The Making Of The Spirit Of The ANZACs

As it happens, the genesis of the album, Spirit Of The ANZACs, that will see Lee Kernaghan touring the nation in quite spectacular fashion later in the year, wasn’t the 100th anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli. It was the observations of an Australian surgeon who, 28 years later, in 1942, became a Japanese prisoner of war when he was captured in Bandung in Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies.

“I was at the Australian War Memorial in July 2013,” Kernaghan remembers. “I’d just read Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop’s diaries, so I was there on a mission to get a bit more background to that period in our history, and on my way in, I saw an inscription on a plaque from the founder of the War Memorial, Charles Bean, and it simply said, ‘Here is their spirit, in the heart of the land they loved, and here we guard the record that they themselves made.’

“I dunno, something inside me reacted to that in a pretty profound way. I got goosebumps up my arms and chills at the back of my neck. Then later that day as I entered this special area where all the original archival letters and diaries are held, it made an even deeper impression on me and it was as if the voices of the ANZACs, dating back to the landing at Gallipoli, were suddenly coming to life, in their words, scribbled out in a trench on the Western Front or from the deserts of Afghanistan. I think it was probably the songwriter in me that, seeing those words on paper, my natural inclination was to add music. That was where the project was born.”

ANZAC has become a noun in its own right but was, of course, just an obscure acronym when, on 25 Apr 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula, in the Turkish Dardanelles, as part of the allied expeditionary forces. The campaign would ultimately prove to be a military disaster, but it was at Gallipoli, as far as the history books are concerned, that both nations forged their national identities.

You could argue of course that technically, Australians and New Zealanders had first fought side by side in 1863, a full 52 years before Gallipoli, when more than 2,400 Australian volunteers crossed the Tasman to fight alongside their European counterparts in the “Maori Wars” in Waikato and Taranaki. But it was at Gallipoli that the myth of ANZAC was born. Between the landing and the withdrawal on 8 Jan the following year, approximately 50,000 Australians fought there, 8709 lost their lives, 5482 were killed in action, with a further 2012 dying of their wounds. Among them was Sapper Roy Denning.

“The first written song for the project was Top Of The Hill, based on a letter from Denning,” Kernaghan explains, “Number One Field Company, Australian Engineers. He was there that day, on the 25th of April 1915, at the landing, and he wrote in graphic detail what he saw, what he heard, what he was feeling that morning. His words were then adapted to music. He survived the Gallipoli campaign and the Western Front, remarkably, and finally arrived back in Sydney in October 1918 and went on to live to the ripe old age of 89.”

Together with his regular producer, Garth Porter, and fellow singer-songwriter Colin Buchanan, Kernaghan pored through letters and diaries to find stories that would then translate into songs that would convey 100 years of the ANZAC spirit. Along the way, he called in a few friends, among them Ted Egan, whose Song For Grace, as recorded by Sara Storer, became a part of the project; John Schumann, who duets with Kernaghan on the track, Kokoda – Only The Brave Ones; Lisa McCune, who duets with Kernaghan on his homage to the war nurses, The Unbearable Price Of War; and Canberra diplomat and singer-songwriter Fred Smith, on whose poignant tribute to Private Ben Ranaudo, The Dust Of Uruzgan, the title track of his 2011 album, Kernaghan also duets.

Then there’s the title track itself, Spirit Of The ANZACs, based on a phrase, “He is all of them. And he is one of us,” the then Prime Minister Paul Keating used as part of his eulogy at the entombment of the Unknown Australian Soldier.    

“Because we were singing about the ANZACs,” Kernaghan expands, “I felt it needed representation from different parts of the music industry. That was the reasoning behind making it an all-star cast. I’ve always in believed that if you shoot for the moon, even if you fail you’ll end up out among the stars, so we shot for the moon and got the best of the best-selling and most successful artists in Australian music.”

So joining Kernaghan on the track, which has been lifted as the first single and proceeds from which go to the charities Soldier On and Legacy, are Guy Sebastian, Sheppard, Jon Stevens, Jessica Mauboy, Shannon Noll and Megan Washington.