Bruce Ruxton helped me find my way to Gallipoli for Anzac Day, because at the time there was no one else to ask for directions.

It was 1988, and a young Australian backpacker did not consider pilgrimage to the sacred shores of Turkey an automatic rite of passage - and if he did, he struggled to nut out how to get there. It's hard to fathom today, when the news is filled to saturation with images of the modern Anzac invasion and stories of ballots to secure a treasured spot on the Dardanelles cliffs. But 27 years ago there were no arguments over "Brandzac". No jostling of leaders beside the graves near Anzac Cove. The April 25 fetish - its elevation to a stature rivalling religious holidays - was but a twinkle in a marketing man's eye. That the marketing would eventually co-opt everyone from supermarkets to prime ministers was some years in the future - all modern efforts to suggest that we have always carried on like this to the contrary.

Australians now congregate en masse at Anzac Cove for Anzac Day ceremonies, in what has become a national right of passage for many. Credit:STR

We didn't. Not even in 1988, the bicentennial year. We'd never known a festival of national pride like it, but in a year of jingles, jingoism, celebratory harbour jaunts by Charles and Diana and a year-long party led by an enthused I-was-born-for-this Bob Hawke, no prime minister or representative graced the faraway birthplace of national legend. The Queen wasn't in Turkey honouring veterans, she was in Australia late that April, opening Expo in Brisbane. No TV anchors stood on the Turkish coast beaming back stories of gravesites and gloried heroism. No laws governed how we might speak of the occasion. Indeed, Melbourne's Anzac Day march the year before had been marked by protesters loudly lamenting the glorification of war.