Malta and the ANZAC connection

ANZAC Day is commemorated on the anniversary of the fateful pre-dawn landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey, on 25 April 1915. The battle by Allied soldiers to capture and hold the Gallipoli Peninsula was one of the hardest fought, but ultimately futile, campaigns of the First World War. As the troops landed on the beaches of the Peninsula, they were cut down by sustained and concentrated machine-gun fire.

In the nine-month campaign that was to follow, both sides would suffer a disastrous loss of life. Of the 51,472 members of the Australian Imperial Forces (from a total Australian population of just five million) to serve at Gallipoli, 8,141 were killed during the campaign. As many as 66,000 Turkish lives are believed to have been lost.

This heavy toll of dead and wounded carved deeply into the psyche of the of Australia and New and since the first anniversary of the 25 April has been observed in both countries of solemn remembrance. The significance of Day has only over the years as remembers those who have laid down their lives in the many conflicts in which have served since the Gallipoli campaign.

Recognizing the association stretching back to the Gallipoli campaign between the ANZACs and Malta, the Australian High Commission has, for many years, observed ANZAC Day with a Commemoration at Pieta Military Cemetery, one of five cemeteries in Malta in which ANZAC troops are buried. Shared duty has long brought the two nations together. There were six Maltese members of the 7th Australian Brigade which earned fame for its part in the Gallipoli landing.

History remembers Malta as the ‘Nurse of the Mediterranean’, with 57,950 of those wounded in the Dardanelles campaign, including several thousand ANZACs, evacuated to Malta for treatment. For some the island was also to become their final resting place: there are 229 Australian and 79 New Zealand war graves in Malta.

Today, 100 years after that first ANZAC Day, there are no longer any living survivors of the Gallipoli campaign, but the legacy and traditions forged on those forbidding shores are an ever present memorial to those who served, suffered, and sacrificed their tomorrow for our today.