Saturday, April 25, 2009
For all of you who ever looked at your calendar and saw "ANZAC Day (Aus/NZ)" and wondered what it was, well this is it. The shared national holiday commemorates the memory and heroism of the fallen soldiers in WWI, especially at Gallipoli, the first major combat action (an unmitigated disaster) seen by the old Australia & New Zealand Army Corps. It has since come to encompass all the military campaigns in both countries' histories. Some say it should be the national holiday, not Waitangi Day (commemorating when the treaty with the Maori was signed), since WWI is when New Zealand really found it's national identity, separate from the UK. It's become sort of a combined Memorial Day/Veteran's Day, but it seems to get a lot more attention here than those holidays do in the States, at least by the general public.
Gathering crowd around 5:45am
One of the nurses at work tipped Mark off to the Dawn Service at the Mount Maunganui main beach this morning, at the cenotaph right across Marine Parade from Mount Drury. Not relishing the thought of waking up Ro to drag him to a solemn ceremony on a blustery soggy morning with the distractions of the beach a few feet away, Mark let Sherry and the little guy sleep, wolfed down some breakfast, put on his jacket and jeans for the first time we've been here, and set out on foot for the beach. There was no point in driving, because there was no parking to be had much closer than where we live anyway. Every conceivable parking spot (including sidewalks) was filled two blocks from the beach at 5:30am, and the line of cars looking for spots looked like it stretched all the way back to the Tauranga bridge.
News reporter at the service with sailors marching past
The crowd was enormous (wearing their ubiquitous paper poppies), the TV news crews were out in force, and Mark couldn't even see the dais until after the ceremony was over. Of course, all the WWII vets marched in followed by more recent vets, surviving descendants, fire brigades, Boy Scouts, etc... After they all marched out at the end, everyone came up and laid poppies on the cenotaph. The overcast skies prevented any dramatic ray of sunshine peeking over the Pacific, but it was still a memorable morning.
View from the slopes of Mount Drury of the crowd dispersing
See link: http://www.rsa.org.nz/remem/poppy_hist.html
Near the end of the ceremony, Rev Chris Haines asked New Zealanders to keep their recession hardships in perspective and not look for somebody else to blame. "The inevitable cycles of less than plenty have much more to do with our common obsession with self-interest than with a particular person or political party," he said. "We can, individually and as a people if we will, remember the gifts of freedom and peace that was brought to us by so many thousands of young New Zealanders who, on the sharp end of war and terror and death, gave us their second chances."
neat...nice writing, too! :0)
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