ANZAC Day (The Gallipoli Campaign)

Anzac Day marks the moment on 25 April 1915 when Australian and New Zealand soldiers landed at Gallipoli, their first engagement of the First World War. What was planned as a swift strike to seize the peninsula, open the way to Constantinople and knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war became an eight-month stalemate of terrible cost: more than 56,000 Allied dead, among them 8,709 Australians and 2,721 New Zealanders, before the forces were evacuated at year's end. The campaign failed its military objectives, yet the memory of those who served and died became a founding thread of both nations' identity, commemorated every 25 April. Read as the chart of the day, the signature is sombre and fitting. The Sun sits in earthy, enduring Taurus in the eleventh house of the tribe and the collective, the bond of a whole people forged in common sacrifice. The Moon in Virgo in the third house speaks to grief carried in words and remembrance, the letters home, the stories that would not be forgotten. Cancer rising, the maternal shell, is the shape of a day given over to mourning and protective, national memory. A chart is never a verdict on war; here it is simply the imprint of loss and of remembrance held sacred.