Judy Bailey: Gallipoli such an emotional place

Visitors walk among the headstones at Ari Burnu Cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Photo / Alan Gibson

Opinion

Judy Bailey is in Gallipoli for Anzac Day and will be reporting live from the New Zealand service at Chunuk Bair for Maori Television. It will be the second trip to the sacred peninsula for Bailey, one of the country's best known television broadcasters. Today, she is calling on all Kiwis to remember the fallen.

I have been to Gallipoli once before - I found it incredibly moving.

When you get there you really do feel them all around you. It's an incredibly spiritual place.

I don't have any relatives who died there, no direct connection with Gallipoli, but I have been involved in the Anzac programme for so many years so I've got a real feeling for those people and I do, to some extent, feel their sacrifice when I set foot in the place.

I think that we are only really now beginning to realise how important Gallipoli was. It was a time that we actually began to think that we weren't British, that we weren't Australian - that we were actually New Zealanders. We were a nation in our own right. It was a real turning point for us - we really saw that we were different.

Gallipoli is a key part in our history and our sense of ourselves as being Kiwis. Those servicemen and women at Gallipoli really embodied the best of us. They were courageous, selfless and incredibly human.

Gallipoli is such an emotional place. You can't help but be emotional when you look at those graves there - and that is just a fraction of those who died there.

It is a wonderful thing to see so many New Zealanders making the effort, going there and participating. And it is an effort - it is freezing overnight and it's really uncomfortable.

The other thing that really stands out for me is the welcome that you get from the Turks. It is a very strange thing when you consider we were the invaders.

They lost far more people than we did. It was their home and we were invading it - we may have gone there with the best intentions but as we know now with the benefit of hindsight, it was a very misguided plan.

They were incredibly kind. I remember standing at Chunuk Bair having a bit of a quiet moment looking along the trenches there, and a Turkish soundman came up to me and said "I want you to have this".

It was a shell casing from a bullet that he had picked up in a trench. That was such a nice moment for me, such a generous and thoughtful thing for him to do.

It is important to remember what happened at Gallipoli, from the Turkish side as well. No one wins in war.