KEY POINTS:
A Kiwi soldier in traditional lemon squeezer hat is to join an Australian digger on Sydney's Anzac bridge.
The Kiwi will join the muster shortly before Anzac Day next year after a suggestion from the New South Wales Returned Services League and funding from the State and New Zealand governments.
"It's about putting the 'NZ' back into Anzac, ensuring our mates across the Tasman are very much part of the Anzac celebration and commemoration - as are indeed Australians and Australian diggers - because they have been, they are and always will be mates," NSW Premier Morris Iemma said after a wreath-laying ceremony yesterday with Prime Minister Helen Clark at the Martin Place cenotaph.
Mr Iemma said the two countries had spent 200 years tied to Britain, 60 years proving themselves to the United States and 30 years selling themselves to Japan and China but Australia had one true friend - "the country that we call mates. This statue will symbolise a great partnership, a great friendship."
Helen Clark said that when she heard about the Anzac bridge and the sole Australian digger guarding its western entrance she thought the time would come when a Kiwi joined him.
"When I first drove over the bridge a few years ago, the digger looked a bit lonely," she said.
The timing for a Kiwi statue was right, coming after Wellington's Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and memorials in Canberra, London and the United Nations war cemetery at Pusan, South Korea.
An Australian memorial, given funding in the May federal budget, would be the first to be erected in the new War Memorial Park at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
"The statues of the two [Anzac bridge] soldiers will be fitting reminders to all who use the bridge of the sacrifice of the Anzac soldiers, the wider Anzac tradition, and the close bond that exists to this day between Australians and New Zealanders," Helen Clark said.
The new statue will be sculpted by New Zealand-born Alan Somerville, who sculpted the bridge's digger. The design has yet to be finalised.
