Commemoration vs Celebration

Over the last week, Wel­ling­ton has been the focus of an Anzac Day like no oth­er. The long-awaited Pukeahu Nation­al War Memori­al Park opened with a “spec­tac­u­lar” light show, and on Fri­day the city stopped to cheer a “spec­tac­u­lar” Anzac parade (paging Guy Debord!). This was fol­lowed by a huge turnout for the dawn ser­vice on Anzac Day itself. These were all resound­ingly suc­cess­ful at ful­filling their pur­poses, but what were those pur­poses, and what wider agen­das might they be serving?

[Dis­claim­er: this is my own per­son­al view, and should not be taken to rep­res­ent the views of oth­er Wellin­gonis­tas, or of SBS.]

Many tal­en­ted and ded­ic­ated people have worked hard to ensure that the full and nuanced story of the ANZACs and New Zeal­and’s wider his­tory of con­flict (includ­ing the stor­ies of non-com­batants and con­scien­tious object­ors) is told. But those sub­tleties aren’t get­ting through. The huge crowds at Pukeahu deserved the full story, but what they saw could cyn­ic­ally be described as a slick pro-mil­it­ary Power­Point: kiwiana; brave chaps off to war; kiwiana; war is hell; sad pop­pies; kiwiana; WWII; Iroquois heli­copters off to ‘Nam; more kiwiana; Wil­lie Api­ata look­ing staunch and hero­ic. While much of it would have been mov­ing for those with fore­bears in WWI, the mes­sage came relent­lessly from a mil­it­ary per­spect­ive, with no ques­tion of who they fought for, who they fought against, or why.

While the light show attemp­ted some bal­ance and acknow­ledged the tragedy of war, Fri­day’s parade dis­pensed with such niceties and went for full-on jin­go­ist­ic cir­cus. Sombre reflec­tions on the hor­rors of indus­tri­al­ised slaughter don’t tend to fea­ture con­fetti, chil­dren hap­pily cheer­ing how­itzers, and breezy rendi­tions of “76 Trom­bones”. A stu­dent of semi­ot­ics would be hard pressed to explain how it differed struc­tur­ally from a May Day pro­ces­sion or a tick­er­tape parade for vic­tori­ous All Blacks. The Domin­ion Post blithely described this as “shades of the pat­ri­ot­ic pride and sense of adven­ture our sol­diers must have felt 100 years ago”, as if we should have learned noth­ing from the futile carnage of that “adven­ture”. I sup­pose this is to be expec­ted when you hand the reins over to an acknow­ledged “WWI buff” and tank col­lect­or.

As well as this glor­i­fic­a­tion of the mil­it­ary, this year I’ve noticed a par­tic­u­larly insi­di­ous form of essen­tial­ist nation­al­ism. There’s an emphas­is on remem­ber­ing those of our ancest­ors who made “the ulti­mate sac­ri­fice” for our coun­try, but this excludes many New Zeal­anders. Our pop­u­la­tion has quad­rupled since 1915, so a sig­ni­fic­ant pro­por­tion of New Zeal­ander had no ancest­ors here in WWI*.

For many of us, our ancest­ors’ exper­i­ence of war was­n’t Gal­lipoli: it was the Blitz, Dachau, Bel­fast, the Killing Fields, or Erit­rea. The Māori exper­i­ence is dif­fer­ent again, with some tupuna fight­ing for Empire and oth­ers against: oth­ers can tell that story bet­ter than I. But the assump­tion that a fam­ily his­tory of going away to fight in WWI is an essen­tial and “unit­ing” part of the New Zea­l­and iden­tity erases and excludes many New Zeal­anders.

There may be some truth in the stand­ard nar­rat­ive that WWI helped cement a par­tic­u­lar nation­al iden­tity, but if so, it cre­ated the New Zea­l­and of (say) 1965. The Aotearoa New Zea­l­and of 2015 is at least as much a product of the fol­low­ing 50 years—of Viet­nam, the Spring­bok Tour, Rogernom­ics, immig­ra­tion, the Māori Renais­sance, jet travel, two waves of fem­in­ism and the internet—as it is of Gal­lipoli.

Yes: if you had a great uncle who died at Chu­nuk Bair, hon­our his memory. But that is less and less a defin­ing part of “the” New Zea­l­and story. This coun­try has always been good at hon­our­ing those who went away to war; but we must­n’t for­get those who suffered in wars that came to them.

Why does this mat­ter? Because many politi­cians and many in the media keep telling us that Anzac Day “unites us all as a coun­try”, and this builds a pres­sure to fall in behind a sim­pli­fied (and to some extent fab­ric­ated) myth of uni­fied nation­hood. While the dawn ser­vices offered the dig­ni­fied moments for reflect­ing on loss that they usu­ally do, Fri­day’s parade sig­ni­fied a shift from com­mem­or­a­tion to fest­iv­ity.

A cyn­ic­al per­son would say this serves two pur­poses: it makes it easi­er to con­vince us that it’s noble to engage again in for­eign wars; and it helps to usurp Wait­angi Day as our nation­al day. Accord­ing to the Domin­ion Post edit­or­i­al on Sat­urday, Wait­angi Day is about “passing ideo­lo­gic­al argu­ment” while Anzac Day “unites us all”. But it does­n’t. Anzac Day does­n’t unite the quarter or so of us without fam­ily con­nec­tions to the ANZAC corps; nor did the war unite the coun­try at the time. It was in fact bit­terly divis­ive, and it remains fun­da­ment­ally polit­ic­al. And of course Wait­angi Day is polit­ic­al: any nation­al day must be so by defin­i­tion, because a nation state is a polit­ic­al entity. The “fest­iv­isa­tion” (to coin an ugly word) of Anzac Day is part of a very polit­ic­al pro­cess to erase cer­tain his­tor­ies and to turn oth­ers into sac­red, unques­tion­able truths.

If you want a Wel­ling­ton anti­dote to the offi­cial nar­rat­ive, I recom­mend Remem­ber The Peace­makers at Thistle Hall (until the 3rd of May).  You could also read about the oppos­i­tion­al roles of Te Puea Hear­angi, Archibald Bax­ter, Rua Ken­ana and Peter Fraser; a Turk­ish view­point; or Tim Lead­beat­er at The Daily Blog invok­ing Robin Hyde. Hope­fully, once the poppy con­fetti has washed away, Pukeahu will have room to com­mem­or­ate its own loc­al his­tor­ies of con­flict. Right there on Buckle St in 1913, sol­diers armed with bay­on­ets and machine guns set up a bar­ri­cade against strik­ing uni­on­ists. And this, tucked away behind the Caril­lon, is a memori­al to Māori depor­ted from Tarana­ki:

New Zeal­anders have a vast range of exper­i­ences of war, and much of it is at odds with the image of “young men will­ingly going to the oth­er side of the world to fight for the Brit­ish Empire” that has dom­in­ated this Anzac Day more than any oth­er that I remem­ber. Maybe it’s becom­ing easi­er to for­get the diversity of human exper­i­ence behind the myth of “the birth of a nation”; maybe it’s the price of the club. But the resources are out there to flesh out and chal­lenge the offi­cial Anzac story.

* I haven’t found any stat­ist­ics to say what pro­por­tion of New Zeal­anders had ancest­ors in this coun­try at a giv­en time in the past. But using the yearly depar­tures and arrivals stat­ist­ics from the Stat­ist­ics NZ web­site, and a few assump­tions, I make a very rough estim­ate that maybe a quarter of the pop­u­la­tion had no ancest­ors here in 1918, and hence have no fam­ily con­nec­tion to the ANZACs. In many parts of the coun­try, that will be much high­er: in sub­urbs with a high pro­por­tion of recent immig­rants, the vast major­ity would not have ANZAC “in their blood”.