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| Schuler, with binoculars and maps, watching the movement of Allied Shipping in Mudros Harbour from Mt Elias, Lemnos. Photo AWM |
Phillip Schuler was one of Australia's pre-eminent journalists to cover the Gallipoli campaign, including the role of Lemnos in the campaign. Along with Charles Bean Keith Murdoch and the British correspondent Ellis Ashmead Bartlett, Schuler played a major role in crafting what would become Australia's Anzac legend. But he has been overshadowed by his more well-known peers.
A short biographical article by the The Age's Mark Baker seeks to correct the record. He argues that it was:
"Phillip
Schuler's evocative, insightful and compassionate dispatches from Gallipoli
that were the ones which most eloquently captured the horror and the heroism
for Australian newspaper readers, and which first revealed the scandalous
neglect and mistreatment of wounded Australian soldiers."
In 1916 he published the first account of Australia's role in the Dardanelles campaign - Schuler's 1916
book, Australia in Arms . And it was Schuler, the amateur,
accidental photographer whose hundreds of images from the trenches remain our
most poignant and precious archive of the era.
The son of the editor of Melbourne's The Age, Frederick Schuler, Phillip sailed to Egypt and Lemnos as the special correspondent of the paper. He sailed in the first troopship convoy, aboard the HMAT Orvieto - the troopship selected by the Victorian Govenrment as a focus for the 2015 Centenary of Anzac.
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| Phillip Schuler, on the right, with Charles Bean (second left), c 1914. Photo AWM |
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| Phillip Schuler, atop the Great Pyramid, Egypt, January 1915. Photographer Charles Bean. Photo AWM. |
His observations and reports of the landings, the aftermath of battle, the lack of medical triaging, poor medical treatments aboard the hospital ships and the conditions the Anzacs were forced to live and fight in, played a key role in improving medical conditions for the Anzacs.
After Gallipoli, Schuler volunteered as a Private in the Australian Army Service Corps. In June 1917 and after being promoted to Lieutenant he was fatally wounded by shell fire near the front at Messines in Western France. He is buried in Trois-Arbres cemetery, France.
Lest we forget. Below are reproduced some of Phillip Schuler's photographs from the AWM archive.
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| Myrina (or Castro). Photographer Phillip Schuler 1915. Photo AWM |
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| Australian troops practice landing procedures on Lemnos. Photographer Phillip Schuler 1915. Photo AWM |
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| Lemnos. Photographer Phillip Schuler 1915. Photo AWM |
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| Lemnos. Photographer Phillip Schuler 1915. Photo AWM |
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| Pier at Mudros. Photographer Phillip Schuler 1915. Photo AWM |
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| Pier at Mudros. Photographer Phillip Schuler 1915. Photo AWM |
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| Merchant ships sunk as a break water Lemnos. Photographer Phillip Schuler 1915. Photo AWM |
His evocative images of Lemnos are important elements in the Australian War Memorials archive - especially the images of himself and George Renwick (Correspondent for the Daily Chronicle) on top of Lemnos' great and scared Mount Ilias, watching the assembled mighty Allied fleet in April 1915 pictured above.
To read the article by Mark Baker in The Age click here.
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| George Renwick, watching the movement of Allied Shipping in Mudros Harbour from Mt Elias, Lemnos. Photographed by Phillip Schuler. Photo AWM |
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| Captain Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean (C. E. W.) standing on a Pyramid, on New Year's Day. Beneath him is Mena Camp. Photograph by Phillip Schuler. Photo AWM |
Jim Claven
Secretary
Lemnos Gallipoli Commemorative Committee
So glad to see my Great-Uncle's photos of Lemnos on your blog. Did you know that at one point he was detained on Lemnos as a spy? He was certainly an energetic and fearless soul.
ReplyDeleteYes, I read that in his book "Australia in Arms. Quite comical - to think that an Australian journalist on Lemnos would be an Ottoman spy! They were suspicious of spies on the Island. If you would like be kept informed of our events, send me your email address - jimclaven@yahoo.com,au. Thank you for your comment and apologies for my tardiness in replying.
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