Lest We Forget

Poppy wreaths laid at the Australian War Memorial in London on Anzac Day

Craig every second Tuesday

Kia ora and gidday everyone,

In the past week a rather significant day for Australians and New Zealanders has passed by again. 25 April may just be a date on the calendar for most countries, but down in New Zealand and Australia, and for others all around the world who have links to our two nations (including Turkey), it is a very special, and sombre day; ANZAC Day. A public holiday, but more akin to one like Memorial Day in the United States than its more festive holiday brethren. 

Anzac Day is a day when Aussies and Kiwis pause and remember the soldiers, sailors, and others who have served (and are still serving) our countries in wars and conflicts all over the world. 109 years ago, our two nations first fought side by side under the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) banner – our soldiers landing together at dawn on a desolate beach on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. It was a military bungle by the British commanders - but the attitudes, actions, and courage of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers both at Gallipoli and over the many battles and years since, stoked a burgeoning sense of independent identity and nationhood.

Despite being about as far away from the main First World War conflict as you could be, more than 100,000 New Zealand troops and nurses served overseas during the First World War, from a population of just over one million. 42% of men of military age served. The losses were huge. You've only got to drive around New Zealand and spy the war memorials in various rural towns, where there are dozens of names listed even from tiny farming communities, to realise the impact the First and Second World Wars had on a couple of generations. Service, sacrifice. 

Wreaths at New Zealand war memorial
in London. Green one is Royal Family

Over the past century, Australia and New Zealand have contributed greatly on the world stage in many ways and in many diverse areas, generally 'punching far above our weight' given our geographic isolation and small populations - and in some ways this can be traced back to the values associated with 'the ANZAC tradition'.

I've been thinking a lot about Anzac Day recently, and what it means. It's thirteen years since I made the pilgrimage to Gallipoli myself, camping out overnight with hundreds of fellow Kiwis and Aussies by the beach where the Anzacs landed in 1915, waking for dawn service then hiking up the steep cliffs for morning services at Lone Pine and Chunuk Bair. You can read more about my thoughts on that experience at a prior Murder is Everywhere post. A couple of years ago I attended an Anzac Day ceremony in my hometown of Richmond, Nelson in the top of the South Island of New Zealand. The place where I used to march in Anzac Day parades as a little kid in the Boy Scouts, joining the then-current military personnel and the veterans wearing their medals. 

That April we were back visiting family, for the first time in three-plus years because of the pandemic (we usually go back every year). Some significant things have changed for me since, and I've learned more personally about loss, and grief.

Flight Lieutenant Edward Te Keu
Bennett, a rare indigenous pilot

This year I toyed with attending the dawn service in London for the first time. It's held each year by the Australian and New Zealand war memorials near Hyde Park corner. I even had got Miss Nine and myself some poppies to wear (they're usually sold here in the UK around November, for Remembrance Day, whereas in ANZ they're an April thing). I'd been thinking about nationhood, military service, and more quite a bit recently as I was also writing my first large feature article for a big British newspaper (having had 1,000+ new stories, columns, and features published in other print magazines and newspapers in several countries). That feature combined crime writing and wartime remembrances; an interview with Māori filmmaker and novelist Michael Bennett (Better the Blood, The Gone, etc) about his father, Ted, who was a rare indigenous fighter pilot in the Second World War, and one of seven brothers who served in the war - remarkably, all came home, including three from the famed Māori Battalion. I'd gotten to do some fascinating research and gone down a few interesting rabbit holes while writing and fact-checking the feature article - which was originally scheduled to be published on 25 April (it got bumped to a later issue by the announcement of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year longlist). 

So Anzac Day had been on my mind even more than usual. 

To attend the dawn service in central London, it was going to be a 3am wakeup in South London to get a night bus into the city in time to make the entry time for the service - doable if tricky on a school day. Unfortunately a very late night beforehand for Miss Nine meant I couldn't in good conscience drag her out of bed so early, even for something as significant as Anzac Day. Especially when it's not a public holiday in the UK, so she'd have to go to school afterward. Perhaps in a couple of years, when it's on a Saturday here. After dropping her at school, though, I did head into town to pay my own respects at the war memorials. It was interesting being there, with the poppy wreaths placed by the Royal Family, the New Zealand and Australian governments, each branch of the military, and more. Tourists were wandering around as they usually do in London, and some wondered about why there were so many big wreaths at those memorials today. So I ended up chatting with some American tourists, and German tourists, and others, about Anzac Day. 

My dawn view over Anzac Cove on 25 April 2011

After that I strolled down Piccadilly and visited several bookshops, before getting back to my laptop for some work. On the other side of the world, my compatriots had been attending services and spending a public holiday with family and friends. My Anzac Day was a little different, but I was glad I took the time this year to pause for a while, to remember and reflect. I'll leave you with the words of the Anzac dedication, read out at every service: 

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.”

Until next time. Ka kite anō.

Whakataukī of the fortnight: 

Inspired by Zoe and her 'word of the week', I'll be ending my fortnightly posts by sharing a whakataukī (Māori proverb), a pithy and poetic thought to mull on as we go through life.

Ko te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōna te ngahere. Ko te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōnā te ao

(The bird who feeds on the miro berry has the forest. The bird who feeds on knowledge has the world.)

The native New Zealand wood pigeon (kereru) is fond of miro berries

At the going down of the sun and in the morning ...

Craig every second Tuesday.

Kia ora and gidday everyone.

So since my last post a fortnight ago a rather momentous day for Aussies and Kiwis passed on by. 

For more than a century the 25th of April has brought both antipodean nations to a pause, a special and sombre day where we remember the soldiers, sailors, and others who have served (and are still serving) our countries in wars and conflicts all over the world. Anzac Day, as that date is known in our part of the world, has been commemorated every year since 1916, the first anniversary of an ill-fated battle. 

Dawn over Anzac Cove on Turkey's Gallipoli peninsula

Ten years ago, I took the photo above. Like many young Aussies and Kiwis, I'd made the pilgrimage to Gallipoli, a rocky peninsula in Turkey, a place whose name alone resonates strongly with us from a young age, regardless of our family ties or otherwise to the military. Perhaps it's the equivalent of 'Pearl Harbour' for Americans, in that the name has so much more weight than just its geography.

106 years ago, on 25 April 1915, our two nations first fought side by side under the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) banner – our soldiers landing together at dawn on a desolate beach on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey. The campaign and landing were a military bungle by the British commanders (including the First Lord of the Admiralty, a certain Winston Churchill) - but the attitudes, actions, and courage of the Australian and New Zealand soldiers both at Gallipoli and over the many battles and years since, stoked a burgeoning sense of independent identity and nationhood.

Anzac. It’s a powerful word for anyone from our end of the world. 

But despite attending many an Anzac Day parade in New Zealand as a youngster – feeling proud as we marched, paper poppies pinned to our Scout uniforms, alongside aging veterans weighed down with medals, and feeling my skin tingle as the notes of the Last Post rang out – I don’t think I truly grasped its significance until that freezing morning I experienced on the Gallipoli peninsula ten years ago. 

Thousands of young Kiwis and Aussies, buried 10,000 miles from home

Gallipoli. Another word drenched in meaning for antipodeans. The afternoon before we’d walked down a dusty road towards the site of the ceremony, past open fields and sheer cliff faces that few would want to scale in the best of conditions let alone when you were under heavy gunfire, past cemeteries where white stones marked where men from all parts of Australasia, every state, city, and town, lay side by side, forever. Looking back, I have to admit that before taking that walk Gallipoli was a name from a book, a place on a map, a word that carried weight because of what we’d read or watched on TV. 

Then,  it was real. It may sound kind of silly, I know, and for many people dirt is dirt is dirt, but I couldn’t help myself from placing a hand on the grass beside those graves (I wasn’t alone), and thinking that there was something special, something meaningful, about this particular strip of earth. I have family buried near European battlefields, but as far as I’m aware, none here. 

But I still felt something in the air at Gallipoli.

It was a surreal, special experience visiting that tiny part of Turkey, a nation overflowing with rich history (Greek, Roman, Biblical, Ottoman Empire, and more) far beyond its (relatively) modern meaning for Aussies and Kiwis. 

And I had a few realisations over the course of the 24 hours or so we spent exploring and camping out under the stars at Gallipoli. For the first three decades of my life I'd thought of Anzac Day as a sadly special day for two countries, my own and our closest neighbour.

The crowds huddling up for a long, cold night before the dawn service

It was their ages that particularly got me. We were huddled together, thousands of Kiwis and Aussies wrapped in blankets, beanies, jackets, thermals and sleeping bags to ward off the bone-chilling overnight temperatures of a spring morning at Anzac Cove. The sky hadn’t yet lightened, it was still the ‘wee small hours’ of 25 April, and the big screens had been showing the haunting images of a small selection of our forebears who’d lost their lives on this blustery peninsula almost a century ago. They were all so young, most in their teens or very early twenties. At the time I liked to consider myself still a young (ish) man, at 32, and yet only two of the many dozens of soldiers shown were my age or older. 

We often say we sent our men to war, all those years ago, but in truth we really sent our boys. 

And lost so very many of them.

More than 2,700 New Zealanders and 8,700 Australians died at Gallipoli. Many thousands of others were terribly injured. Young men and boys from across our nations. While the numbers are horrifying enough, time and distance perhaps underplays them. Despite being about as far away from the battlefronts of the First World War that you could get, and in no direct danger ourselves, New Zealand sent more than 42% of its men of military age overseas to fight alongside the UK and other allies. 

Anzac soldiers landing at Gallipoli were faced with steep terrain and deadly artillery

 

To put it in perspective, the losses at Gallipoli, given New Zealand's population at the time, are the equivalent of the United States losing just under 900,000 people in a single military campaign today.

It's hard to fathom. 

You can see why it was such a big deal for Australia and New Zealand, and why Anzac Day was commemorated since 1916 (the one year anniversary of the landing) even as the war raged on. 

But let’s not forget, around 20,000 Turks died on that peninsula too, defending their country against forces who were outside invaders. We may have been fighting for freedom, but so were they.

Ten years ago, as we were let in to find a patch on the grassy slope or a seat in the stands, and night began to fall, the reminders were all around of what we were really there for; to remember. 

Wreaths of remembrance at Gallipoli

The New Zealand, Australian, and Turkish flags flew high above us. Military personnel, New Zealand, Australian and Turkish, wandered the grounds. Informative films about the Anzacs and the Turks played on the big screens. Military bands entertained the crowds throughout the night (not everyone appreciated the New Zealand Air Force band launching into a stirring rendition of some old classics at 3am, but I enjoyed it). At midnight, messages were played from then Prime Ministers Julia Gillard (Australia) and John Key (New Zealand), and during the night we saw broadcasts from services already happening back home Downunder (it was strange being ‘behind’ timewise), and as the sky began to lighten everyone stirred themselves from drowsiness or sleep for the dawn service. 

It was a strange mix of emotions, being there at Gallipoli. You could see it on everyone’s faces.

There were few dry eyes as the words of the Anzac Dedication rang out:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old,

Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.”

But the dawn service at North Beach wasn't the end of our Anzac Day experience in Turkey. Afterwards we wandered the beach, chatted to Turkish soldiers, and then began the hike up the steep trails and roads to the Australian service at Lone Pine and then further on up the road to the New Zealand service at Chunuk Bair. Turkish boy scouts handed out water bottles on the way up.

Compulsory 'flag at Anzac Cove' photo

It really was a surreal and special experience, celebrating Anzac Day in Turkey. 

And it opened up my eyes to the fact it is a very special day and remembrance not just for two countries. When you think about it, how many nations would warmly welcome the descendants of an invading force to come and commemorate the very men who killed so many of their own people? 

War is a horrible, horrible thing, for whatever reason it is fought. 

How many military commanders would years later, as President of their country, say words such as these about the men they fought against: 

"Heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives! You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well."

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

I was amazed by what the Turkish people had done at Anzac Cove, not only opening their doors, but creating a memorial area for thousands of Kiwis and Aussies to gather every year (well, pre-pandemic). 

And I was left with the realisation that despite years of thinking of Anzac Day as something about Australia and New Zealand, that'd I'd been wrong. For me now, it isn't about two countries, but three. 

Until next time. Ka kite anō.

Whakataukī of the fortnight: 

Inspired by Zoe and her 'word of the week', I'll be ending my fortnightly posts by sharing a whakataukī (Māori proverb), a pithy and poetic thought to mull on as we go through life.

Ko te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōna te ngahere. Ko te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōnā te ao

(The bird who feeds on the miro berry has the forest. The bird who feeds on knowledge has the world.)

The native New Zealand kererū (wood pigeon) is particularly fond of miro berries