Flowers on the Roof of Hell: George Lambert’s Gallipoli

Man shall be halfway between the plant and the specter. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The eight-man contingent that would come to be known as the Australian Historical Mission, including the war correspondent Charles Bean, the artist George Lambert, and the photographer Hubert Wilkins, set out from London in January 1919, traveling first by rail through Paris and Rome to Taranto, and then by sea to Malta and Constantinople, before finally arriving the following month on the shores of the Gallipoli Peninsula.

A little more than three years had passed since the withdrawal from the Dardanelles. Left behind was a landscape scarred by trenches and shell craters, the valleys studded with makeshift graves, the hilltops crowned by heaps of bleached-white bones assembled by local shepherd children. Charles Bean, the leader of the expedition, had himself been an eyewitness to the first landings at Anzac Cove on April 25, 1915, and had produced regular, if heavily-censored, reportorial dispatches…