Letter to the Otago Early Settler's Museum

I'm a regular visitor to the Otago Settler's Museum, it's a great place for my 2 year old boy to run around in and occasionally look at the exhibits. The 'Dunedin's Great War' exhibit has been going for several months now, and over time I have managed to look at a few snippets of it when I am not busy looking after my boy. The title of the exhibit, and the central image of the small child saluting the union jack, I find highly objectionable. The emphasis on remembrance of the dead and military history, and the marginalisation of almost all other aspects of the war is not really very surprising. These more or less obvious ideological points aside, I was motivated to write a letter to the curator because of some factual innaccuracies and omissions. I think I have succeeded in being polite and reasonable sounding, while at the same time not pulling any punches:

In the shadow of Gallipoli - review

In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The hidden history of Australia in World War I

By Robert Bollard

Pub. NewSouth 2013

I spotted this book in the display section in Dunedin Public library a few months ago. There's a mountain of literature on Gallipoli, and a fairly large chunk of it seems to revolve around questions of military strategy and personal details about the soldiers who died. I knew nothing about Robert Bollard, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that he was a Marxist historian, and that the book wasn't really about Gallipoli at all. Instead, this book tells the fascinating story of the labour struggles in Australia between the outbreak of WWI in 1914 and the early 1920s.

Some thoughts about courage (part one)

I've been working on this for a while and it's still not really finished - I need to tie it back to Baxter again, so I will write a part two later.

The motivation for this post is a recent article in the ODT about Archibald Baxter and the conscientious objectors. There's an interesting quote in the article by Professor Tom Brooking, who describes both the pacifists such as Baxter and the regular soldiers as brave:

Robin Hyde's 'Nor the Years Condemn' and the ideology of Anzac Day

The following is the text of a speech I gave recently at the 'War Memorialisation and the Nation' conference at the University of Otago. It turned out to be far too long for the 30 minute time limit, and although I'm reasonably happy with it as it stands, there's a lot more work to be done. The concept of Anzac ideology is just a sketch, which requires a lot more further development. 

The Anzac – Silver Fern – Security Council Trifecta: Prospects for NZ nationalism in 2015

Our Anzac day has always been a fairly muted and low key version. Compared to Australian version it is nowhere near such a big deal here. But at the same time it has definitely gone under a resurgence of popularity recently. With the centenary in 2015, it will be a big deal – lots of media attention etc etc. At the same time later in the year there will be a flag change referendum. And at the same time NZ has spent millions, and won a place on the UN security council. The spin is we are able to contribute a “unique and independent voice” to the council.

Embarkation Carnival, September 2014

Keeping up with history is hard work. I find myself going through ebbs and flows with this WW1 project of mine – especially since the birth of my second son, I realise that there are many other things I care about a lot more than Anzac day. Having said that, now that we have officially passed the 'starting line' of the centenary, it actually looks like we could be in for an Anzac day which starts in late September and ends – well, maybe it will never end, but we might have to wait until sometime around 2018.

Aitken's Lemnos: a transformative memory of the Aegean war

The words we choose to use have a huge power over our imagination. When I hear words like “Greek islands” or “the Aegean” my mind conjures up visions of beaches, olive trees and sunlight. Even though my knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome is fairly weak, I still sense the evocative and historical power of the ancient place names of the Aegean region. Islands such as Lemnos and Samothrace contain relics of a history which goes back thousands of years, and it is this very ancient history itself which allows our imaginations to wander and dream: myths of figures such as Hephaestus, the Greek god who was cast out of Olympus and fell into water near the coast of Lemnos. Jason and the argonauts also rested here, and were tempted to stay there by the women who ruled the island at the time. Further back in time the mists are even thicker and the legends more enigmatic: the ancient Lemnians worshipped a duo of deities known as the Cabeiri, subterranean figures whose history is obscure.