Anzac Day Collection

An Anzac Day collection on NZ On Screen raises more questions than it answers, and so it should.

It is sobering to think that in the first half of the 20th Century the big OE for most New Zealanders was by going to war. 6,500 New Zealanders volunteered for the Boer War from 1899-1902; 103,000 New Zealanders (including 550 nurses) served in World War I out of a population of just over one million, and some 140,000 in World War II. The cost escalated accordingly, 228 dead in the Boer War, 18,500 dead in 1914-1918, and 11,625 deaths in 1939-1945.

In the two world wars no country of the British Empire paid so high a price in casualties per head of population. New Zealand’s military commitments also provided an avenue for thousands of New Zealanders to see the world in the 1950s and 1960s in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam. Even today our country still ‘punches above its weight’ in its commitment to multinational peacekeeping operations around the world.

“King Dick” Seddon’s commitment of New Zealand volunteers to the Boer War in South Africa led to the first film that captured New Zealanders preparing to go to war. The Departure of the Second Contingent is New Zealand’s oldest surviving film: a brief clip showing New Zealand Mounted Riflemen at Newtown Park. Its producer, Alfred Whitehouse, was the first to shoot film in New Zealand, and his film of the Second Contingent is the only one to have survived.

Our first Government-commissioned film was of the royal visit of the Duke and Duchess of York who came south to thank New Zealand for its efforts in the Boer War in 1901. This film was taken by the Salvation Army. Fragments survive, some of which show Boer War veterans filing forward to receive their medals: a one-armed veteran is evident, giving us our first glimpse on film of the cost of war.

We had official cameramen in both world wars filming New Zealanders overseas in the United Kingdom, France and Belgium, Egypt, North Africa, Italy and the Pacific. Film enables us to access the spirit of these times, wondering at the contemporary BBC-New Zealand-English of the Pictorial Parades and Weekly Reviews and what it says about our sense of identity.
How do we make sense of this commitment today?

For many years it was Gallipoli that was the focus of film and documentary attention, but more recently there has been a shift to the Western Front. One catalyst for this has been the return of the Unknown Warrior and the recent 90th anniversaries have seen a stream of documentaries that have survived the grim battle against all odds to gain finance and airtime to tell New Zealand’s war stories.

Māori television is the leader in this with its brilliant Anzac Day programmes and the documentaries that this has inspired. As a result the epic of the 28th Battalion on film overshadows the rest of the Second New Zealand Division in the stories that are told of Greece, Crete, North Africa and Italy.

In the true New Zealand Number-8 wire fashion, most of what we see is driven by a passion to tell a personal story (particularly as descendents of veterans connect with the stories of their relatives): a great uncle who died in the mud at Passchendaele, a grandfather who served with the New Zealand tunnellers under Arras, or the first New Zealand Māori pilot to fly bombers over Germany with the RAF who ended up being murdered in the aftermath of the Great Escape.

All inventive, trying to overcome the cost of using archival film with a balance of photographs, walking the ground, and re-enactment. All having something to tell, even if the need to tell the story and fill in the background as quickly as possible, cements such mythologies as Māori influence on military tactics and of kiwi ingenuity and military brilliance, without paying equal attention to where we failed and the sometimes minor role we played.

There are great successes, Gaylene Preston’s documentary War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, enriching our understanding of the effects of war, and fictional efforts such as Taika Waititi’s Tama Tū immersing us in the moments of fighting, and also some failures where a burning desire to put it on film could not compensate for lack of funding, Chunuk Bair being the notable example.

But regardless of argument over relative merits of films in this collection, each is a document of New Zealanders at war, and poses a question about the identity of New Zealand and New Zealanders that one film alone cannot answer. And that’s why it‘s so important to view this Anzac collection.

About the writer:

Dr Christopher Pugsley is a senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the United Kingdom. A former New Zealand Army officer, he is an authority on New Zealanders at war. His books include Gallipoli: The New Zealand Story; The Anzac Experience; Te Hokowhitu A Tu: The Māori Pioneer Battalion in the First World War; and Kiwis in Conflict: 200 Years of New Zealand at War.