Gallipoli

We were at a brunch for my parents' Gourmet Group. The group has been meeting since 1977, so the friendships and bonds have gone far beyond just a hobby of cooking that originally brought them together - they've been through births, graduations, marriages, grandchildren, facelifts, heart surgery, remodelling, and buying a trailer and travelling America. For Christmas each year they meet at a restaurant for a fancy brunch and exchange gifts gathered in their travels all through the prior year.

This year the banker and his wife had been to Turkey. She had brought back beautifully painted trivets for everyone, and they were truly exotic and impressive.

I was sitting at the opposite end of the table to them, so I wasn't following the conversation at that end of the table, but at one point my Mom got my attention, "Ellen?" She pointed at the banker's wife and said, "Tell Ellen where you went."

The banker's wife leaned over the others between us on our side of the table and said, "Dar...nelle? The Straits of Dardanelle?"

I was racing to recall my Australian geography, but all I could remember was the Bass Strait and the Torres Strait. I shook my head, it wasn't ringing a bell.

"Where the battle was? Gallipoli?"

"Oh, my! You went to Gallipoli?" My heart moved in my chest like it does in the last scene of the movie. I tried to sort of explain to the others at the table, "That was really important, to the...every January they..." But the conversation had moved on.

It haunted me all day, the end of that sentence. "It's incredibly important to them- to me, to Australians, which is us, but really them, but also me..."

I am still an Australian, at least on paper. Is Gallipoli incredibly important to me, because I am an Australian, or are the Australians it is important to a "them", because I didn't grow up with it being important to me, although I now understand why it was, and I have left them and moved back here?