In this monograph based on her doctoral thesis, Jenny Macleod asks why the disastrous military campaign at Gallipoli in 1915 is infused with such importance and meaning in Australia, by contrast with Britain, where remembrance of the Great War focuses on the war as a whole. The Gallipoli episode acquired mythical status in Australia, where it is remembered on Anzac Day, 25 April, whereas 11 November, the end of the war, is forgotten. Macleod finds the explanation in the way the Gallipoli myth developed in the Australian national historiography and in particular in how certain actors in the drama represented the defeat at the time.

While the book aims to explore the British narrative of the Gallipoli campaign to counterbalance the emphasis on the legend of Anzac in the Australian story, it remains very much an Australian interpretation of British and Australian source material. An obvious gap, in my opinion, is the omission of the “NZ” in Anzac, which was the acronym for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Macleod notes the potential that exists for an ironic as opposed to romantic portrayal of the Gallipoli episode and yet overlooks how the New Zealand version of the Anzac legend differs from the Australian as well as the British account of the Gallipoli campaign. This is regrettable because this ironic potential has to some extent been realized in New Zealand, where the Gallipoli myth is invoked on occasions to justify the small nation's nuclear-free policy.

Despite this omission, Macleod's historiographical approach to what became a key moment in Australian history makes a useful contribution by indicating that the Australian Anzac legend is a variant of an overarching romantic, chivalric myth shared by the British world. As she acknowledges, Ken Inglis charted this path in his classic articles on the Anzac tradition in the 1960s that examined how C. E. W. Bean, Australian's official war correspondent and war historian, shaped the legend through his central question: “How did the Australian people—and the Australian character, if there is one—come through the universally recognized test of this, their first great war?” (K. S. Inglis, Sacred Places [Melbourne, 1999], 8). The location of Gallipoli invited likening the Anzacs to ancient warriors. As schoolboys, the men who fought at Gallipoli were raised on stories of classical heroes, of King Arthur, crusader knights, and Ivanhoe, who endured defeats as well as victories. Hellenism was also prominent in contemporary public school education. In Turkey, therefore, classical allusions combined with a cult of chivalry and a romanticizing of war to create the “British heroic-romantic myth” (12).

Reconsidering Gallipoli traces the development of the British myth and the Australian legend through the assessments of participants who authored the classical texts about the Gallipoli campaign. Chapters cover the Dardanelles Commission, British and Australian official histories, journalists’ reporting from the peninsula, “the soldiers’ tale” in published accounts, General Sir Ian Hamilton's Gallipoli Diary, and the development of the literature on Gallipoli since the war. The approach throughout is historiographical, with an emphasis on continuities in the British myth and the parallel Australian legend rather than on changes over time.

Macleod finds that the British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett provided the first rough draft of the Anzac legend in his dispatch about the Anzac landing on 25 April 1915. Bean's dispatches, on the other hand, provided drafts for his subsequent volumes of Australia's war history. Bean's core question about the Australian character meant that he would write his official history volumes as national history, as opposed to military history, using his own papers and recollections of his experience at Anzac with the men. By contrast, Macleod finds that Cecil Aspinall wrote the British official history from the officers’ point of view and sought to balance the Australian account by showing that Gallipoli was not a complete failure.

Macleod concludes that romance is the key to the survival of war narratives, witnessed in the endurance of the British Gallipoli myth and of the more powerful Australian Anzac legend spawned by the First World War, when campaigns on the Western Front have been all but forgotten. She finds that simplified, romantic myths are more likely to be remembered. To portray the Western Front as forgotten, however, begs the question of by whom? A visit to Ypres and the Somme would suggest not by the British or the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and certainly not by the French. Again, it is really the Australian Anzac legend that is the reference point for Reconsidering Gallipoli. Surely timing, too, was significant in the choice of Gallipoli as a site of heroic mythic development. Gallipoli became the defining moment for Australia and New Zealand in the First World War because the beach at Anzac Cove was the site where their representatives of the “coming man” were subjected to their first—global—test and proved their manhood. The horrors of the Western Front came later.

While this book succeeds in its aim of tracing the writing into history of a British heroic-romantic myth by journalists, officials, and historians, its historiographical approach limits the appeal of the book in being removed throughout from actual events. There are also a surprising number of typographical errors for a book published by an academic press. But for readers interested in understanding the different meanings of the Gallipoli campaign in Britain and Australia, Macleod provides a useful summary of the literature that shows how these divergent strands of mythology developed. What this study now invites is an antipodean reading of Gallipoli, which recognizes that the Anzac hero as a chivalric Christian soldier was actually the heir of British heroic myth.