On Anzac Day, we honour young Kiwis who never returned home. Photo / Stuart Whitaker
Glenn Dwight is the studio creative director – regional at NZME and sometimes writer for The Country.
Last weekend, on Anzac Day, we stood in remembrance.
We stood in silence.
We watched wreaths laid in remembrance, the stillness broken only by the haunting call of a bugle playing The Last Post – a tribute to young New Zealanders who left home and never came back.
But there’s something else we need to remember, something Fred Dagg once reminded us: “We don’t know how lucky we are.”
Especially now, when logic seems to have gone on holiday with reason, and complaints come easier than gratitude.
These days, many Kiwis feel the need to escape it all by booking their OE – flights to Europe, pints in London, maybe even “finding themselves” somewhere in Thailand before losing their passport in Bali.
And that’s the OE we know today, we feel entitled to.
But 110 years ago, the OE looked very different.
It wasn’t about discovery. It was about duty. There were no return tickets. No pub crawls. Just trenches, fear and a war fought far from home, in a land most couldn’t even imagine.
These young Kiwis weren’t influencers. They were infantry. Fighting for a world they might never live to see.
They didn’t sip wine by the Seine. They drank from battered canteens, hoping the water wasn’t just mud.
They didn’t browse vintage shops in Paris. They wrote letters by candlelight – hands shaking from the cold and from knowing what tomorrow might bring – trying to sound braver than they felt, all to the soundtrack of war.
Most had never left their small New Zealand towns, let alone the country.
Farmhands from Waikato. Shearers from Southland. Teenagers, many of them, sent to fight in places they couldn’t pronounce, for reasons they were only beginning to understand.
Their OE was mud, gunfire, and mates they couldn’t save.
It was courage in the face of chaos. It was a sacrifice we still live in the shadow of.
The freedoms we enjoy today — to vote without fear, to speak our minds, to travel across borders with ease, to pursue education regardless of gender — these were privileges they could only dream of as they huddled in foreign fields.
Real remembrance is more than ritual, it’s reflection.
It’s recognising that the freedom we enjoy – to travel, to speak, to choose – was paid for by those young Kiwis.
So as we stand at dawn ceremonies by our great Southern Ocean, we must remember, as Fred Dagg knew: ”We don’t know how lucky we are.”
