New Zealand and Australia are shortly to celebrate 100 years of shared history. GREG ANSLEY explores the truth behind the Anzac legend.
The symbolism contained in a huge stainless steel structure being built to commemorate the century of cooperation between Australia and New Zealand is open to interpretation.
Come April 24, on the eve of Anzac Day, Prime Minister Helen Clark will stand before the completed structure with Australian counterpart John Howard in Canberra's Anzac Parade to celebrate more than 100 years of togetherness.
But last week the two leaders were in Wellington, signing an agreement to banish a comfortable assumption of that relationship: that each would welcome the other's citizens as their own.
It was never that simple, nor that complete, and there is no economic or moral argument for the absolute right of the citizens of one country to demand sustenance from the taxpayers of another.
Nor does the new agreement prevent New Zealanders moving to and living and working in Australia. It just ends their automatic access to the dole and other benefits.
But with the sadness that accompanies all loss, and with fissures still scouring other parts of the relationship, the four parts of the memorial structure being assembled in Darryl Lowie's foundry, Port Melbourne, raise the question: is the future of the transtasman partnership as we once perceived it also in pieces?
The intent of the New Zealand memorial in Lowie's foundry says the opposite. Working to the complex design of New Zealand sculptor Kingsley Baird and Wellington's Studio of Pacific Architecture, Lowie is building the two handles of a symbolic kete (flax basket) that will tower above Anzac Parade.
It is a monumental piece, rising 12.5m in a double arch, its feet on one side lodged in a base of Maori design, Aboriginal on the other. Rocks from Gallipoli will be imbedded in both. The concept is based on the Maori proverb "Mau tena kiawi o te kete, maku tenei" - You at that, and I at this handle of the basket - symbolising partnership and shared load-bearing.
For Lowie, the symbolism is submerged by the demands of completing a job he won in November, translating Baird's graceful art into the practicalities of steel and strength, of individually shaping bronze flax leaves to comply with sciences that demand allowance for 2 per cent shrinkage.
"We've got a design that's not completely resolved," he says. "It's evolving on the go."
For Simon Butt, director of Manteena Pty Ltd, the project manager, the arches are a logistical nightmare of rigid deadlines, of juggling the interests of two national governments and planning authorities in Canberra - dealing with bureaucracies has its own set of circumstances - and of planning for major disruption to key traffic routes as four semi-trailers arrive, unload and erect the memorial.
"It will have a significant impact on Anzac Parade," Butt says. "The memorial is almost going to form a gateway ... it will have a special place."
There is no doubting that.
The memorial will stand at the intersection of Constitution Ave and Anzac Parade, midway between Parliament House and the Australian War Memorial, on the axis of Walter Burley Griffen's original plan for Canberra.
The arms of the kete will embrace the entrance to the parade, arguably the nation's most hallowed ground, lined on each side by memorials to the men and women who served in conflicts from the Dardanelles and Tobruk to Korea and Vietnam.
"What it reminds us of, at moments when the Wallabies are beating the All Blacks or vice versa, is that Australia and New Zealand have managed to be good neighbours for well over 100 years, and that in times of crisis we've pulled the same weight together," says New Zealand's High Commissioner in Canberra, Simon Murdoch.
"The notion of one of us at each handle of the basket captures that beautifully for me."
Australia's Regional Services Minister, Senator Ian Macdonald, said much the same when he broke the ground for the memorial last year on behalf of Prime Minister Howard, describing the work as perhaps the most fitting in the parade, representing the closest and most enduring relationship Australia has with any country.
There is history for the rhetoric. But there are also undertones, surfacing in part in this week's social security agreement, that suggest the relationship is being subtly but clearly redefined.
For much of our European history the relationship has been defined largely by conflict: were it not for war we would barely have talked to each other for half a century and would have developed little of the warmth that a shared struggle brought.
In 1900 we fought together in South Africa, where the first Anzac command was formed under Colonel W. D. C. Williams of the New South Wales Army Medical Corps. Australian balladeer Banjo Patterson rode with the New Zealanders, describing them in his despatches to newspapers in Sydney and Melbourne as possibly the best troops in Africa.
The Anzac legend was forged at Gallipolli, and hardened in mounted actions in Mesopotamia; in Greece, Crete and North Africa; in Korea, where Anzac gallantry won US Presidential citations; in Malaya, Borneo and Vietnam; and in Cambodia, East Timor and Bougainville.
In peace we went our own ways.
In the late 19th century we toyed with the idea of a transtasman federation and, failing that, held a series of inconclusive intercolonial conferences on issues ranging from lighthouses to security in the South Pacific.
In 1944, when it became clear that the US and Britain were about to carve up the post-war Pacific to their own design, we reached our first substantial agreement in the Anzac Pact, and we clubbed up with the Big Two in Seato, Anzus and Commonwealth alliances to stem the southward drift of communism.
We did little else together.
In 1960 Australia took a mere 4 per cent of our exports; only 18 per cent of our imports came from Australia. About 5000 New Zealanders crossed the Tasman; roughly the same number moved the other way.
"As far as trade went," Australian analysts Alan and Robin Burnett wrote in 1978, "the Ditch was a gulf of 50 years ... of acrimony and distrust."
In the mid-1960s the first tremors of a seismic shift in the relationship raced across the Tasman, if unrecognised at the time - the NZ-Australia Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) framed in the panic of Britain's move to Europe, and the advent of cheap air travel across the Tasman.
The following three decades changed forever the way the two countries interacted and regarded each other.
Much was to the good. Nafta gave way to CER and merged the two economies virtually into one, bringing with it an intensely close business and political relationship. This is dramatically illustrated by the position that New Zealand ministers hold on Australian councils of ministers, and by the intimacy of leader-to-leader contact.
We coordinate policy closely - especially in Pacific crises and in world trade negotiations - and the two militaries are enmeshed in a web of agreements, understandings, commitments and exercises.
But pain has accompanied intimacy.
The agreement to restrict benefits available to New Zealanders living in Australia, and to grant permanent residency according to normal immigration criteria, was as much an expression of this as of the financial burden of supporting large numbers of Kiwis.
There has been a sharper edge to the sheep and ET jokes ("what's the difference between a Kiwi and ET? ET went home"), honed by the greater visibility of our 425,000 expatriates, the regular media blitzes on the mythology of "Bondi bludgers", and a sense of intrusion similar to the feeling you would have if a passing acquaintance arrived for the weekend and never left.
It was also expressed in the irritation of other migrant communities at the preferential treatment accorded New Zealanders, through the fading sense of family as the size and diversity of Australia's ethnic mix increased, and with the passing of the generation that actually remembered and experienced the Anzac reality.
Australia's present political leadership is on the cusp of that now: Anzac, in the colloquial, embraces only an Australian spirit.
On our side of the Tasman, we have also become less tolerant and more sensitive to the opinions and actions of our neighbours.
We have also developed and articulated divergent views of the world.
Australia sees both its future and its largest threat in Asia, expressed in a universally accepted need to maintain large, modern and expensive military forces, and - for all the intimacy and goodwill - places New Zealand well down its list of priorities.
New Zealand's strategic outlook differs widely, and we place far greater importance on our transtasman relationship.
With social security removed as an irritant, the divergence most clearly shows in defence, beginning with the Anzus split and continuing through New Zealand's decision on Anzac frigates and its wavering on the future of air force strike and maritime patrol aircraft.
There is a feeling of deep unease in Canberra, not only at the contraction of our military, but also at the lack of a consistent, bipartisan approach to defence that many in Australia believe could see New Zealand become an unreliable ally.
Former New Zealand Defence Secretary Gerald Hensley, in a speech late last year, said of our approach to defence: " It affects our whole relationship with Australia and if we try that country's patience too far we could suffer in ways far removed from defence policy."
Anecdotal and off-the-record conversations have supported this view.
Canberra may not punish us, but political goodwill could be eroded - and to some degree already has been - thereby sapping the support that would otherwise naturally flow when issues affecting our well-being are discussed.
The effects may be even broader.
Herald deputy political editor Vernon Small has uncovered deep fears in Wellington that Australia will use its close security relationship with the US to write a new bilateral free trade deal excluding New Zealand.
Beyond this are the new lines of national interest being drawn in the world that began evolving with the end of the Cold War, the rise of new centres of power and wealth, and the inevitable rivalries of two economies competing on the same world market.
At times, when our interests coincide, we will work together, as we are in the World Trade Organisation, against US barriers to lamb, and in efforts to attach CER to the South East Asian Free Trade Agreement and the Mercosur free trade area of Latin America.
If they clash we will compete fiercely, as we may do in the Word Trade Organisation if Australia continues to ban imports of our apples.
It may not be as seismic as the 1960s and 1970s, but the new definition of our friendship is likely to be equally as profound, and provide the kete in Anzac Parade with a new load to carry.
Anzac: Uneasy allies
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