"We have had a very long tradition of courageous journalists covering Australia's wars," said Malcolm Turnbull, having emerged from his own lesser skirmish to become Australia's new prime minister.
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"They have drafted history. Written the first draft of history."
Mr Turnbull, opening the first memorial to Australian war correspondents at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, noted that "it is often said in war the first casualty is the truth and it is the war correspondents who have to tell the truth".
Many of the correspondents who attended the dedication, from Peter Greste back, and those representing correspondents killed in their work from World War II to south-east Asia and on to Balibo in East Timor, might have reflected on the accuracy of those words about truth being the first casualty.
Most of them, too, would have known that the first draft, which can be a devil of a thing to transmit from a conflict zone, can sometimes prove contestable.
The memorial was dedicated 100 years to the day since Australian journalist Keith (later Sir Keith) Murdoch dispatched a scathing indictment of the fiasco that was the Gallipoli campaign of 1915.
What has become known as the Murdoch Letter — an 8000-word damning of what he called "one of the most terrible chapters in our history" — was cabled to Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher and soon also reached the eyes of British Prime Minister Henry Herbert Asquith, forcing the powers to recognise the Gallipoli expedition for what it was — a disaster and a waste of life.
"What Keith Murdoch did, an Australian journalist, what he did was tell the truth," said Mr Turnbull.
The Murdoch Letter, however, was not the first draft of the history.
Murdoch spent only four days on Gallipoli and the nearby island of Imbros in early September 1915, though he wrote that he had "visited most parts of Anzac and Suvla Bay positions, walked many miles through the trenches, [and] conversed with what senior and junior officers I could reach".
During his visit, Murdoch met the talented and flamboyant British correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who had been there since the first day of the landings.
He asked Murdoch to carry a letter he had written to the British prime minister.
Ashmead-Bartlett — who had fought in the Boer War, had reported from the Russo-Japanese war (1904); the French campaign in Morocco (1907); with the Italian army in Tripoli (1911); and was at the Turkish headquarters in 1912 during the First Balkan War — was appalled by what he had witnessed happening at Gallipoli over more than four months.
But his dispatches were so heavily censored he couldn't get the truth published.
Ashmead-Bartlett wanted Murdoch to smuggle his version of the truth to London.
But a rival from The Guardian got wind of it and betrayed the plan. Murdoch was detained in Marseilles, and a British army officer confiscated Ashmead-Bartlett's letter.
Murdoch then sat down and wrote his own 8000-word letter, based on what he could remember from Ashmead-Bartlett's effort coupled with his own observations over four days, with a number of not entirely accurate flourishes scorning English officers and mythologising the Australians.
Ashmead-Bartlett was ordered out of Gallipoli within days, interrogated by military authorities, placed under surveillance and threatened with further censorship as, short of cash, he undertook a series of lectures in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. He was interrogated by military authorities and the House of Lords back in England and died in 1931.
Keith Murdoch, who had beaten the censors, was lauded as a hero and became a media baron. His letter became famous and was — still is — credited with having removed the ineffectual Sir Ian Hamilton from running the Gallipoli campaign and with persuading the military to abandon the Gallipoli Peninsula. The Murdoch Letter has gained UNESCO listing.
"It takes courage for any journalist, for any correspondent to stand up to big businesses, to vested interests, to governments, and never more so than in a time of war when all the arguments of patriotism can be levelled in vain against a journalist who seeks to tell the truth," Mr Turnbull told the gathering at the war memorial.
To which Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, a prophet scorned in his own land, might have agreed, with a wry nod to his messenger, Keith Murdoch.
The war correspondents' memorial was funded by the C.E.W. Bean Foundation, which honours the journalist and official World War I historian, Charles Bean.
