AustLit

Editor's note: Not all Australians reacted negatively to 'the East'. A journalist in peacetime, Hector Dinning was one military tourist whose enthusiasm extended to an appreciation of the surpassing beauty of Gallipoli, and is remarkably modern in tone. 'A half-day in the bazaars,' he says of Egypt, 'I would not exchange for a whole wilderness of Sphinxes'. It was in Cairo and along the Suez Canal, Dinning argued, that the Australians discovered a 'liveliness of interest that was almost an affinity'. He hoped By-Ways on Service would reawaken in war veterans memories of 'their first-love in the world outside Australia'. Dinning also wrote Nile to Aleppo : With the Light Horse in the Middle East (1920)

From Book I: Waiting, Chapter II: Up the Canal (19-22, 22-23) and Book II: Gallipoli, Chapter II: Glimpses of ANZAC (82-83)