomach twists and turns and heaves as though it is full of blind spiders racing about in maddened confusion.

Joes young wife Hester has gone to England to wait for his return from battle. Shes there with their little boy, a toddler named Peter. Like all the other soldiers preparing for battle, Joe wonders if he will ever see his family again.

Joes life already has been an endless series of cliffhangers but nothing in the pages of his adventure story since he left Melbournes Xavier College has prepared him for the bloodshed he knows is coming. Not his time in the Royal Navy before deserting, not his two years in Algeria with the French Foreign Legion, nor his sojourn as a mercenary in two South American uprisings.

Joe is always up for a fight, always ready to put his wiry 125 pounds (57 kilograms) on the line. And always telling those he encounters that his name is pronounced Law-ler not Lay-lor.

Wherever trouble and fighting were to be found, a Melbourne newspaper once said, Captain Lalor was to be found.

Joe is part of a force called the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs), which, along with the British 29th Division, the French Oriental Expeditionary Force and the Royal Naval Division, is about to storm the steep ridges and gullies surrounding a stretch of water crucial to the Allies supply chain from Russia to the Mediterranean. This mornings assault is the first in a plan to land 75,000 men on the Turkish coast.