New Zealand Executive Government Speech Archive

You are lost, my son, to these marae
And sorrow weighs me down
You are in Egypt, my son, and Gallipoli
Alas, what pain! Farewell, farewell!

Send your love to me!
Alas, I must keep weeping here
Farewell, my son, farewell

Haria mai te aroha ke ahau
Haerera, e tama, haerera

So wrote Paraire Henare Tomoana from the Ngati Kahungunu tribe during the First World War. If ANZAC Day is about anything it is about the memories we hold with affection and love for the sacrifices thousands of men and women have made for all we hold dear today.

Today our love and memories - to paraphrase President Kennedys inaugural address - are with those who paid the price, bore the burden, met the hardships, supported friends and opposed foes to assure the survival and success of liberty.

It is an honour and a real privilege to be here again at this gathering. Only the year before last we were here in this great Cathedral for the 79th ANZAC Day. Today, once more, we are joined by the Australian Ambassador and the staff of the two ANZAC Embassies, to welcome you.

And its a distinct pleasure to have so many of our American associates and friends here with us too - members of Congress, colleagues from the Administration; United States Armed Forces personnel (and especially veterans who first came into contact with Kiwis and Aussies back during the war in the Pacific) - to all who still feel a part of Australia and New Zealand, from no matter where - my warmest greetings to you.

It is scarcely two weeks since the world had a tragic reminder, from this very building, of the toll war takes on the best and brightest of our people. We in our part of the world, shared your grief at the loss of Secretary Ron Brown and the fine people who perished with him while striving to help Bosnia move beyond the destruction of civil war. We were also moved by the clear sense of national unity in the face of adversity, exemplified at the inspiring Dover Air Force base ceremony when flag draped coffins arrived home from Dubrovnik.

I want to convey a message to you this morning about the sense of duty these people and others before them have carried in their hearts. The men and women who served in the First and Second World Wars were completely committed to their belief in their community and their country.

The question I ask is how many of us still feel this passion and if we do how do we reflect it? I wonder if we are becoming too focused on ourselves and our individual rights. Are we now more inclined to think about what the community owes us rather than the other way round?

I think perhaps in recent years we have been, but lately there seems to be a dawning realisation that we are a global community, and it is to this community, more and more, we as people - and nations - are beginning to feel a sense of duty and protection.

In preparing these remarks I looked back at some of New Zealands newspapers and their coverage of ANZAC day in the twenties - barely five years after the horrors of Gallipoli - where 10 000 New Zealand soldiers fought, where 3000 lost their lives and 5000 were wounded.

Only a fifth of those men came away unscathed and even they would suffer the mental anguish of those killing cliffs and hills for the rest of their days. For the United States in todays terms that would mean sending away 2 « million men and 2 million of them being killed or wounded.

Twenty thousand Australian comrades in arms suffered similarly. For both of us it was the dawning of our sense of nationhood.

What struck me was the poignancy of those early newspaper reports. The hurt, the sense of loss and the anguish felt were still so very raw. It brought home with searing force your General Shermans words when he spoke to his troops;

There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.

The New Zealand Heralds report of the town hall ANZAC service in 1920 attended by the Prince of Wales said,

Many women stood quietly weeping, old mens faces were drawn in lines of sorrow, and here and there were women who broke down completely as a realisation of their bitter loss swept over them.

The same paper reporting the 1923 service at St Matthews reminded readers of the men who were maimed, scarred or ill, others blind and in many a quiet home or hospital - silent sufferers who still bear their cross of sacrifice.

I was moved by the sense of duty and commitment conveyed in the speeches and eulogies given after both wars.

In the early twenties Chaplain Captain James spoke of those who fought and died, unhesitatingly doing their duty as they saw it. They had three guiding principles he said - duty, patriotism, sacrifice.

In 1946 Canon Vickery spoke in Auckland of those who served as giving of the highest ideals for the laws and for the people whom they held dear.

In recent years it seems we have become distracted by individualism - duty to community and country has given way to individual rights. Its no longer so much what we owe the community but what society and the Government owes us. Proliferating legal actions, militant demands on the Government and welfare agencies and falling church congregation numbers all reflect this self interest.

In 1981 Sir David Beattie, our then Governor General, said, Freedom is not an arrogant demand for rights. We must see again the quality of commitment learned at Gallipoli.

If this view of the individual seems rather bleak, a very positive development is also discernible - crystallising more rapidly since the end of the Cold War.

A move is detectable towards an ideal which acknowledges the tremendous costs of past wars. There is a growing realisation and recognition of the concept of a global community which needs our protection. The trite observation that the world is becoming a smaller place is now being recognised in deed rather than simply in technological advance.

For example, never before has there been such a universal movement to build comprehensive and enduring security frameworks. New Zealand, Australia and the United States can all draw great satisfaction from the roles we are all playing in many of these initiatives.

Together we are engaged in disarmament and non-proliferation institutions like the ASEAN Regional Forum. Even half a dozen years ago who would have believed you could gather the participants who make up the Forum to discuss the topics we did last year.

Very real steps are also being taken towards nuclear disarmament. Could I say how much it meant to us in the South Pacific that the United States was last month able to sign the protocols to the Treaty establishing the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone. We certainly appreciate and want to see the United States commitment to the Asia Pacific remain - both in economic and security spheres.

Further evidence of the increasing sense of protection the world is feeling towards its people and the globe as a whole can be seen in environment and trade related international agreements. The Rio Declaration on the environment was the result of one of the largest gatherings of NGO and governmental representatives the world has ever seen. The year before last the Uruguay Round of GATT was concluded and for the first time a World Trade Organisation was established with the power to put in place the undertakings reached.

Finally, this phenomenon can be seen in the quantum leap in demand for the services of the United Nations Security Council. Only since the end of the Cold War has it really begun to do the work envisaged for it at the end of the last war.

Reference to which brings us back to the reason we are all here today. The events of 81 years ago remind us there is no escape from the rigours of history.

For most New Zealanders Gallipoli is a peninsular of land in Turkey, for those there during the First World War, it was being dumped on a small beach in the dark and told to climb to the top of a hill and hold it, many tried, most failed and the hill at Chunuck Bair was held by the New Zealanders for barely forty eight hours. I will continue to tell young Kiwis, go to Gallipoli, stand on the head, walk up the hill, talk to your ancestors who rest there in peace, there is a part of us still there.

Turkeys great leader Ataturk who rose from the battles of Gallipoli commemorates the losses on both sides in a memorial at home in Wellington:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehemets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are at peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

And so I conclude - in those time-honoured and very meaningful words - They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them nor the years condemn At the going down of the sun and in the evening we will remember them.

In keeping the faith of those who lie not only in Gallipoli, but at Passchendaele, the Somme, Greece and Crete, in the North African desert, Italy, Burma, Malaysia and Singapore, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Korea and Viet Nam and remembering those today in the Middle East or the Balkans, let us all give some thought to the communities and countries they cherished and let us also reflect those sentiments in our commitment to the global community.