Anzac Day
Ordinary Kiwis, service men and women paid their respects around the country on a crisp autumn day yesterday.
April 25 marks the commemoration of the landing on the Gallipoli peninsula by New Zealand and Australian soldiers in 1915. Their aim was to capture a gateway to Turkey, but the campaign was a slaughter – thousands lost their lives, including 2779 New Zealanders.
Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy addressed the Wellington crowd gathered at the national commemoration, talking about the need to educate the young about the values and freedoms our soldiers fought to protect.
‘‘By giving our children knowledge of the past, we make a wise investment in the future. We want our young people to be better equipped to make informed democratic choices about what it means to be a New Zealander and what kind of nation we want to be.’’
Australian Secretary of Defence Dennis Richardson, after 48 years in government, attended his first Anzac Day ‘‘in the other half of Anzac’’. ‘‘I’m grateful for the privilege of being here today to honour the sacrifice of New Zealanders, a sacrifice that is shared across the Tasman. Anzac is a bond between our two countries, unlike that shared between any others,’’ Richardson said.
In Nelson, Christ Church Cathedral reverend Mike Hawke said the Anzac service acknowledged both the gratitude and grief of those who suffered in ‘‘mind, body and spirit’’ in a bid to spread peace and goodwill to the world.
Hawke said it was only right the nation worked to ‘‘be worthy of their great deeds’’ so hardship and loss was never in vain.
An estimated 10,000 people turned out in Dunedin.
In rural Marlborough, about 250 people attended a dawn service at the Awatere Memorial Hall. Last year’s 7.8-magnitude quake caused serious damage to the foundations of the Awatere War Memorial cenotaph and it has been closed since. It marks one of the few times the dawn service has not been held at the Awatere War Memorial in the past 100 years.
RSA president Ross Cooke said the service was poignant, as the Awatere community suffered the highest loss of life per capita in New Zealand during World War I.
Life would be very different had the call of war not reached the small Marlborough town of Seddon. It is a fact James Jermyn, 73, reflects upon as the sun rises over the town, 25 kilometres south of Blenheim. ‘‘It . . . makes you think of what could have been without war,’’ he said. ‘‘You look around during the service, and you think ‘their father was killed, their grandfather never came home’. It’s a reality check.’’
Jermyn told how his father’s twin brother, Doug Jermyn, was killed in action during World War II in Libya. Even though his father Harold stayed in Marlborough to tend to the farm, he knew something had happened to his 33-year-old brother.
‘‘Identical twins have a special bond. Dad knew three to four days before the official news arrived,’’ he said. ‘‘My father was never the same again. As a kid growing up it was the elephant in the room. It was taboo for the first 10 years of my life.’’