As Anzac Day approaches, Listener writers reflect on the enduring influence of war on New Zealand. Here, Matt Vance asks whether war memorials and monuments trade in ‘superficial glory’, keeping the wider damage of war at a safe emotional distance.
Sometimes grief manifests itself in strange ways in both our minds and the places we inhabit. Every culture does it differently, but in New Zealand’s case, when collective grief is mixed with a whiff of fear, it has a tendency to come out as a stiflingly formal war memorial.
To stand at the foot of the Lyttelton War Memorial, one of the 700 or so such memorials dotted throughout the country, is a view into this curious mix of collective grief. The monument is a solid structure of blue stone, limestone and Italian marble, a paperweight to hold down our memories. The names of the war dead are engraved in stone thick enough to give the illusion of permanence. Most of the time, no one takes much notice of it; the red-billed gulls turn up only when someone has left behind fish and chips; the drunks sleeping on the park bench snore loudly in its shadow.
I run my hands over the engraved names and wonder what Private PF Canning thought about in his dying moments in hospital as a POW, or what Sergeant Warner’s mum thought of trading her son for a telegram and an engraved name on a monument.
It is a solemn, formal sort of grief that is exhibited. What it lacks in passion it makes up for in self-control.
The memorial tells me nothing of that: it trades in superficial glory and it sits in cold defiance of any inklings of fear.
Bottling it in
As they do in many places around the country, every April local people gather around the monument to remember the fallen. It is a solemn, formal sort of grief that is exhibited. What it lacks in passion it makes up for in self-control. While monuments may take pride of place in communities and are an obvious measure of collective grief, the wider damage of war was hidden within shattered families, self-medicating alcoholics and places like Queen Mary Hospital at Hanmer Springs, which treated those suffering from “psychological and nervous conditions”. No bugle-blowing or flag-raising ever happened there.
Perhaps it is simply the military nature of these commemorations, or perhaps it is the monument itself that bottles all this in. For those whose loved ones did not return, there was only a telegram and an awful silence. Grief, it seems, does not like silence. It demands to be heard, and in lieu of a body or a coffin, it needs some tangible form in the landscape.
To an outsider looking in, our passion for war memorials seems odd. A young German hitchhiker once asked me, “Why do you celebrate war?” We were driving past an imposing war memorial at the entrance to Leeston. “These things are everywhere.”
Except for the few memorials that commemorate the New Zealand Wars, most of these small-town monuments are to locals who died in other places. Thanks to our remoteness and lack of valuable resources, the beaches of this country have not seen a shot fired in defence against a foreign aggressor for more than 150 years.
War at a distance
The sheer number of war memorials is perhaps a response to this distance. War is an abstraction, it was fought somewhere else; the smell of cordite, the shattered bodies and the fear did not translate to these quiet islands. It is this abstraction that makes them unusual, like something on the tip of your tongue that you can’t quite remember but you know is important.
In World War I alone, more than 100,000 New Zealanders served overseas, and some 18,000 lost their lives. For a small country, this meant grief on a large scale. It also meant a burst of untapped creativity that was notable for its diversity and, at times, its quirkiness. There were cupolas, bridges, obelisks and gates fashioned from the best marble, bluestone and limestone the locals could obtain. Rarer were the landscape features, such as Piha’s Lion Rock, that were imbued with the mana of a war memorial with little in the way of decoration.
Critiquing the New Zealand war memorial is like prancing through a minefield laid by grief.
In the main centres, memorials were usually a commissioned work by a noted sculptor or architect, but elsewhere, design was by committee and spurred by good intentions. Even the smallest local councils spared no expense. Though their public toilets and other community assets may have been rough, their war memorials were always grand.
By World War II, it was deemed acceptable to allow memorials to have other practical uses – as public halls and parks, for example. Formality was usually uppermost in the design, but on rare occasions, conformity was challenged.
A book by Lincoln University professor of landscape architecture Jacky Bowring tells of monumental mason William Trethewey’s proposed “bomb -thrower” figure, and its rejection as a war memorial for Kaiapoi. The sculpture was of a Gallipoli soldier about to hurl a grenade made from a bully-beef tin. His face was lean and strained and his clothes in tatters. Even his bootlaces were broken. The bootlace was the final straw; the realism was too much for locals still wedded to a romantic view of war. The Kaiapoi Borough Council eventually opted for a more predictable figure of a soldier standing to attention.
Cliché moments
Critiquing the New Zealand war memorial is like prancing through a minefield laid by grief. Bowring has perhaps been the bravest soldier in this field. “Memorials can become ‘invisible’ and fail in their melancholic potential,” she wrote in her 2016 book A Field Guide to Melancholy.
“Through the use of clichéd forms – the man on a podium, for example – they fail to become effective, affective moments in the landscape, to trigger an emotional response.” It is often left to an obscure kind of “memorial arithmetic” to smother any emotion in neat arrangements of dates, times and numbers of dead.
It is this that best describes what I feel about the Lyttelton War Memorial I share with the snoring drunk and the squabbling red-billed gulls. The fear and the grief war spawns have been nicely swept under the expensive Italian marble carpet.
Although memorials like this one try to keep death sanitised, they are in fact hiding fear: a fear that death can be ugly, that war is horrific, and that our grief can come tumbling out of us in odd and wonderful ways.
