Contact Leah Humphrys Media and Communications Officer La Trobe University Victoria 3086 Australia T + 61 3 9479 5353 E [email protected] twitter.com/latrobenews latrobe.edu.au MEDIA RELEASE Thursday 26 March 2015 What really happened at Gallipoli? A La Trobe University forum will attempt to separate the facts from the myth surrounding what really happened at Gallipoli, as the nation prepares to mark the centenary of Anzac forces landing on the Peninsula. Robin Prior, author of Gallipoli: The End of the Myth, and Carolyn Holbrook, author of Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography, will join La Trobe Emeritus Professor and Ideas and Society Convenor Robert Manne in a special Anzac event - “What Really Happened at Gallipoli? Separating the History from the Myth”. Professor Manne said Professor Prior’s Gallipoli, one of the six books he has published on the First World War, involves a brilliant, entirely scholarly refutation of the mythology that has been created around the Gallipoli campaign. Professor Jay Winter of Yale, the doyen of First World War studies, has called Prior’s Gallipoli “the best account by far” of the Gallipoli campaign. Last year Carolyn Holbrook, a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University, published her ground-breaking and original study of the changing ways in which the Anzac landings on Gallipoli and involvement in the First World War have been interpreted in the political culture over the past century, the journey from the early image of our “martial baptism” to Australia’s current “civic religion”. According to Professor Manne: “Our conversation will investigate the reasons the British decided to land allied forces on the Gallipoli peninsula, the reasons the campaign so comprehensively failed, and the central cultural puzzle: why, despite its abject failure and the needless deaths of so many young Australians, the Gallipoli campaign is still believed to have given birth to the Australian nation.” The Ideas and Society program is La Trobe University’s leading intellectual forum for debate, which brings together high-level thinkers to deliberate society’s top issues. EVENT DETAILS What: Ideas and Society event: What really happened at Gallipoli? Separating the History from the Myth When: 6-7.30pm, Thursday 23 April 2015 Where: Clemenger Theatre, National Gallery of Victoria Additional information: This is a free event, however RSVPs are recommended. Media contact Leah Humphrys Media and Communications Officer T + 61 3 9479 5353 E [email protected] ABN 64 804 735 CRICOS Provider 00115M 2/2