Those of you who have looked at my profile will see that I am a writer and an Architect, and that "my life's work", in many respects, is my long and detailed book "The Sky Their Battlefield 2", which has just been updated, expanded and was republished in October 2014. It has met with a lot of critical acclaim and praise. More importantly, it has proved useful to thousands of people around the world, since the first edition appeared in 1995. It deals with the First Air War, in really considerable detail - indexing and telling the stories now of almost 17,000 Allied air personnel in over half a million words of detailed research and examination. More information can be found at the web site I have built to explain this work, at The Sky Their Battlefield 2 http://www.theskytheirbattlefield2.com/But as part of my wider interest in most aspects of The Great War I also came across Lt Jack Duffy's Gallipoli album in a shop in Melbourne in the early 1990's. A few years ago I began to explore on this site here how I could use a blog to publish many of the photos it contained - with particular emphasis on the photos of graves which Lt Duffy had taken so much trouble to record before he and his comrades were evacuated, inevitably leaving them behind. I find his actions in doing this particularly moving. The very least I can do as the present owner of his album is to share them - exactly in the way he so clearly intended.
And now this tale takes a turn... If you search for Jack Duffy on the Net you find that in the last year a book has been published in Australia - of his photos! "Where Anzacs Sleep. The Gallipoli Photos of Capt Jack Duffy - 8th Battalion" by Ron Austin of Slouch Hat Publications (ISBN 0 9758353 2 7).
This excellent book explains that Duffy returned to Victoria and after the war took his images out on magic lantern tours around the Australian states. The book primarily appears to draw on these and I heartily recommend it to you all.
What I have are Jack's original photos in one of his original albums, all carefully annotated in his own hand in fine white copperplate ink script. I say -one- of his albums because Ron Austin's book contains obviously personal photos not found in the album I own. On the other hand, my album has a number of other photos of scenes and locations that Jack chose not to show on his travels, as well as his original captions, which often reveal more about an image than is first apparent. For example, a photo of a large group of Diggers apparently standing around the water tanks at Shrapnel Gully are revealled by Jack's caption to be earnestly engaged in a game of Two-up!
Rather than to cover a wider selection of his fascinating images - so expertly gone over by Ron Austin in his book - I have concentrated on the images of graves. I made high resolution copies of all the album's contents a few years back and then extracted and ordered all the grave images and relevant names into battalions and regiments. It is this set of photos and names, relating to 97 individuals' original Gallipoli graves, which I have uploaded and described here.
I have enhanced the images as much as possible whilst ensuring they remain true to how they appear in the album, as well as always including Jack's captions. Most images have an additional detail photo appended for reference.
To completely contradict what I have just said, however, I'll begin with a photo of Jack Duffy (on the right, above) so you can see the individual who was responsible for all that you now see.
And in addition, here is that picture of the Two-up game with Jack's own caption. It shows a group of ANZAC mates and comrades at Gallipoli. They're engaged in a pastime as familiar to those young Australians born 110 years ago as cricket or reading a book. All around them, however, the most appalling carnage is going on - a game of two-up must have seemed the most blessed relief. When the evacuation took place in December 1915 these men left behind between eight and nine thousand dead Australian comrades, lost in a conflict that for all the combatants had claimed possibly half a million casualties in only eight months. As every parent will tell you, or any brother or sister, every life is precious beyond words. If pictures can tell a thousand words then this record of almost a hundred original Gallipoli graves can possibly go a little way towards remembering and honouring the Australians, New Zealanders, British and others who have been at rest now for ninety years in the Dardanelles.
