Hanifi Araz, a big man from the city of Canakkale across the Dardanelles from the Gallipoli Peninsula, saw the future in the early 1980s, and he wanted to be part of it.
''Anzac tourism was born after the Gallipoli movie was made,'' he told me years ago. He was referring to the 1981 film starring Mel Gibson, Mark Lee and Bill Kerr, which traces the journey of two boys from Australia to the hideous mess that was the Gallipoli campaign amid the valleys and ridges above Anzac Cove in 1915.
It ends at the moment when hundreds of Anzac troops, most of them Light Horsemen with no horses, were fed to Turkish machineguns and damnation at a place called The Nek, and it tapped something long dormant in the Australian heart.
''Before that, only a few people from Australia and New Zealand came here,'' Araz said.
He was in his 20s then and persuaded his father to convert a building close to the ferry terminal in Canakkale into a small hostel. He named it Anzac House. Though the term Anzac tourism jars on the ear, for the first time the few intrepid travellers who managed to find their way to the old battlefields no longer had to pitch tents or search for often dodgy accommodation in the area.
Araz's timing proved serendipitous. If the movie influenced the early tramp of feet back to Gallipoli, other cultural, historical and political events were about to combine to turn that slow march into a flood.
More than 10,000 Australians and New Zealanders will travel next week to the Gallipoli Peninsula to attend the Anzac Day dawn service by the beach. Such crowds have become the norm over the past 14 years, and show no signs of abating.
Next year, Australian, New Zealand and Turkish authorities, fearing maybe 50,000 people would overwhelm the peninsula for the 100th anniversary of the landing, have imposed a balloted limit of 10,200 pilgrims.
In just three decades, the Anzac sector has been transformed from a lonely pocket of scrubby and weathered coastal hills to a destination in danger of being overrun.
To understand how this happened, we need to look beyond the movie Gallipoli, though 33 years after it was made it retains such status that it is still screened every night at the now numerous hostels and hotels in the area. Indeed, we need to look at the fallout of another foreign conflict, one much less celebrated than the defeat at Gallipoli.
Australia by the early 1980s was still wrestling with the consequences of the Vietnam War, which had split the country during the 1960s and early '70s. Vietnam - at a time when baby boomers were coming of age and exploring peace and love and feminism, and turning against two decades of conservative government to try Gough Whitlam's Labor administration - had marginalised interest in old wars.
What had been known as the Anzac tradition was widely ignored or openly derided, and attendances at Anzac Day events were so diminished there was speculation the day would die away.
The period had also marginalised the status of soldiers who had been sent to Vietnam. For the first time in Australian history, the nation's troops received no universal embrace when they returned home. When that long war ended for Australia in 1972, Vietnam veterans were given no welcome home march. No cheering, no bunting. It left a legacy of bitterness and confusion that claimed more lives through alcoholism and suicide.
By 1987, the Hawke government judged enough time (15 years) had passed to deal with the Vietnam War.
Australia was finally moved to welcome home its soldiers. In October 1987, 25,000 veterans, many of them weeping, marched through the streets of Sydney, with tens of thousands of Australians cheering them.
It was as if a boil had been lanced.
Suddenly, with the realisation that old soldiers of World War I were dying out, many Australians seemed ready to embrace anew the nation's oldest myth - sacrifice on Gallipoli.
Belated recognition of one group of Australian veterans, those from Vietnam, helped foster a renewed fascination for ancient veterans who were disappearing forever. Within months, the nation was caught up in a new search for identity: 1988 was the bicentenary of European settlement. Amid all the celebrations, many Australians went to archives to dig either a convict or an Anzac out of the family tree.
In that same year, the ABC's eminent reporter Chris Masters went to Gallipoli with producer and Turkish speaker Harvey Broadbent to make a Four Corners documentary that would catch the imagination of a generation.
Called The Fatal Shore, it was shown for years in Australian classrooms. Masters spoke to backpackers at Lone Pine, wondering why so many young people had taken to visiting the peninsula. About 12,000 Australians were visiting a year, he reported. His program spoke to young Australians in a way many of their parents - those of the Vietnam generation - never had.
The Fatal Shore became the spur for hordes of gap-year backpackers to include Gallipoli in their travels, and is still screened alongside Gallipoli at hostels and hotels around the Gallipoli area.
The ground for renewed interest had already been sown on the battlefield itself. In 1985, the Turkish government had officially named the beach of the 1915 landings as Anzac Cove.
In return, the Australian government unveiled a memorial above the beach that retains the power to reduce pilgrims to tears.
It features the words of Kemal Ataturk, the first president of the Turkish Republic and the man who made his name by leading the defence of the Anzac sector in 1915.
''Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives … You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country,'' advise the stone-engraved words, continuing, ''You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.''
Many guidebooks claim Ataturk spoke the words directly to a group of Australians and the mothers of lost sons who had journeyed to Gallipoli in 1934. In fact, he was ailing in Istanbul and wrote a version of the message, instructing that it be delivered by one of his ministers, Sukru Kaya, to a party of mostly British visitors who had sailed from England aboard the SS Duchess of Richmond.
Only three former soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force were among the 700 on the ship and the message was to all former allied combatants and their families.
Nevertheless, its rendering sits on Anzac territory next to the little Ari Burnu cemetery alongside Anzac Cove, and it has been claimed by Australians and New Zealanders as their own.
Ari Burnu (Bee's Nose) cemetery, perched at the edge of the Aegean Sea, contains 253 graves, and was the site for dawn services through last century. They were mostly small gatherings, travellers sleeping among the graves and warming themselves with rum, and regularly no one beyond war graves staff turned up.
Australians and New Zealanders, of course, had made intermittent visits to the peninsula since the war historian C.E.W. Bean returned there in 1919 on a mission to begin collecting exhibits for what would become the Australian War Memorial. Prime Minister Stanley Bruce - a Gallipoli veteran himself - was the first Australian PM to make the journey. He wandered the cemeteries in 1924.
A group of 87 Australians sailed to Gallipoli aboard a cruise ship in 1929, and the last major visit before World War II, which included the former commander of Anzac troops at Gallipoli, William Birdwood, took place in 1936. Soon after, the Turkish government closed the area, gazetting it as military land. And so it remained, isolated and lonely, for more than a decade.
The most significant remaking of ''Old Anzac'' as part of the Australian and New Zealand heart had to wait until the 75th anniversary of the 1915 landing. Prime Minister Bob Hawke spent more than $10 million leading 58 Anzac veterans - aged 91 to 103 - to Anzac Cove for Anzac Day 1990.
Australian warships stood off the cove, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and New Zealand's PM, Geoffrey Palmer, attended and 70 Australian journalists went to document the occasion.
About 5000 Australians flocked to Anzac Cove - the biggest contingent since the 1915 landing, and far too many to be contained within the Ari Burnu cemetery. Organisers worried about its grounds being trampled.
Hawke, at the dawn service, conceded that Gallipoli had been a military failure, but portrayed the Anzac sector as part of his own nation ''… because of the courage with which they fought.
''Because of their devotion to duty and their comradeship, because of their ingenuity, their good humour and their endurance, because these hills rang with their voices and ran with their blood, this place Gallipoli is, in one sense, a part of Australia.''
The event gained immense media coverage, commemorative stamps were issued and commentators analysed the Anzac-Gallipoli phenomenon anew.
The Vegemite Bar and the Boomerang Bar appeared on the shore of the Dardanelles, Araz expanded his accommodations and established a travel company to make it easier to reach the area and soon he had competitors swarming. Across the Dardanelles, in the little town of Eceabat, a young Turk named Ilhami Gezici - known as TJ - established his own operation and harnessed the power of the internet to attract Australians and New Zealanders to his hostel-hotel (free Wi-Fi in every room) and tour company.
In 1996, TJ married Bernina Aitchison, a young Australian woman from the Victorian-NSW border town of Corowa he had met when she took one of his tours.
His pitch remains irresistible in the age of multiculturalism: his great-grandfather died fighting the Anzacs, and Bernina's great-grandfather was with the Australian troops at Gallipoli. ''I say the Anzacs and Turks never hated each other - they just fought each other,'' TJ tells his clients.
The new Gallipoli-Anzac era was all but complete in 2000 when Prime Minister John Howard attended the dawn service at a new commemorative site built on North Beach to save Ari Burnu cemetery. About 14,000 Australians and New Zealanders flocked to the service and later played two-up at Lone Pine.
Turkish and Australian bureaucracies have since tamed the experience by erecting fences and terraced seating at the site, and alcohol is confiscated from those who try to relive the old days, when hip-flasks fuelled the crowds.
Roads have been upgraded to cope with buses that bellow around the old battlefields every weekend now, many of them carrying Turkish schoolchildren. Some years ago the Turkish government declared Gallipoli sacred to its own people and urged all Turkish citizens who could afford it to make the pilgrimage at least once in their lives.
With a year to go to the centenary, the old place is being loved almost to death.
Tony Wright is the author of Walking the Gallipoli Peninsula, Allen and Unwin.
