Original Anzac book to be reprinted

Seven months into the Gallipoli campaign, war correspondent Charles Bean invited the diggers to submit poems, drawings and essays for a Christmas book.

The process was encouraged cash prizes worth five pounds.

Bean was inundated with some 150 entries and The Anzac Book was published in 1916, selling an astonishing 100,000 copies.

It was published again in 1975 and now, in 2010, it has been republished for a second time.

This time it includes material Bean deemed inappropriate for publication, drawn from the archives of the Australian War Memorial.

Launching the book at the Memorial on Friday, writer Les Carlyon said Bean had not engaged in censorship, but exercised editorial judgement.

"We should see this book for what is was meant to be, a diversion, something to amuse the men as they prepared to spend winter in a hellhole," he said.

Carlyon, author of best-selling books on Gallipoli and the Western Front, said The Anzac Book showed just what the men on Gallipoli thought.

There was no other war book quite like it, providing distinctly Australian humour and whimsy initiated under adversity.

"It was conceived and written and sketched on scraps of paper by men who lived in holes in the ground and who were under fire 24 hours a day," he said.

"All of the content came out of the tawny ridges above Anzac cove, a foreign place and much more foreign then than it is now."

"Few books of such good humour have ever been written in such wretched conditions."

So what did Bean deem unsuitable for publication? The answer is nothing that would be judged especially raw or risque.

The only nudity is a photo of British general Sir William Birdwood - who commanded the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli - swimming in Anzac Cove.

The war memorial's senior historian Ashley Ekins says the new material shows some cynicism about the Gallipoli campaign and that some soldiers didn't always hold their commanders in high opinion.

"It wouldn't have done to publish that at the time," he said.

"We have this image of there always being a free and easy camaraderie between officers and men in the Anzac spirit. Some of these men resented their commanders."

One particular new inclusion is a pencil sketch of the storm-damaged Anzac Cove pier with the caption: "We are consolidating our positions daily."

That was a send-up of the absurdly optimistic official reports on the campaign's progress.

But far from sanitising the Gallipoli experience, Bean included much alluding to the hardship, discomfort and death.

"The men are very frank about the rotten food, the appalling conditions, the lack of resources, the deaths and wounds," he said.

"No-one could move very far in the Anzac area without coming across a mate's grave."

(The Anzac Book is published by the University of NSW Press and is available at bookshops at a recommended price of $49.95.)