Anzac Day: the way forward
Inmany ways, World War I still feels like New Zealand’s founding story, despite decades of prior Pa¯keha¯ history and centuries of Ma¯ori history.
Historian Vincent O’malley saw this when he compared the tens of millions spent on five years ofworld War I centenary events with the paltry sums spent on the anniversary of the New Zealandwars.
While the ‘‘historical amnesia’’ he described in 2015 has lifted somewhat, thanks largely to the efforts of O’malley and other historians, and lobbying that finally resulted in official commemoration, Anzac Day will continue to overshadow all other days on which we remember
New Zealand’s wars. Another historian, author James Robins, sees that the simplicity of the Anzac myth, with its heroism and sacrifice, obscures more complicated and contested histories of colonialism.
It’s easier to reflect on all of us at war with another, even if few of us know the reason, than New Zealanders at war with each other. The meaning seems clearer, and we think we know where the lines of right and wrong fall.
For Robins, in his recent book Whenwe Dead Awaken, the Anzac myth doesn’t just get in the way of earlier New Zealand history. It also stops us from seeing the Armenian genocide, an atrocity that continues to be unrecognised by New Zealand and Australia, despite being perpetrated by the same enemy that we fought at Gallipoli. The international politics of honouring and remembering can be very tricky.
A third historian, Nicholas Boyack, has observed that despite the millions spent by government on World War I events, an average class of New Zealand high school history students would struggle to explain why we fought the Turks in 1915, and what the wider war was about.
Boyack noticed another thing as well. Anzac Day’s meaning has waxed and waned. Attendance dipped in the 1970s in New Zealand and Australia, before popular Anzac stories revived the Gallipoli myth in both countries. In the 1990s we saw a new wave of popular histories of World War I, often based on letters and diaries.
These books ‘‘add little to our understanding of thewar, why we got involved and the long-term impact on the nation’’, Boyack argues. Perhaps they could be seen instead as part of the wider trend of family history and amateur genealogy that took off at the same time, aided by the internet and shared databases. They also speak to an enormous public appetite for war stories.
Yet another historian, Australian Romain Fathi, thinks Anzac Day needs to be revived by becoming more inclusive of other demographics and narratives, less militaristic, with more focus on peacekeeping.
For us in New Zealand, the growth in the family history side of
Anzac Daymight point to a way forward. Over time, Anzac Day can become less about the specifics of a particular war in a particular place at a particular time than about the act of remembering in general, within a culture that has few sacred occasions left and few shared ceremonies.
It could also be more inclusive in the ways Fathi describes. We don’t talk much about the 550 New Zealand nurseswho served overseas duringworld War I. Nor do we talk about the war’s conscientious objectors. And we still say far too little about New Zealanders who died in wars before 1914, and what those wars were for.