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How Will We Remember Them?

By Thomas Scrimgeour May 02, 2024

“NZ Defence Force Contingent in Gallipoli now in ‘good position’ to carry out roles.”

Stuff news tempted fate last week in the lead-up to Anzac Day. Such optimism has served us poorly on that particular peninsula. Aside from lost-luggage-gate and services cancelled due to the Wellington wind, the Anzac commemorations passed without major incident. We remembered the dead, honoured the living, and pondered the future of our national myth.

Anzac Day has a significant place in our national calendar. Christmas and New Year are for partying, Waitangi is an argument, and Easter is for the beach. Matariki is for fireworks, and King’s birthday is for mocking republicans.

Anzac Day has maintained an earnest solemnity that is somewhat out of place.

But Anzac Day has maintained an earnest solemnity that is somewhat out of place. The Gallipoli campaign was such a disaster that it’s hard to turn it into a day of jingoistic chest-thumping. Likewise, foreign policy is typically so far from the minds of the New Zealand public that there is not much to get political about.

Across the country, fountains were dyed red by protestors opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza, but for the most part, the protests were ignored. There was the usual chiding about disruption, “making the day political,” and calling instead for unity.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about “unity.” National unity can be extremely unforgiving. My great-grandfather, Thomas Meikle, was a conscientious objector to the war on religious grounds. He appealed his conscription in court, lost the case, and was mocked by the military service board and in the newspaper. We were a unified nation, and everyone would be made to agree.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about “unity.” National unity can be extremely unforgiving.

In obedience to his country, Thomas Meikle served as a medical orderly, returning home after being wounded at Passchendaele.

The emotional complexity of such stories is what makes Anzac Day such a remarkable occasion. We remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice, the strangeness of a stable world, and we worry about the fragile future of peace. It also poses the question, what is New Zealand? Would I be willing to die for that?

Anzac Day is not an exercise in dispassionate history, but a collective work of memory. Historian Rowan Light draws out this distinction, “the work of history tries to understand the past on its own terms, the work of memory, however, uses the past to make sense of our present.”

Anzac Day is not an exercise in dispassionate history, but a collective work of memory.

At Gallipoli, Winston Peters spoke with gravity, drawing heavily from Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. “Yet we cannot hallow these grounds. The men who died here have already made sacred the ground upon which we come every twenty-fifth of April.”

He went on, “We live in a troubled world, the worst in memory.” Peters didn’t have to name names. New Zealand is slowly waking up to the state of global tensions, and so once again we may have to ask the big questions. What is it about our nation we believe in? What did it cost to achieve? We must continue to wrestle with our national history. Only by sustained reflection on our past, can we look with resolve towards an uncertain future.

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Researcher Thomas Scrimgeour explains the thinking behind his column.

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