You might not guess, handed the photograph to identify without benefit of a caption, that this is a boatload of Australian servicemen being towed to Gallipoli's Anzac Cove at 6am on that first day, 25 April 1915. Even allowing for Australian servicemen's real (and romanticised) courage and nonchalance, they seem to be remarkably cheerful. (Although, when you go carefully from face to face, as a photograph like this commands you to, there are two very anxious faces, each belonging to an almost boyish-looking chap.)

In the book author and editor Peter Pedersen explains the ambience of this boatload of the Ist Divisional Signal Company.

"Some men are smiling, others are looking seawards rather than shorewards, and nonchalance seems to have run tension a distant second. The reason is that by this time the few Turks on the heights above the beach had long since been sent packing and the main threat to landing troops came from the occasional airburst shrapnel. But the boats made small targets, so Gaba Tepe's gunners shelled the much larger transports and warships ..."

What a remarkable picture it seems. These days all of us photograph everything that's going on, all of the time, ("Here we all are at Brodburger!") but here is a photo with that kind of capture-the-occasion intimacy, taken at a dangerous time and in a fearful place.

Peter Pedersen, having pored through the memorial's huge Gallipoli Collection to make choices of things to portray in this very pictorial book, told me that he didn't enjoy journalists and others asking him silly questions about what were his "favourite" artefacts in the book. His firm view is that every item in the Gallipoli collection is iconic. I'd just asked him a question that sounded almost as trite as the one he didn't like to be asked. But suffering this fool gladly he did sit down with me and with the book (after the prime minister had left us to give real journalists an impromptu press conference under a tree in a courtyard about matters of political import) to find one or two particular things that for him ring with a special resonance.

He alighted on a picture of a shovel, its blade lacerated by bullets and shrapnel.

"Some of the attacks that were launched from Anzac were just hopeless ... Sometimes the command was appalling. The Australians launched an attack at a place called Krithia. They were only given half an hour's notice ... they approached the line and they came under fire ... The incoming fire was so bad they had to hold up spades and shovels in front of their faces. You look at that [the lacerated shovel] and you just wonder, you just marvel. Imagine those men advancing like that! Bent forward as if they were trying to walk into a heavy rainstorm, with the fire coming in. I think these [artefacts like the shovel] are important things. Even after the span of a century for me they still haven't lost any of their impact. And I'd like to think that will be true for most other people as well."

* ANZAC Treasures – The Gallipoli Collection of the Australian War Memorial, by Peter Pedersen.

It is time to give poor, worn-out and weary Mount Everest - clambered all over by almost everybody - a rest. As we write, the first team of aromatherapists to climb it has just returned, and the gung-ho ACT Young Liberals' team is at Kathmandu, hiring sherpas.

If we must hanker to climb a Mount Everest let it be a virtual one. The vocal ensemble the Song Company is setting an example in this by attempting to scale Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B Minor, regarded as "the Mount Everest of vocal music", according to the Song Company's publicists. The Sydney-based Song Company and the Ironwood chamber ensemble are soon to attempt this ascent, in Canberra.

We may be the best city in the world and but we mustn't hold our breath waiting for a full-scale performance of the 27-part Mass in B Minor here. This columnist has been to it in Sydney's Town Hall, and found it a magnificent experience employing magnificent forces. Sublime, it enabled me to float home (to North Bondi) afterwards, on wings of joy, with no need of public transport.

The Song Company will present this epic work "in a stripped-back format – almost one per part in the strings, and one per part for woodwind, brass and singers" with "this minimalism" giving us a great gander at the bones and sinews of Bach's god-like genius. How human he suddenly looks without his wig (he could be a plumber, a Liberal frontbencher, a football coach) in our picture of this forensic reconstruction of his face, made using his skull.

Bach's Mass in B Minor is at St Christopher's Cathedral, Manuka, at 6pm on Saturday, October 25. All ticketing details are at the Song Company's website.