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Brand new and sealed.

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Read by: Robert Meldrum
Running Time: 26 hrs 9 mins approx.
Categories: Non-Fiction, Historical, Australiana, WW1
Released: 2014
Media: Unabridged Audio Book on 21 CDs
ISBN: 9781486243327

The Author:
Peter John Allen Fitzsimons AM (born 29 June 1961) is an Australian author, and radio and television celebrity. He is a former national representative rugby union player and has been the chair of the Australian Republic Movement since 2015. FitzSimons has written for The Sydney Morning Herald since 1988, and has been a sports columnist for that publication since 1987. He regularly appears on the Australian Foxtel program  The Back Page, where he gets to share his opinions on many topics.

Fitzsimons is a prolific writer and is one of Australia's best-selling non-fiction writers. He has written books about subjects such as Nancy Wake, the shipwreck of the Batavia, Sir John Monash, Breaker Morant, Charles Kingsford-Smith, Ned Kelly and John Eales.

Fitzsimons is married to Australian  TV presenter Lisa Wilkinson. They have three children and live in Sydney.

Fitzsimons has outed himself as an atheist and a republican. On 13 June 2011 FitzSimons was named a Member of the Order of Australia for service to literature as a biographer, sports journalist and commentator, and to sporting organisations.

Synopsis:

On 25 April 1915, Allied forces landed on the Gallipoli Peninsula in present-day Turkey to secure the sea route between Britain and France in the west and Russia in the east. After eight months of terrible fighting, they would fail.

Turkey regards the victory to this day as a defining moment in its history, a heroic last stand in the defence of the nation's Ottoman Empire.

But, counter-intuitively, it would signify something perhaps even greater for the defeated Australians and New Zealanders involved: the birth of their countries' sense of nationhood.

Now approaching its centenary, the Gallipoli campaign, commemorated each year on Anzac Day, reverberates with importance as the origin and symbol of Australian and New Zealand identity.

As such, the facts of the battle – which was minor against the scale of the First World War and cost less than a sixth of the Australian deaths on the Western Front – are often forgotten or obscured.

Peter Fitzsimons, with his trademark vibrancy and expert melding of writing and research, recreates the disaster as experienced by those who endured it or perished in the attempt.