ANZAC DAY

Matt from Matt Wineera - Thats Real Estate with Matt Wineera

Half a world away from dawn services in Australia & New Zealand, a small group of dignitaries will meet in Malta this Anzac Day among the neat rows of headstones at sun-baked Pieta Military Cemetery just outside Valletta – as they have since 1916 – to commemorate a moving but largely forgotten chapter of Gallipoli lore.

It is the story of how a tiny, ancient, impoverished and battle-scarred nation in the centre of the Mediterranean opened its arms and hearts to care for thousands of wounded, traumatised and sick young Anzacs, many of them still teenagers, who arrived aboard a flotilla of blood-soaked hospital ships from the battlefields of Gallipoli.

While most of the 57,950 soldiers evacuated to Malta recovered and eventually left, some 202 Australians and 72 New Zealanders did not, and are in war cemeteries across the archipelago.

Apart from their graves hewn from the parched, rocky Maltese earth, there is little other physical evidence the Anzacs were ever in Malta, despite the enormity of their presence over a century ago.

The voyage across the Eastern Mediterranean in these makeshift hospital ships from the Gallipoli Peninsula to Malta was not an easy one. It took the steam ships up to eight days to cover the 1163-kilometre journey.

At the beginning of April 1915, there were 824 military hospital beds in Malta. At the end of May 1915, there were more than 6000 in 14 hospitals spread all over the island. At its peak there were 25,522 beds in 28 hospitals, with the highest number of patients on any one day a staggering 16,004.

We will remember them 🥀 🌺

(article written by Andrew Hornery a senior journalist and former Private Sydney columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald).