Gallipoli and the "ANZAC legend" are key building blocks of a carefully constructed ideology, formulated in the first place by CEW Bean, and then, through constant repetition, by the 21st century these have become part of the national psyche.

This month every facet of Australian life is being exposed to a centenary "celebration" of the landings by Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli during the Great War. This includes the visual arts and this touring Gallipoli Centenary exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery Return to Anzac Cove: Your friend the enemy. The strange title is derived from an incident related in a letter home from one of the Australian soldiers. "We threw some tinned beef and jam over to them and in return they threw tobacco and cigarette papers. A couple of the parcels had notes in them written in French. One ran something to this effect: Our Friends the Enemy, we received your preserved meat, and send in return tobacco. Would be pleased if you could send a souvenir, and we will do the same… Your soldier friends Turks."

There appears a certain unreality in such an exchange, which taken together with stories of a truce for sport and festive celebrations, marks a contrast with the sheer senselessness of the carnage which left almost 10 million combatants dead, while empires vied for pride and political influence.

For this exhibition, 13 artists, the painters Deirdre Bean, Elisabeth Cummings, Euan Macleod, Guy Maestri, Idris Murphy, John Walsh, Luke Sciberras, Peter O'Doherty, Steve Lopes, Michael Shepherd, Amanda Penrose Hart and Leo Robba, and the documentary film maker Bruce Inglis, visited Gallipoli for a few days in 2013 and 2014 and recorded their impressions. It was a huge and very expensive undertaking with selections of these artists' work being shown concurrently at the SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney, the Goulburn Art Gallery as well as at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery. The quality of the artwork is very uneven in the Canberra exhibition, but there may be a simple explanation, that some of the better work by these artists is being shown elsewhere.

The other rather general observation is that the work has only a tangential link with Gallipoli and perhaps it is only the New Zealand artist, Michael Shepherd, who in a somewhat heavy-handed manner has revisited the battlefield genre in his paintings. Most of the other painters, in this strongly Sydney-centric group, have continued to make work in their familiar style, but now taking into account something of the local Turkish topography. The more interesting pieces in this show are by Euan Macleod, Elisabeth Cummings and Idris Murphy and some of the smaller pieces by Guy Maestri.

Gallipoli itself is a much compromised site, where, in the interests of tourist revenue, something of the sanctity of the place has been sacrificed. When I first visited some 40 years ago, the scars were still evident. It was place where great evil had occurred and the traces could still be seen – the earth was still bleeding. Today the spectacular views remain, but little else, with much geared to the constant flow of buses bringing fresh groups of tourists. It is a dilemma facing many sites of horror, whether this be Auschwitz, Stalingrad or Gallipoli. Today the landscape tends to conquer those who set out to paint Gallipoli and perhaps this is the way that it should be. Even the great GW Lambert was defeated by the setting and had to struggle with the archaeological details of the conflict at a time when the memories were still fresh and the bones of the fallen were scattered on the ground.

Indeed, the only Australian artist who had the genius to tackle Gallipoli and to evoke the resonance of drama, tragedy, heroism and that profound sense of pathos was Sidney Nolan in his Gallipoli series, which is held at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.