The combined dead of the Battle of Gate Pa was honoured at Tauranga's Mission Cemetery today when the Bishop of Waikato eloquently delivered the message of how 150 years ago today men "sought to extinguish each other's lives on a rainy afternoon on a green hillside not too distant from this place".
Bishop Helen-Ann Hartley welcomed about 300 people to the Military Memorial Service, with strong representation from the Anglican Church, the armed services and Maori iwi and hapu whose ancestors laid down their lives in the history defining battle at Gate Pa.
"We come here to seek a lesson for their loss so that they will not have died in vain," she said.
Bishop Hartley asked what a different place it would have been if General Cameron and the Maori chiefs had acknowledge their common humanity and sat down over kai and a pipe to talk about their differences and how to resolve them.
"It has taken us 150 years to repair what was supposed to be easy and quick. It has taken us 150 years to realise that we can build a strong community by working together and by having a vision for the future that is shared by us all...our grief is surely the grief of what might have been, no, what should have been," she said.