War memorials
Posted 23 April 2008 // Simon Nathan
Blenheim war memorial
War memorials are a familiar sight in New Zealand’s cities and towns. War memorials take many forms, from entire buildings (such as the Auckland War Memorial Museum) to smaller obelisks and windows.
They usually remain unchanged since they were first erected, which is generally not long after the end of the war that they commemorate. But when I visited the West Coast recently, I noticed a number of changes.
- A new memorial was unveiled at Blackball on 22 March 2008, during commemoration of the 1908 Blackball strike. As a socialist stronghold, there was strong anti-war feeling for many years at Blackball, so no war memorial was built after either world war. But at the beginning of the 21st century, feelings have changed.
- Memorial gates were erected at the old Kōtuku School, near Lake Brunner, in 2006. Although the school is no longer used, it is a listed historic building.
- In 2007 the memorial pillars were removed from the site of the old Grey Main School in Greymouth, after the land had passed into new ownership. There was a public outcry, and the pillars are now at the entrance to Dixon Park. It is hoped that they will be re-erected there later this year.
The fate of the Greymouth School memorial is a reminder of how important it is to ensure that all war memorials are recorded and protected as historic sites.
A comprehensive photographic database of New Zealand war memorials is now online on our sister site NZhistory.net.nz, also run by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage. Many of the photographs were taken as part of a study of memorials by Chris Maclean and Jock Phillips, and published as The sorrow and the pride: New Zealand war memorials (GP Print, 1990).
Do check the database to see if your local war memorial is there, and please contact us if you can add any new information.
Te Papa is currently working on a new exhibition dealing with 20th century New Zealand history, and the memorialisation of WWI’s war dead is one of the topics we’ll be dealing with.
We’ve just launched a project on the photo website Flickr to collect New Zealanders’ images of their local war memorials. The intention is to project these images in the exhibition, and they can also be used to fill any gaps in the nzhistory.net database.
If you’d like to contribute photographs to Te Papa’s World War One Memorial Project, the Flickr site can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/717828@N23
If you’d like more information about this project or the 20th Century History exhibition in general, have a look at our blog: http://blog.tepapa.govt.nz/category/20th-century-history/